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.
