Emigration Down Under: Voluntary and Involuntary Removal in the Early Nineteenth Century

Nicoletta Gullace looks at early Victorian attempts to settle Australia as part of quasi-utopian enterprise, aimed at settling a new “paradise,” while conveniently ridding Britain of undesirable Irish and English paupers.  The aggressive marketing of Tasmania, along with demands in Hobart Town for free labor, resulted in a highly controversial relocation scheme, where the British government’s Emigration Committee peddled dreams of a better life to people who might otherwise have become burdens to the parish or found themselves in the workhouse.  While the Emigration Committee sought to relocate able-bodied poor to Australia, the government nevertheless consistently refused appeals from the destitute wives of transported convicts for free passage to join their husbands, following their seven year terms of penal servitude.  Despite the penury of many convict families – and the relative prosperity of the post-indentured ex-convicts in Australia – the Government found such requests incompatible with fiscal economy.  In this paper, Gullace examines the elision between voluntary and involuntary emigration by comparing lotteries and free-passage offers with convict transportations.  She unravels the logic of removal in a context where the poverty of a potential emigrant was only part of a complex social calculus that came into play in the settlement of Australia.