Bold state activism drove us from our convict days, and we need it again now

When Labor Party leader Anthony Albanese this week invoked the ideal of post-World War II reconstruction – with a focus on big “nation-building” infrastructure projects and the Aussie fair go – pandemic politics entered a new phase. The battle for ideas has been joined. Just a few weeks ago Federal Parliament was clubby and fraternal. It is once again testy and fractious.

"A view of the Cove and Part of Sydney", drawn by convict Joseph Lycett in 1818.Credit: State Library of NSW

The moment of post-war reconstruction is certainly worth recalling. But a social ideal even more worthy of resurrection is the ideal on which the settlement at Sydney Cove was founded. There was nothing noble about the plan to establish a penal colony at the world’s end in order that transportation’s “salutary terror” – the phrase is from official documents – might deter desperate people from committing desperate acts. But it was undeniably an example of bold state activism, and that’s worth recalling at a time when we need an activist state.

Even more apposite is the social model forged in the next half a century after settlement when state resources were harnessed to the energies of a fledgling colony and a distinctive kind of society began to emerge. In the span of a generation a criminal underclass was largely transformed. “We are rising from the rude and unconnected state consequent and separable from the first efforts of colonisation,” wrote some of the better-off emancipists and free settlers in 1812, in a letter to the Sydney Gazette.

Charles Darwin, who visited Sydney in 1836 aboard The Beagle, observed of the colony: “On the whole, as a place of punishment the object is scarcely gained, but as a means of making men outwardly honest – of converting vagabonds, most useless in one hemisphere, into active citizens in another, and thus giving birth to a new and splendid country – a grand Centre of Civilisation – it has succeeded to a degree perhaps unparalleled in history.”

Within a few decades of the colony’s establishment a sense of exceptionalism had begun to stir among the young native-born “currency lads and lasses”, a belief that on the fringes of empire a humble person could become what he or she desired to be. The young Australian men were described as “tall, loose-limbed and fair, with small features … They made clever and daring sailors, were already proud of their horsemanship, and were willing and quick to learn any trade”.

A young Charles Darwin reported of Sydney: "as a place of punishment the object is scarcely gained, but as a means of making men outwardly honest – of converting vagabonds, most useless in one hemisphere, into active citizens in another, and thus giving birth to a new and splendid country – a grand Centre of Civilisation – it has succeeded to a degree perhaps unparalleled in history".

What the 26-year-old Darwin witnessed in 1836 was the creation, in large measure, of what we call the public sector. The colony itself was a government project. Men, women and provisions were dispatched half-way around the world by the colonial state. A society was built and garrisoned by government. Convicts – a great drain on the imperial coffers after the end of the Napoleonic Wars –cleared the land and built the roads, bridges and early settlements.

When the colony became more established, they beautified the settlement with public buildings: churches, schools, hospitals. When each new transport entered the Heads the landowners were there at the first muster to choose the best convicts as indentured servants and labourers – labour that was paid by government.

The young colony’s first infrastructure project, the Sydney-Hawkesbury turnpike road, was run by Simeon Lord, a rich emancipist merchant, and Andrew Thompson, a prominent landowner. Men who would never have amounted to much at home – Lord and Thompson had separately been convicted of stealing small amounts of cloth – rose to the status of gentlemen. Their ascent didn’t happen by chance; it was part of the new society’s design, largely the policy of emancipation: a form of early parole invented in the colony that allowed the convicted felon to work for a wage under certain restrictions before his or her sentence had been served. Pretty soon skilled and “gentlemen” convicts were paroled with tickets-of-leave as soon as they stepped off the transport.

This, naturally, irked the authorities in London who were anxious to maintain the deterrence of transportation. But it soon produced a burgeoning economy driven by small landholders. The total value of property held by emancipists in 1820 was estimated at pounds 1,123,600. Some 7556 emancipists owned 29,028 cultivated acres and 212,335 acres of pasture, 42,900 head of cattle and 174,179 sheep. Britain’s criminal underclass had done remarkably well in exile.

Around this time – 1819 to be precise – two ships under the command of Louis de Freycinet entered the Heads. On board was the artist Jacques Arago, who confessed he was “enchanted”. In a rhapsodic, though not entirely exaggerated, account he wrote of: “Magnificent hotels, majestic mansions, houses of extraordinary taste and elegance, fountains ornamented with sculptures worthy of the chisel of our best artists, spacious and airy apartments, rich furniture, horses, carriages, and one-horse chaises of the greatest elegance, immense storehouses — would you expect to find all these, four thousand leagues from Europe? I assure you, my friend, I fancied myself transported into one of our handsomest cities.”

The world that Jacques Arago and Charles Darwin saw was the creation of an activist – and in many ways progressive – state. And that, quite as much as the example of post-war reconstruction, is worth remembering in our attempts to simultaneously craft a fresh political narrative and a new political reality.

The early colony’s longest serving governor, Lachlan Macquarie, employed convict tradesmen on public buildings, and he used the government stores to set up emancipated convicts on small parcels of land gifted to them by the government. In Sydney one-eighth of colonial revenue – raised mainly through the tax on goods – was set aside for a state education fund at a time in the “mother country” when the Bishop of London could assert that it was “safest for both the government and the religion of the country to let the lower classes remain in the state of ignorance in which nature has originally placed them”.

Britain’s antipodean penal colony was the unsung hero of the Age of Revolution (1774-1849). One reason the Australian revolution is not discussed alongside its illustrious predecessors in France and America is because it had no one – certainly no Thomas Jefferson – to articulate its ideals. It was, more precisely, an evolution with the moral force of a revolution. This is something that Darwin, who was uniquely attuned to the forces of evolution, clearly understood.

Though we are no longer defined by criminality, ours remains a society marred by inequalities of opportunity and social division. If we look back to the origins of a distinctive Australian society we find a model of state activism that evolved, in the first half century of European settlement, to address the abiding questions of human elevation, social reform, and shared prosperity.

It wasn’t perfect: the whole experiment was founded, after all, on the oppression of another race. And it certainly wasn’t as pretty as Arago’s vaporous description. But it was, in many important ways, a good start. The social evolution to which Darwin bore witness is not only a model worth recalling as we chart a fresh course into a stiff headwind, it’s a model worth offering to the world.

Luke Slattery is a journalist and author of two books on the early colonial period.