The Men of the 'Eleanor', 1831: A Case Study of the Hulks and Voyage to New South Wales

Abstract

Images of the convict system as unjust, barbaric and brutalising are deeply etched into the minds of Australians, who continue to believe that our convict forbears were the victims of a brutal and repressive system. The worse the conditions they endured, the more heroic they were. In this scheme of things, the convict hulks and transports have featured prominently as subjecting the convicts to almost unspeakable conditions. Some sixty years ago, Wilfred Oldharn produced in his general study of the convict system a shon scholarly analysis of the early convict hulks, an aspect which Alan Frost has taken up and investigated in his most recent work while Kim Humphery has examined the ideology of control on the convict transpons. The only general study we have of the hulks is Branch Johnson's outdated and one-sided account published in 1957. More recently the statistical work of McDonald and Shlomowitz has thrown new light on conditions on the hulks and transpons while the first detailed study of the shipping of female convicts is an imponant contribution. Bateson's classic work, The Convict Ships, first published in 1959 still remains the best general account and point of reference but it is a study which is limited in some significant respects.