The Feel of a Word: convict taint

If you were to mention these days that someone had the convict taint, you would be met with blank looks, but the label aroused passionate debate from the 1840s on in Australia.

The heat in the debate initially came from the suspicion that the British government were thinking of picking up the transportation system again and dumping more convicts in Australia, in particular, Tasmania and Western Australia.

This caused the Tasmanians to organise in opposition and to form the Australasian Anti-Transportation League which ended up having chapters in every state of Australia and in New Zealand.

One side of the debate said that convictism was a pollution on Australia, introducing all sorts of moral depravity, and arguing that ‘there is a greater probability of violent crimes being committed by men whose lives have been steeped in guilt from their youth up, whose sensibilities are blunted, and whose characters are lost, than by men whose reputations are unimpeached, and whose consciences have not been seared and indurated by familiarity with vice’.

The other said that the grown-up children of the convicts were on the whole physically and morally healthy and capable of expanding the fortunes of the colony.  The young men were a bit on the wild side but their exuberant high spirits was not the same as moral depravity.

The convict stain was part of the stereotyping of the currency lads and lasses by the newly arrived free settlers who felt that the offspring of criminals had to be failures at everything.  They could not be trusted to farm the land properly. Their womenfolk were prostitutes, and they were all permanently inebriated. Only the free settlers could set things right.

Some, more temperate in their remarks, said that it was undoubtedly the case that some convict families had prospered. They put this down to the fact that among the convicts there were those who had an inherently moral disposition. They had lapsed but then recovered. These were the ones that went on to have families and children. The dissolute ones were, as a consequence of their depraved behaviour, childless, and so the convict stain was wiped out in the next generations.

In addition the swelling ranks of the new free settlers began to vastly outnumber the convicts, and so the ‘birth stain’ was washed out.

Others took the view that ingrained immorality could never be expunged and the children of the convicts, and their children’s children, all went on to lead dissolute lives.

In a sense the settlers won because the idea of the convict stain or taint became an accepted one in Australian culture.

By the second half of the 1800s families had buried their convict ancestry.  This led a writer to boast in the South Bourke and Mornington Journal (Victoria) in 1882 that he personally had kept a  record of the convicts and was prepared to make such ancestry known. He gloats over his power:

‘How they writhe and bribe.  In the zenith of their fortunes I strike.  When th maid is on the eve of being led to the alter, when her gewgaws are purchased and enshrined in her chamber, when her fashionablebridesmaids are worked to the acme of excitement at the approaching ceremony, when the settlements stand ripe for signature, I crawl to the father’s side.  I say to him.  “You are a convict, dear sir; may I mention the fact to your expectant son-in-law?”  Oh! It is glorious to see them writhe, to hear their defiances and their wild boastings, their mad denials, their wild blasphemies, while the perspiration streams from their swelled foreheads, and muddies the rich carpets.’

Sydney’s ‘birth stain ‘ came to prominence in 1899 when the 20th Governor of NSW, Earl Beauchamp, sent a telegram from Fremantle giving notice of his imminent arrival in Sydney,  and quoted the verse written by Rudyard Kipling in The Song of the Cities published in 1896.  In this poem each city of the Empire has its own verse.  Sydney’s read:

Greeting! My birth stain have I turned to good;

Forcing strong wills perverse to steadfastness;

The first flush of the tropics in my blood,

And at my feet Success!

Beauchamp may have meant well – the last line is uplifting – but the citizens of Sydney did not take kindly to being reminded of their birth stain.

People wrestled with the problem of convict ancestry for a surprisingly long time.  Even in the 1980s a new spin was being put on it.  It was argued that in Britain at the time of transportation it was not legal to exile a British citizen, be they honest and upright, or convicted of a felony.  Therefore the convicts to be transported had to be given a pardon first so that they arrived in the colony as indentured servants of the colonial administration.  No convicts, no convict stain.

An article in the Bulletin in the 1961 began with the question: ‘How long will it be before “First Fleeters”  -- descendants of those who arrived with Governor Phillip – manage to work up the same sort of snobbery about their status as America’s Pilgrim Fatheers have?’

The term first-fleeter had been used from the early days of the colony for those who arrived with the First Fleet. But through the 1900s the First-Fleeters who were invited to celebrate at meetings of the Pioneers’ Club were those who were most definitely not convicts. They were descendants of the ship’s doctor, of free artisans, of soldiers.  The Women’s Pioneer Society was restricted to women who were the direct descendants of  (1) a member of Captain Cook’s Expeditions to Australasia. (2) an officer or man of the naval or military forces or mercantile marine. (3) an officer or man of the civil establishments.  (4) a landholder or professional.

It probably wasn’t until the 1980s that one could say with pride that one’s ancestor was a convict on the First Fleet.

As convict taint became an obsolete term, first-fleeter rose to be a badge of pride, even with the most respectable members of society.