‘The Last Fleet’: Crime,Reformation,and Punishment in Western Australia After 1868

Abstract

This article reexamines the theories of John Braithwaite published in 2001 in the light of recently analysed historical court data. He argued that transported men and women enjoyed better conditions and better life chances than those who were imprisoned in British jails, and that the social and economic conditions in early- to mid-19th century Australia provided ex-convicts with opportunities to integrate into respectable society. The 19th-century system of transporting con victs to Australia ended in 1868 with the last ship arriving in Fremantle, Western Australia. There is considerable debate as to whether transportation aided the rehabilitation of offenders, or heaped more misery upon those defined by the British authorities as moral ‘refuse’ who should be flung far from British shores. This article uses existing information, such as the English census registers, and the Fremantle magistrates' court registers, to reconstruct the lives of the last 218 transported men, and the general reconviction rates of transported men in the colony. We argue that the majority of convicts continued to offend in the colony, but only committed minor crimes, and that the labour needs of the new colonies helped to bind many convicts into society through employment and the estab-lishment of new relationships. The colony therefore benefitted from convict endeavour while in the drunken and dissolute convicts, free settlers and contemporary social commentators were still able to find evidence of a persistent ‘criminal stain’.