Australia's Birthstain: The startling legacy of the convict era

Abstract

For many family historians in Australia, the discovery of a convict ancestor raised as many questions as it answered. At an individual level, family origins were explained and myths exploded when the 'black sheep' came to light. Family context in the wider scenario of Australian history became clear. Often, older family members or general family knowledge made it possible to deduce who hid the information, and the research process usually revealed how it was done in a particular case. But major questions remained. The chief question was also the most obvious. Why? Dismissing the cover-up as simply due to family snobbery was too easy. Once they started investigating, family researchers realised that avoidance of convict history extended far beyond an individual story. The phenomenon was too widespread to be dismissed as a purely personal reaction. Family researchers wanted to know why Australian society came to fear its own history to this extent. How did this occur? Why was there such a fundamental national silence that the convicts as real-life characters - whose true stories abounded in success, failure, optimism and in tragedy, triumph and pathos - were forgotten? Was it the crimes they committed in Britain? Or did the source of a birthstain so terrible that it must be hidden lie in the penal colonies? The second major puzzle for many researchers was why their ancestor's story did not fit the established view of convict experience. In so many cases, he did not go to the penal settlements of Port Arthur, or Moreton Bay, or Norfolk Island, nor was there any indication that he was ever flogged. And if the ancestor was a woman, in my case named Susannah Watson, she appeared to use the Female Factory to her advantage rather than dread being sent there, as some major scholarship claimed. Generally, published history as well as popular stories seemed melodramatic and at odds with the stories uncovered by family historians. Family historians were right to be puzzled. For the last 150 years the idea that convict foundations were a blot on Australia's history has shaped political, social and intellectual thought to such an extent it is as though the previous 60 years never existed. The strongly developed ethos of a flourishing convict society is neither remembered nor understood. Its people have been reduced to caricature.