What do Australians think of the Convict Stain?

[TwentytoTwelve]

This is an article in response to the question of why Australians no longer feel ashamed by the “Convict Stain” when they used to. Do you agree with it? How do you feel about the Convict Stain?

Here it is:

• The “convict stain”, the genuine embarrassment at the criminal ancestry of many Anglo-Australians, was still mainstream enough that “As late as the 1960s, Tasmania’s Library Board refused permission to doctoral student Peter Bolger to publish convict names for fear of embarrassing their descendants.” (Tasmania’s convict ancestry is 74% of the population.)

• The 1970s is when Australian nationalism was reasserted as a denial of British authority, and the embrace of convict ancestry was an easy thumb-in-the-eye that many Anglo-Australians had access to. The working-class, anti-authority narrative was always there, but the 1970s was the first time it could be celebrated openly.

• It of course helped the medicine go down that the prevailing narrative about convict Australia is Dickensian: convicts are conveniently seen to have been mostly petty criminals who committed infractions out of want, as victims of the Industrial Revolution, but are seen to have been basically the hard-working salt of the earth, plucky sorts to take a mischievous pride in—rather than loafers and sociopaths whose ancestry you should recoil from.

• That fed the convict pride further: the British State in the popular imagination, in line with the popular questioning of imperialism and capitalism, went from a guarantor of order to an oppressor of the poor, and once Australians stopped identifying so strongly with the British State, the contrary narrative could take growth.

• The more prominent legend of Australian nationalism in the 70s was the diggers in Gallipoli, and a similar anti–British-Establishment narrative entrenched them: that of lions led by donkeys, of working-class troops sacrificed by effete upper-class generals (seen in the later Australian iteration of that narrative as foreign Britons). So celebrating convicts was seen as sticking it to London, at a time when Australians started feeling the urge to.

• Many of those convicts would have been political prisoners, such as Irish rebels or Chartists, but that bit hasn’t captured the Australian imagination. You would expect them to, if the point was sticking it to London, because those prisoners really did get transported for their principled opposition to the British State. But Australians have developed an impermeable cynicism about grand narratives and ideology, which they fancy does them credit—and which owes a lot more to the hedonism of Nietzsche’s Last Man than to the querulousness of Derrida. Australians will celebrate the street-smart pickpocket and the starving Jean Valjean type; they’ll either dismiss the Chartist as a wanker, or look blankly on long-forgotten social grievances.

• Crimes like rape and murder became reasons for transportation instead of execution only in 1830, and it does appear they are underrepresented among convicts sent to Australia even afterwards; so the popular Dickensian narrative is not at all unfounded.

• Apparently the TV series Roots in the 1970s inspired some genealogical sleuthing there as well.

• The “stain” is so defused now that people asserting it seriously are laughed off.

• It was something South Australia, a free colony, used to sneer at other states with; I can’t remember the last decade I’ve heard it employed.

• It is a standard part of British put-down banter against Australians, as a passive-aggressive, plausible-deniability assertion of superiority. (On arriving to Australia: “Any criminal record?” “I didn’t know that was still an entry requirement.”) Australians, confident how superior they are in every way to Britons (a superiority assumption they share with Britons, along with the style of banter), barely even notice it.

• The Vietnamese and British both brought it up to reporter Hugh Lunn during the Vietnam War, as he wrote in the memoirs of his time there (Vietnam – A reporter’s war - Hugh Lunn). I read them in 1988 in high school, and already thought that a strange thing to bring up. (The link does note that mentions of the convicts were still scarce in the 1988 bicentennial festivities, but that’s more about official occasion.)

• The Stack Exchange article notes that foreigners and New Australians still bring it up. It notes the Mufti of Australia using it as a retort to Anglo-Australian suspicion of Muslim Australians. It also notes that the Anglo-Australian response was incredulous laughter that he’d assume they’d actually take any offence to that.

• And, it has to be said, the “convict stain” is an Anglo-Australian narrative. Those of us that don’t claim Anglo ancestry, and who lack cultural fluency in Anglo-Australian ways, like the Mufti of Australia, might still think it stings. Those of us that do have the cultural fluency just look on the whole thing with bemusement.”

Never heard of it.

Moved to Oz in late 80s, never heard of the phrase.

My grandmother always liked to make it very clear that our ancestors were not convicts. I always found that quite funny.

Dickens did also have characters who emigrated to Australia to start a new life who were not convicts. They weren't as interesting as Magwitch though.

There were lots of later immigration waves. I have heard of '10 pound poms' but not come across the phrase 'convict stain'.

It was a thing up to the 70s, though not universal, but would be laughable now. My ancestors include thieves, arsonists and rebels, and I love each new revelation about them (and about my other ancestors).

I am in Oz, and while I have heard of this, I've literally never heard it mentioned. It seems like a very old-fashioned idea! There have been some very odd threads about Australia recently on here! We didn't care much about Cool Britannia either!

Given that more than half of the Australian population was either born overseas, or has a parent born overseas, I think it's pretty irrelevant nowadays. There are far more first and second generation immigrants than there are people with convict ancestors.

Given that many people were transported for such heinous crimes as stealing a loaf of bread or taking a rabbit to feed their family, I think pride would be more appropriate than stain.

I’ve only ever heard convict ancestry disclosed with a sense of pride.

My ex husbands ancestor was transported to Tasmania for stealing a watch.

I was very envious, mine are much more prosaic, recent arrivals.

I think I’ll comment here having had conversations with my now late aunt. A bit of different context but I think has parallels.

My grandfather had Irish, Catholic parents. He was a clever man who had to leave school at 14 and joined the Civil Service in 1915. However, strike 1) he was Australian born. Strike 2) He was Catholic. Strike 3) he was of Irish parents (free settlers but even so). Consequently, he was never able to progress beyond a certain grade because 1) he wasn’t English born and certainly not English educated. 2) he didn’t complete high school and 3) he was Catholic. I can see from the Civil Service staff list that all those in higher levels were WASP’s.

Convicts and their descendents were in the same boat. Their opportunities for a respectable career advancement would have been next door to nil due to caste. Many convict descendents did very well but usually because they started their own business. They also mixed in their own circles as they had little entree to the caste that included senior government officials, university academics, bankers, and the squattocracy. Not disclosing convict ancestry would have made a path life easier if you had any sort of upwardly mobile ambition and any hope of a respectable reputation.

Even in my own little backwater, I read local biographies and it’s the English, Protestant free settlers who are allocated large tracts of land, socialise and marry amongst themselves - convicts, ticket of leave, Irish settlers and the bride ship girls all had to create their own society.

See also My Place by Sally Morgan “yes, we are Aboriginal but if anyone asks, your grandparents are from India”.

@Xanhi re your grandmother being adamant that she was not of convict stock. When she was a girl, that mattered. She would have grown up hearing comments, sneers from her elders along the line of “well, you know what her parents/mother/father/grandfather were”.

My great aunt would always wear black trousers and black shoes in her later frailty. And always white socks. She grew up down the road from the state orphanage. Orphans wore black socks. Those black socks must have really marked the poor girls. Black socks are orphan’s socks. Right into the 21st century. Heartbreaking on a number of levels, really.