The Human Face of History

Crime, Punishment and Redemption: A Convict’s Story by June Slee 

(NLA Publishing), Pp. 194

The diary of John Ward is one of the few existing records of life from the perspective of a convict. He was sentenced to ten years transportation to Australia in 1838, before which he spent 19 months on the prison hulk York, moored at Gosport. He was then transported on board The Mangles (1839-1840) but by the time he arrived in NSW, they were no longer receiving convicts, so he was sent instead to Norfolk Island. During 1840-1844 he came under the more humane system of Captain Alexander Maconochie and his marks system, before being sent to Van Diemen’s Land to serve out the final four years of his sentence.

June Slee is delighted with this diary of 155 pages, which provides valuable information about the period. In this book she has copied excerpts from the dairy, adding analysis and background. It is lavishly illustrated with photos, paintings and images of artefacts, collected by the National Library of Australia. Interpretative sections on a variety of topics add colour and include smuggling; eating out; fox hunting; county courts and the justice system; hulks; homosexuality (punishable by death – between 1801 and 1835 more than 50 men were hanged in England for sodomy); convict ships (often shoddy and barely sea-worthy); surgeons-superintendent (the highest ranking man on the ship; he had power over all the convicts; a decent one made a huge difference); convict class and society; and evangelicalism (men could be saved through religious conversion).

In some ways it is reminiscent of Moll Flanders, dwelling on the sordid and squalid aspects which sell, and then the religious conversion and desire to do good seem narratively disappointing. His religious conversion is probably a result of the evangelical tracts which were in vogue at the time. He sees life through the eyes of the evangelists and shuns relatively innocent pleasures such as the line-crossing ceremony held as the Mangles crossed the equator, describing it as “very improper”. The diary in effect becomes an extended confession in which he interprets his previous lifestyle with new-found disapproval.

As a surviving record of transportation, John Ward’s diary adds a human element to the statistics. “Transportation to Australia began with the arrival of the First Fleet at Botany Bay in 1788 and ended when the Hougoumont landed 279 convicts in Western Australia in 1868. Over that 80-year period, an estimated total of 163,000 convicts was sent to Australian penal colonies from Britain.”

Sections on Captain Alexander Maconochie are fascinating from a philosophical perspective as to the future of the nation. He believed that punishment alone would not result in peopling the colony with desirable citizens, and that it was important to recognise that those who were convicts would become settlers.

In writing his diary, John Ward hoped that it “may prove of service to those that may come after me”. Clearly he was intending to convert potential sinners to his brand-new evangelism, but it has proved invaluable to those studying this fascinating period “as a rare, if not unique, eyewitness account of the final decades of British transportation to the Australian penal colonies.”