When travelling overseas, I have been taunted on a couple of occasions and told that I am the descendants of convicts. This is clearly an attempt to rile me up and never works - I actually enjoy the laugh. Some research is in order as I do want to have an answer for them, if anything, just to shoot down their ill-conceived insults.
This has been when I have been first introduced to people I have never met before - very strange behaviour. My family name is OHalloran, that's Irish and the family came out during the Victorian gold rush before moving to the goldfields of Western Australia. My grandmother came from Kalgoorlie, still the capital of the West Australian goldfields. Besides, this appears to be their problem and not mine, so I ask myself, how many convicts were actually transported to Australia?
The eleven ships of the First Fleet arrived in 1788 in Sydney Harbour departing from Portsmouth in England for the 13,000 mile journey carrying about 1500 people in 1787. Prior to that, Joseph Banks had returned from a expedition in 1770 and declared this land as suitable for a penal colony. On board the ships of the First Fleet were 751 convicts and their children along with 252 marines and their families.
A further two convict fleets arrived in 1790 and 1791 before the free settlers began arriving in 1793. The French had also been interested in colonising the great southern land and the British wanted to get there first and claim the land for Britain. I believe the French were also interested in establishing a penal colony as this was as good a way to claim new territory.
Over on the west coast of the continent, the Swan River Colony was established in 1829 after an expedition in 1827. These were not the first Europeans to explore the west coast as the Dutch seafarers had navigated the west coast then known as New Holland with Dirk Hartog planting a pewter plate on an island in what is now known as Shark Bay in 1616.
Willem de Vlamingh mounted a rescue mission searching for survivors of the Ridderschap van Holland that had gone missing a number of years earlier. The three ships under his command landed at Rottnest Island in December 1696 and ventured up the Swan River in January 1697.
They are believed the first Europeans to do so, although Frederick de Houtman may have also ventured up the Swan River in 1619 but this is unclear. Vlamingh's trek headed north up the coast where they replaced the pewter plate left by Dirk Hartog also inscribing their own visit on the replacement plate.
The last shipment of convicts arrived in Western Australia in 1868 with the total number of transported convicts recorded at approximately 162,000 men and women transported on 806 ships.The convict transportation to Australia ended at a time when the population of the colonies was approximately one million people.
The purpose of the convicts was to provide labour to the fledgling colonies and by the mid–1800s there were enough free settlers in the colony to undertake the work with the colonies becoming self sustaining with convict labour no longer required.
What is interesting is that even though slavery had not been abolished, at least in the British Empire, there was no slavery in the colonies although the convicts sent to the colonies were for reasonably minor infractions.
The Aboriginal and Torres Straight Islander population in Australia is 2.8% of the total population with 649,200 people according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics in 2016 with the approximate population of 24,770,000 people in 2018. The 2011 population census identified approximately 25% of the population claimed their ancestry to be Australian.
An interesting statistic from the 2011 population census is 30% of Australians were born overseas with 46% having a parent born overseas. We might have started off as a penal colony back in 1788 but we are truly a nation of immigrants embracing a mixed race heritage growing as both a country and nation.
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