"[John Thomas] Bigge particularly disapproved of the practise of assigning convict labour to emancipists. Appalled at the laxity of master, servant relationships on small-scale farms, he hoped that by encouraging an appropriate settlement pattern convicts could be placed in a more appropriate deferential environment—one that might be better calculated to affect their moral reformation. Impressed by the estates of some of the former officers of the military garrison, he recommended that future grants of land should only be made to settlers with at least £500 in capital. He also advocated an extension of the practice of ‘assigning’ convict labour, but only to private individuals of means. His hope was that cheap land and labour could be used to attract migrants with capital from the British Isles.
Instead of sugar (which will not grow commercially in southeast Australia), Bigge thought that such a policy would encourage the production of fine wool, lessening the British woollen industry’s dependence on European suppliers. He perceived that the transplanting of a landed élite would reproduce the hierarchy and stability evident in both the British rural landscape and the world of the slave plantation. That is, a notion of hierarchy that embodied a social ordering which would seek to legitimize power through the exercise of local paternalism. In short, this would be a society that would reward the ‘deserving’ while expecting all those dependent on the master resident in the big house to curtsey, remove hat and touch forelock.
In effect this was an expanded version of Philip’s vision for Parramatta. A series of agricultural districts each of which might be administered by a genteel landed élite who would supervise the construction of ‘substantial’ ordered cottages for tenant farmers and neat barracks for estate workers. An Anglican church and a school, and perhaps even a benefit society, might sit at the heart of each settlement, alongside a courthouse, a watch-house and a range of solitary cells. From these rural centres ‘concentric rings of economic clientship’ might extend outwards encompassing all manner of service industries which depended on the business of the estate and its settlement annexe.
It was hoped that tight local control coupled with a system of obligations and acquired rights would extinguish the petty disputes, illicit distilling and stock theft which was thought to characterise the haphazard settlement fostered under the early governors. For, as E. P. Thompson argued, gentry everywhere make a habit of labelling the mass of common people who exist outside of their control as ‘idle and disorderly’.
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The intention was that convicts sent to these places of punishment would be kept at unremitting toil engaged in the most labour-intensive tasks. In convict parlance these sites constituted something of an underworld. Macquarie Harbour penal station was referred to as Pluto’s Land. Penal stations were designed to extract pain from convict bodies. The extent to which these sites of coercion succeeded in their objective can be measured in graves. The death rate for the convicts that laboured in the gangs at Port Arthur was four times greater than those engaged in assigned service.
The penal stations and female factories were genuine innovations. It would have been impossible, for example, to implement such a system in Trinidad. No master would ever seek to extract labour from a slave beyond the point that it was economic to do so. The difference in the forms of unfreedom that anchored convict and slave in place enabled the establishment of a more complex system of labour extraction in the Australian penal colonies.
Unlike the Caribbean, it was the government who possessed property rights in the sentence that condemned each convict to colonial servitude. While the state chose to temporarily assign those property rights to masters where it suited their interests to do so, it also possessed the ability to absorb the costs associated with the production of pain.
The post-Bigge penal landscape was populated by many different working experiences. The assigned servant who laboured on a country estate, or worked in an urban business, occupied one end of that scale, while the penal labourer, to use a phrase coined by Evans and Thorpe, condemned to a penal station or female factory washtub marked the other.
Behind the incentives that were primarily used to coax labour from assigned servants lurked the terrifying spectre of hard labour on ‘short commons’. It did not matter if the majority of convicts never walked through the doors of the crime class yard or had irons hot-riveted to their legs in a penal station lumberyard, the threat was sufficient to make any prisoner think twice about answering back on not or performing their allotted task. As the Chief Justice of New South Wales put it, the object of a sentence to a penal station was not just to punish those who transgressed the law but ‘to serve as a terror to others’.
In between the extremes of the penal station and assigned service, Bigge also recommended an expansion of other, lesser forms of punishment. This included work in road parties and chain gangs. These were distributed the length and breadth of the settled districts. Men could be sent to such sites of coercion on a magistrate’s order to labour for terms of up to three years under the ever-vigilant eye of an overseer. The work they performed built the colony’s road system, as well as constructing its wharves and docks and supplying the brute labour required to develop the infrastructure that enabled the colony as a whole to turn a profit. Together with the female factories and penal stations these sites of coerced labour were calculated to induce ‘obedient, productive and profitable’ compliance in all convicts no matter where they were located. This was a finally calibrated system that balanced the paternalism of the country estate with the pain of penal labour. Critically this landscape of punishment and obligation was underpinned by an expansion of the powers of the local bench. As Lauren Benton and Lisa Ford argue, magisterial jurisdiction in the Caribbean and Australian penal colonies became closely aligned post-Bigge." - Hamish Maxwell-Stewart and Michael Quinlan, Unfree Workers: Insubordination and Resistance in Convict Australia, 1788-1860. Singapore: Springer, 2022. p. 65-66, 68-69.
