Macquarie's Distribution Lists: Convicts Arriving in New South Wales, 1813-1822

Abstract

This dataset is based on transcriptions of what we are calling the ‘distribution lists’, dating from 1814 to 1822, which are scattered through the New South Wales Colonial Secretary’s copies of out-letters. They are lists of some of the convicts freshly disembarked from 76 convict ships that arrived in those years. Signed by William Hutchinson, the Principal Superintendent of Convicts, the lists were transmitted with letters from the Colonial Secretary to a small number of magistrates outside of Sydney, mostly for ‘general distribution’ among local settlers, or, in some cases, for distribution to named employees. There are batches also of men and women being sent to public institutions, notably the Parramatta Female Factory and (from October 1819) the new agricultural establishment at Emu Plains on the Nepean River. <br> Our transcriptions list almost 5,500 individuals from across 71 documents, accounting for roughly 30% of all convicts who arrived in Port Jackson during this period. The names have been linked to our (separate) Directory of convict arrivals, with our unique identifier number and identification summary (or ‘convict stub’) of each individual added here. At least 12 individuals are listed twice, and 303 individuals have not been matched, frequently because there were multiple individuals of the same name arriving on a voyage who cannot be distinguished in this document (although further triangulation across our record sets may in future clarify some of those identities).<br> The transcriptions are expected to yield valuable insights into the allocation of freshly-arrived workers outside of Sydney, at a time when the distribution of convict labour was increasingly controversial. We have therefore supplemented the transcriptions with data on occupation and age as stated by the individual convicts on the (recent) arrival and recorded in the convict ‘indents’. The dataset is pertinent to research undertaken for the Australian Research Council-Discovery Project, Enquiring Into Empire (DP180100537), and has been compiled by staff, students and associates involved in the University of New England’s Convict History Research Collective <https://blog.une.edu.au/convicthistory/> who are using digital techniques to reconstruct assignment and labour trends in the colony of New South Wales in the early decades of the nineteenth century.