Convicts already part of South Australia before settlement and support early economy in sealing and whaling
Former convicts from New South Wales and Van Diemen's Land supported whaling and sealing, South Australia's first export industry.
Convicts were already in what became South Australia before governor John Hindmarsh and the first fleet of European settlers arrived in 1836. Whalers and sealers set up camps in the islands and bays along the southern Australian mainland as early as 1803 and these had emancipated and escaped convicts.
Captain George Sutherland, who sailed the Governor Macquarie to Kangaroo Island in 1819, reported: “There are no natives on the island; [but] several Europeans assemble there; some who have run from ships that traded for salt; others from Sydney and Van Diemen's Land, who were prisoners of the crown. These gangs joined after a lapse of time, and became the terror of ships going to the Island for salt, &c., being little better than pirates. They are complete savages, living in bark huts like the natives, cultivating anything, but living entirely on kangaroos, emus, and small porcupines, and getting spirits and tobacco in barter for skins … They dress in kangaroo skins without linen, and wear sandals made of seal skins. They smell like foxes.”
In June 1837, when South Australia’s population was less than 2,000, magistrate Edward Stephens complained that “upward of 40 of these (convict) men” were already known in the colony and urged governor Hindmarsh to do something. Judge Henry Jickling also complained his court was full of convicts. That year Hindmarsh wrote to British secretary of state Lord Glenelg asking to start a police force that hadn’t been funded the colony's founders who believed a convict-free settlement would be law aiding. Hindmarsh told Lord Glenelg that “bad characters that are daily arriving from Encounter Bay, and I suspect very much from the interior and, of course, suspected to be runaway convicts, make it necessary not only that a strong police body should exist, but that we should not be altogether deprived of a military force”.
In 1840, Hindmarsh's successor George Gawler also reported a military or a police force was absolutely necessary “in a country in which natives, bushrangers, a large body of escaped convicts and whaling sailors are to be kept under control”. Gawler's believed “two thirds of the prisoners in our gaol have invariably consisted of escapees from New South Wales, whilst one half of the remaining third has usually been composed of runaway sailors from vessels in the Port”. In the British House of Commons, F. Elliot, a South Australian colonisation commissioners, said that he supposed the number of convicts in South Australia was “not inconsiderable.”
Escaped and former convicts in early South Australia, keen to lay low and take on unpleasant work in remote and inhospitable areas, were valuable to the economy. As wool and wheat production took several years before returning a profit, whaling and sealing, supported by convict labour, staved off the colony's total bankruptcy as its first export earner, with oil and bone from a single whale bringing £500 to £600 in 1838.
Escaped and former convicts also helped the agricultural and pastoral industries. In February 1837, prominent land agent John Morphett reported: “We have already at least 15 men come here as labourers from the convict colonies of Sydney and Van Diemen's Land, whose knowledge and course of life will be decidedly useful; that is to say stock keepers, shepherds and paling & shingle splitters.”
Others such as Simpson Newland at Encounter Bay, Christina Smith at Rivoli Bay and the Reid family at Gawler, used ex-convict labour to split timber for building and fencing, building houses and tending livestock. Eliza Mahoney, Samuel Reid’s daughter, recalled that, with sheep and cattle brought from New South Wales and Van Diemen's Land, “there came ticket-of-leave and time-expired men, who we employed, and who understood building huts much better than the emigrants, and we never had more honest, more industrious servants.”
• Information from Paul Sendzsiuk, “No convicts here: Reconsidering South Australia’s foundation myth”, in Turning points, Chapters in South Australian history, edited by Robert Foster and Paul Sendziuk (Wakefield Press).
