A Convict in Australia
The Delaney home for over a century: Moyne Farm
Master and convict
On arrival in New South Wales, the luckier convicts escaped government service and were ‘assigned’ to a master . The majority of convicts arriving in Australia were unmarried landless workers with an average age of 26, much like Nicholas. Where he differed from the crowd was the fact that he was a countryman and a political prisoner: most were urban thieves who did not know how to work the land.
It was Major George Johnston, commander of the New South Wales Corps, who was to be Nicholas’s master. As a senior officer – and one of the largest landowners in the colony – Johnston was a person of importance and would have had his pick of the newly arrived convicts. Nicholas, a young man, must have still looked strong and competent, despite the deprivations of the voyage.
The assignment system was centrally controlled. Convicts’ masters had to feed and house their workers to standards regulated by the government. Any punishment of an assigned convict had to be endorsed by a magistrate. And, while unsatisfactory convicts could be returned to government service, they could, in theory, sue their masters if the conditions of assignment were breached. When adhered to, it must have seemed a fairly liberal regime to masters and assigned convicts alike. Certainly George Johnston rather prided himself on his treatment of his labourers. Asked his opinion on the controversial question of whether convicts really could be reformed, he replied: “‘Yes’; he kept them hard at work and gave them plenty of vegetables”.
Marriage: introducing Elizabeth
On October 17 1806 young Elizabeth Bayly (also spelled Bailey or Bayley) sailed from England, bound for Australia. She arrived in Sydney on April 4 1807, a free settler who had braved the long journey in the ship Brothers under Captain Oliver Russell. She was only 16 years old. In October 1808 she married Nicholas Delaney.
It is one of the paradoxes of Australian history that, as one who ‘came free’, Elizabeth is less documented than her convict husband. It is nearly impossible to know why she came to New South Wales, apparently without any family to support her. Until the 1820s most women who went to Australia of their own (comparatively) free will were the wives or close relatives of men who went there. Fewer than one in five of the transportees in the colony were female, and the proportion of those who came free was even smaller. Women of any age were at a premium, and young women even more so.
The arrival of women, convicts or free, in the colony in its early days was not welcomed by the administration, which saw them not as sources of productive labour but as extra mouths to feed – and threats to morality. The aim was to get them dispersed as quickly as possible, mainly as domestic servants. Britain’s view was that all convict women, most of them transported for theft, were impossible to reform and that, coming from gaols where “extortion, prostitution, and drunkenness were routine”, as the Parliamentary Report of 1814-5 on Mendicity had found, they would turn the colony into an extended brothel. The fact that many women had been used sexually by the guards and crew while on board ship, and arrived pregnant or with a babe in arms, would have added to the administration’s prejudice.
There is more information on attitudes to women in the early colony here.
On arrival in New South Wales, the luckier convicts escaped government service and were ‘assigned’ to a master . The majority of convicts arriving in Australia were unmarried landless workers with an average age of 26, much like Nicholas. Where he differed from the crowd was the fact that he was a countryman and a political prisoner: most were urban thieves who did not know how to work the land.
It was Major George Johnston, commander of the New South Wales Corps, who was to be Nicholas’s master. As a senior officer – and one of the largest landowners in the colony – Johnston was a person of importance and would have had his pick of the newly arrived convicts. Nicholas, a young man, must have still looked strong and competent, despite the deprivations of the voyage.
The assignment system was centrally controlled. Convicts’ masters had to feed and house their workers to standards regulated by the government. Any punishment of an assigned convict had to be endorsed by a magistrate. And, while unsatisfactory convicts could be returned to government service, they could, in theory, sue their masters if the conditions of assignment were breached. When adhered to, it must have seemed a fairly liberal regime to masters and assigned convicts alike. Certainly George Johnston rather prided himself on his treatment of his labourers. Asked his opinion on the controversial question of whether convicts really could be reformed, he replied: “‘Yes’; he kept them hard at work and gave them plenty of vegetables”.
Marriage: introducing Elizabeth
On October 17 1806 young Elizabeth Bayly (also spelled Bailey or Bayley) sailed from England, bound for Australia. She arrived in Sydney on April 4 1807, a free settler who had braved the long journey in the ship Brothers under Captain Oliver Russell. She was only 16 years old. In October 1808 she married Nicholas Delaney.
It is one of the paradoxes of Australian history that, as one who ‘came free’, Elizabeth is less documented than her convict husband. It is nearly impossible to know why she came to New South Wales, apparently without any family to support her. Until the 1820s most women who went to Australia of their own (comparatively) free will were the wives or close relatives of men who went there. Fewer than one in five of the transportees in the colony were female, and the proportion of those who came free was even smaller. Women of any age were at a premium, and young women even more so.
The arrival of women, convicts or free, in the colony in its early days was not welcomed by the administration, which saw them not as sources of productive labour but as extra mouths to feed – and threats to morality. The aim was to get them dispersed as quickly as possible, mainly as domestic servants. Britain’s view was that all convict women, most of them transported for theft, were impossible to reform and that, coming from gaols where “extortion, prostitution, and drunkenness were routine”, as the Parliamentary Report of 1814-5 on Mendicity had found, they would turn the colony into an extended brothel. The fact that many women had been used sexually by the guards and crew while on board ship, and arrived pregnant or with a babe in arms, would have added to the administration’s prejudice.
There is more information on attitudes to women in the early colony here.
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