BANISHED TO A LAND DOWN UNDER

Rather than fill the prisons or issue the death penalty, judges chose to ship tens of thousands of convicts to Australia

- RHIANNON DAVIES

On 13 May 1787, a fleet of 11 ships carrying around 1,400 men, women and children, including around 700 convicts, left Portsmouth Harbour to sail to the other side of the world. Thieves, protesters, and petty criminals were crammed below deck, with the rolling of the waves and the wails of their companions the only sounds they would hear for the next eight months the amount of time it would take the so-called First Fleet to reach the shores of Australia.

The voyage marked the start of Britain's use of penal colonies Down Under, but transportation as a form of criminal punishment had first emerged in the 17th century. At the time of the fleet's sailing, the Bloody Code was in full force and many crimes carried the death penalty (see page 42). Sentencing a person to exile in a foreign land was regarded by many judges as preferable to execution and had the added bonus of making the criminal another country's problem.

The 1717 Transportation Act made banishing people overseas even simpler, stating that anyone sentenced for a serious crime would spend 14 years in an overseas penal colony, and anyone guilty of lesser felonies, such as theft, would be given a seven-year exile - the majority of people transported fell into the latter category. Also transported were protesters, such as the Tolpuddle Martyrs (who were punished, in 1834, for essentially forming a trade union). Around 85 percent of convicts transported to Australia between 1788 and 1868 were men, although their ages ranged wildly, from boys as young as nine to men well over 80 years old.