The 'Knotted Hands That Set Us High': Labour History and the Study of Convict Australia (Essay‪)‬

The study of convict Australia is a study of the creation of self-sustaining settlements, quintessentially involving work and labour that was intended to be retributive and reformative, but also economically productive. Australian settlement belonged to an era of nascent industrialisation and capitalism, albeit motivated initially by penological imperatives and imperial ambitions, with the prevailing impulses of laissez-faire curtailed by strict state-controlled economic and social regulation. For much of the early colonial period, convicts dominated Australia's working population. Convict labour built the colony's infrastructure, and its emerging industries and businesses, and the discussion of convict labour--its quality, nature, management and outcomes, and its role in penal policy--was integral to the ways in which the colony was administered and interpreted throughout the early-nineteenth century. It therefore seems strange that in the twentieth century the contribution of labour history to the study of convict Australia was slow and subdued. This reflected an apparent difficulty in dealing with an era where labour was forced rather than waged, and where the economy was dominated by the state rather than private capitalism. The discomfort was, of course, widely shared. Australian reflections on the convict past were long shrouded in ambivalence and ambiguity, 'spoken of with bated breath, as though the details of it could not be tolerated in the limelight of public criticism'. (1) The convict story became buried in silence, or was excused and romanticised, and historical reflections became consumed with the perceived moral dimensions of the subject and with the possible cultural, psychological and institutional legacies of the period. The result was an emphasis on questions concerning the criminality and culpability of convicts, rather than appreciation of their plight as workers. Yet when labour history perspectives did intervene, they proved critical to challenging and resetting the conventional paradigms of convict history.