The Invisible History of the Human Race

by Christine Kenneally

  Within families it is, of course, the adults who seek and manage this information. How they choose to share it with the smallest offshoots in the family tree is a private matter. Certainly the control that adults exert over the information in the lives of children can be extreme, and sometimes the regime that withholds information is not one’s government but one’s own family.

  • • •

  “Who has a convict in their family tree?” asked my eighth-grade teacher. Student after student held up a hand, testifying to their awesome convict heritage, while I sat quietly resenting them. Having not learned my lesson when I was seven about posing certain questions, I later asked my father if we had any convicts in the family. I reasoned that I had never been actually told there were no convicts in our line, as the question had never come up, so maybe all I had to do was ask, and it would be revealed. I was wrong. My father, who was unmoved by the teenage notion that it was now cool to be of convict stock, dismissed the idea.

  It was therefore interesting a few decades later to learn that the woman who raised my father—his grandmother—was in fact the daughter of a convict. The discovery came about when I asked a local historian to help me find my family’s origins. In a surprisingly short amount of time she led me to documents about my great-great-grandfather, Michael Deegan, about whom I had never heard a thing. The convict register in the Tasmanian Archives recorded that he was sent to Port Arthur in Van Diemen’s Land in 1842. I could hardly believe it—this was the Australian genealogical jackpot. For one small and deeply satisfying moment, I was a convict princess.

  In the clean, crisp air of Tasmania today, the remains of the penitentiary at Port Arthur look more like an elegant old manor than a jail. Even though a fire rendered the main building unusable in the 1890s, the four-story goliath still dominates the scene. Standing beside a deep bay and surrounded by green hills and a forest of blue-gray gum trees, it is the largest building in a complex that includes a church, an asylum, a hospital, and a manicured garden, all surrounded by English oaks. Farther up the grassy slopes, the commandant and his colleagues lived with their families in a row of pretty Victorian houses. Out in the middle of the bay on the tip of a peninsula was Point Puer, a rehabilitation institution for younger criminals kept separate from the main group of convicts. Between the point and the main site is the Isle of the Dead, where more than 1,500 people were buried.

  The black heart of Port Arthur was the Separate Prison building, where warders forswore whipping and tried to more directly manhandle the souls of their charges. When convicts arrived there, they were hooded so they could not look at or speak to another soul for all the years they were incarcerated. In the prison chapel wooden doors sealed all men off from one another. Each seat, or rather each place to stand, was a narrow, suffocating box that was constructed so the only thing the convicts could see was the preacher. Parts of the building were based on a panopticon design, which permitted a guard standing in place to survey four tiny yards where prisoners walked in a small, quiet circuit. Prisoners who misbehaved—or who were made so mentally ill they could not contain themselves—spent time even more completely isolated in a stone cell that let in almost no light, even on a bright day. Outside the Separate Prison, convicts labored in the pastoral loveliness to produce bricks, worked stone, ships, and furniture. They wore uniforms of worsted wool, of different colors depending on their status. One jacket, known as the magpie, was specifically designed for humiliation: Its panels, sleeves, and each side of the collar alternated black and yellow, and it made the convicts look like jesters.

  Young Deegan had been transported to Van Diemen’s Land after having been arrested three times in his hometown of Dublin, at which point he was sent to Point Puer and incarcerated with boys as young as nine. When he disembarked, he was fifteen years old and five feet and three quarters of an inch tall, with hazel eyes and an inoculation mark on his left arm. He left behind two parents and a brother, and it’s likely that he never saw his family again.

  When I went through Deegan’s records with a historian, she noted the surgeon’s comment about his “troublesome” conduct onboard the Kinnear. Boys on transport ships were at risk of rape, she said, and fending that off sometimes made them aggressive. They were often hungry too. Yet while Australia’s convict system left a huge number of men and women so traumatized they couldn’t function, many convicts were given a chance to change their fate. “The British state invested in them by teaching literacy and skills to the young ones,” the historian told me. She looked at Deegan’s files again and pointed out that when he arrived at Point Puer he couldn’t read or write, and he only had one offense for all the time he was in jail. “See,” she said, “he learned how to be good.”

  After Deegan moved to Victoria, he married a woman named Ann McGrath. They lived in the countryside of Castlemaine and had ten children. Did McGrath know that her husband had been a convict? I have not yet been able to find out. After all, it is a challenge to look for information that has gone missing at some point in the last century and a half. It also made me wonder how silence is passed down.

  • • •

  Until the 1970s there were no convicts in Alison Alexander’s family tree. That changed when a distant relative of Alexander’s father, a Mormon, began digging into the family’s past. He found that the family descended from Jane Baird, a Scottish woman who was sent to Van Diemen’s Land for robbery with violence. Alexander remembers that her father was delighted to learn about Baird, and when he discovered there were more convicts in the family, he had a tree made up with little pictures of all the items they had stolen: a silver watch, two pairs of stockings, and ten silver cups. Alexander’s mother was less pleased with the discovery, and her own mother, who was in her seventies at the time, was appalled. She couldn’t understand why her son-in-law would want to know such things or why he would then take pleasure in what he found. “Never mind, dear,” she assured Alexander. “There’s nothing like that on our side of the family.”

  But when Alexander, who became a historian and a writer, began to do some research herself, she discovered at least nine convicts in the family tree. Two were sent to Australia on the first fleet in 1788, and they married other convicts and had children who grew up and married the children of other convicts. Alexander ultimately determined that three of her four grandparents had descended from convicts. After further research, she found that her husband was the first person to marry into her family who hadn’t descended from a convict.

  On the face of it, Alexander’s new family history made perfect sense. She and her parents were born in Tasmania, and Tasmania was once the world’s largest penal colony, with more criminals per capita than the next two candidates, New South Wales (another Australian convict colony) and Siberia. In fact, by 1853 fifty-one thousand of the total sixty-five thousand Tasmanians were convicts or ex-convicts. Because there hasn’t been a lot of immigration to Tasmania since that time, it seems only reasonable that Alexander would have at least one convict ancestor. So why didn’t she know that was the case?

  If it was odd for a Tasmanian historian to have no idea about her family’s past, the experience was almost universal. In 2009 it was estimated that three quarters of the current Tasmanian population had convict roots. Yet hardly anyone seemed to be aware of his lineage. The oldest Tasmanians that Alexander interviewed were born in the 1920s, and when she told them that most Tasmanians were descended from convicts, they were utterly astonished. Although the convict system ended in the 1870s, another historian told me that as early as the 1920s people simply stopped being aware of who had come from convicts and who hadn’t. Even at the beginning of the twenty-first century, Alexander reported, only 36 percent of Tasmanians said they knew of a convict in the family tree.

  I drove from Port Arthur to another tiny Tasmanian peninsula to meet with Alexander, now one of the world’s experts on the island’s convicts. Her house made me think of nothing so much as fr
eedom. From her front and back windows you can see the sea, and if you flew due south from there, you’d be in Antarctica in a mere four or five hours. How, I asked her, had an entire island come to forget its heritage?

  In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the British hung the worst of their criminals; they transported the lesser offenders to Australia. One contemporary observer said that it was the first time that people had tried to create an entire society from all that was wicked in another.

  Van Diemen’s Land received its first shipload of convicts in 1812, and originally the settlement was a curiously laid-back place. Far from the Old World, the small population had to rely on one another to survive, and the distinction between convicts and captors became moot. There wasn’t a lot of law and order in the penal colony, and corruption was common. Although punishments were meted out to lawbreakers, bribes could be paid to circumvent them. Couples shacked up together and moved in and out of relationships without feeling obliged to get married or even appear respectable. Sadly, the lenient founding atmosphere didn’t last. Soon new representatives of the Crown arrived, bringing more convicts and a more severe Victorian morality with them.

  Still, Australia remained a most unique social and economic experiment, because its isolation, combined with its bounty of natural resources, led to labor shortages, which gave the convicts bargaining power. Fundamentally the colony needed its convicts, so the system was obliged to rehabilitate people. Because Tasmania took on more convicts over a longer period than anywhere else in Australia, it spent a great deal of money on social welfare, charity work, and policing.

  From the beginning convicts had many rights and were protected by the law. They won significant legal cases protesting unfair treatment, and they enjoyed privileges and bargaining power that no prisoner and few free members of the working class back in England had. It wasn’t hard to manipulate the system either. Convicts could work more slowly for a bad master, which would likely result in reassignment to a better situation. Some convicts even had their wives and children sent from England.

  In Van Diemen’s Land, 10 percent of convicts, those who had committed a second or third serious crime, were sent to Port Arthur or an equivalent prison for women, know as the Female Factory. In fact, most convicts were not institutionalized; rather, the entire island was an open prison whose inmates worked as servants in homes throughout the community or in the colonial administration. Many became educated during or after their sentence, and once released, they became teachers, surgeons, and lawyers and rose to positions of power in the government. They ran newspapers, and they even organized unions while still laboring under sentence. Once they were free, the government granted them land, animals, and seeds—enough support, pointed out criminologist John Braithwaite, that by the end of the first four decades of transportation, ex-convicts owned three quarters of the colony’s land and were in possession of half its wealth. Over this time the originally mostly male population became much more demographically balanced.

  Indeed, the Australian penal colony was one of the most successful examples of rehabilitation and the raising up of people in history. In 1836, when Charles Darwin’s ship, the Beagle, stopped at Sydney, Darwin declared that it was a place of reform and reintegration, “a new and splendid country” that had “succeeded to a degree unparalleled in history.” Another critic wrote that forgers became useful, swindlers taught children by their newly virtuous example, and “the thief . . . attains the magistracy.”

  But despite the enthusiasm from some quarters, the grand social experiment was not overwhelmingly acclaimed at the time, or since, because hand in hand with emerging personal economic power came the aspiration to respectability and the desire to cast off the criminal past. In her book, Tasmania’s Convicts, Alexander describes how appearing clean, moral, and chaste was the most important goal of Tasmanian society from the 1820s onward. The passion for proper appearance, along with the British idea that criminality was a trait of defective families, combined to create the so-called convict stain: a stigma that marked not only the convicts who were transported but also their children, who were doomed to be inferior, immoral creatures.

  That stigma didn’t come from within Tasmania itself, explains Alexander, but from the British perception that a convict colony had to be an absolutely terrible place. Of course, the British didn’t suddenly decide in the 1820s that the colony was stained. Even before convicts first arrived in Australia, they lampooned the idea of a criminal nation. It was only for a few brief years that the settlers lived among the gum trees free from contempt. Once it caught up with them, there was a bottomless supply.

  The penal colony in New South Wales was a “sink of wickedness,” crowed the British; an Australian parliamentary House of Commons would be a “den of thieves.” The colonies were a cesspool, and their people were abhorrent, poisoned, blighted. When a naval surgeon told people in England that he had come from New South Wales, they would edge away from him, he said, and “check their pockets.” Sometimes the people who spoke with the greatest contempt for the colony were the ones who wanted to stop transportation. They emphasized its humiliations and disgrace in order to reform the system. Although some commenters made the case that transportation had been a success, they didn’t have much sway. The famous nineteenth-century social critic Alexis de Tocqueville said that essentially Australia lacked morals, and convict transportation created a society of dangerous people.

  Even if the English were disgusted by the convicts, most of whom were, of course, the English working class, it was an avid, tabloid kind of disgust. British newspapers joked about convict life. Readers were titillated by reports of bestiality and cannibalism, stories that were without foundation.

  British travelers experienced a pleasurable shock at the abundant evidence of Australian degradation. In the 1860s two Britons wrote a series of letters home in which they reflected obsessively on the convict stain and the way it affected everyone they met. Of middle-class Australians they wrote, “They misquoted Latin, they thought Richard II was a son of Richard I—it is scarcely to be credited.”

  America had thrown off English scorn when it rebelled against the mother country. But by maintaining their cultural, economic, and legislative ties to England, Australians were profoundly affected by its contempt. “In hindsight,” Alexander writes, “it might have been better to brazen it out, to say that Tasmania was a fine place despite its convicts; but it would have been hard to be brazen in the face of British condescension and ridicule.” By unspoken agreement everyone in Tasmania decided to simply not mention that they were all convicts, and somehow, for at least one hundred years, the strategy worked.

  • • •

  “Everyone had a vested interest in forgetting,” Alexander told me. You can find no evidence that anyone spoke about it, she said. If ex-convicts bumped into each other and knew where the other had come from, she suspects they just winked and went on their way.

  It is surely true that we are all born into a world where our parents keep something from us. It may not be scandalous or shameful, but there is a necessary filtering of information. Yet in Tasmania the silence must have been deafening. On the small island nearly all the parents were keeping the same secret from all the children.

  Another historian told me that the subject of the convict past was so taboo that “not even a wife would shout ‘convict’ at her husband in a fight in their home.” Instead everyone invented a past about being a free settler. Luckily, there were actually few barriers to appearing normal: Only the convicts at Port Arthur wore the nineteenth-century colonial equivalent of striped pajamas. Because most convicts served their time as servants in people’s homes, their clothing was the same as everyone else’s, if less grand. Most convicts’ racial features were the same as their masters’ too. Even today there is little physical evidence of the great founding population of criminals, because there were so few actual prisons at the time.


  Being able to pass as a free man or woman depended a lot on one’s appearance. A theory emerged among visitors in the early days that you could identify convicts because they invariably looked grizzled and beaten down, with shifty, sunken eyes and low foreheads. It was typical Victorian bigotry, and yet the theory suited many ex-convicts well: Those who did not wear their troubles or their malnutrition too obviously on their faces found it easier to pretend they weren’t convicts. Ironically, because ex-convicts had access to much better food and were paid higher wages than England’s own working class, it’s likely that they looked much healthier than the people they had left behind in their home country.

  Of course, the more traumatized people were, the more likely they would be to have “the convict look.” For that small group—hard men who had seen brutal days—there was no hope of pretense. They drank and stole and set up small communities out in the bush, and by looking so unmistakably like convicts, they helped everyone else look more upstanding.

  The shame and the silence wasn’t exclusive to Tasmania. In Western Australia mentioning the subject of convicts was utterly taboo. In New South Wales, there were enough well-to-do ex-convicts that to some extent they were able to defend themselves publicly and fight back against the shame that was expected of them. But because Tasmania was smaller and much more isolated, the safest strategy was not affirmation but amnesia.

  The only people in Tasmania who were known as convicts belonged to five particularly successful families, explained Alexander. It was their success, ironically, that kept them from escaping their past. Thomas Burbury, who was sent to Van Diemen’s Land for machine breaking in 1832, went on to become a chief district constable and successful pastoralist. Everyone knew he was a convict, but given his status, it didn’t matter. His family is prominent in Tasmania today.