Convict Maids, the Forced Migration of Women to Australia

Convict Maids, the Forced Migration of Women to Australia. By Deborah Oxley. Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 1996. xi, 339 pp. $25.00.

Traditionally, historians poorly served the story of Australia's convict women. These forced immigrants of the late 18th and early l9th centuries, the overflow of Britain's goals, left for Australia with moralizing slurs ringing in their ears, echoed into 20th century historiography by academics bearing as many stereotypes and prejudices to their research as analytical tools. That the convict women of Australia were all prostitutes and economically unproductive to the fledgling colony has been wisdom, repeated, if not warmly received, as recently as Robert Hughes' The Fatal Shore (1987). Hughes observed that when the colonial authorities referred to convict women, "the word 'prostitute' was less a job description than a general term of abuse." Deborah Oxley contends in her introduction to Convict Maids that Hughes' work, the most influential account of the convict era yet published in the international marketplace, repeats the interpretative and factual flaws of orthodox historiography in the field -developed in the 1950s by Manning Clark, Lloyd Robson and A.G.L. Shaw. Oxley says (5) a "resilient theme" emerged from their research: all convicts came from a professional criminal class, intolerant of legitimate employment; the "`dregs of society; the women were prostitutes or at least morally `abandoned.'"

Since 1988 the historiography has moved on from Clark, Robson and Shaw, challenging stereotypes of "feminine sin" and the women's economic insignificance to the development of the colony. Yet a detailed empirical study, fed by sophisticated analytical skills, has been lacking. As Oxley asserts in Convict Maids, "our lack of knowledge is treated as their lack of activity" (1). Oxley's research over the last decade, including an important contribution to Nicholas and Shergold's Convict Workers (1988) and culminating with Convict Maids, provides us with a rigorous revisionism. Oxley says that she set out to reconcile the "unresolved tension" which had emerged in the changing historiography-that the convicts had arrived in Australia, poorly trained and virtually sociopathic, and suddenly transformed into useful workers, wives, and mothers, helping to build a new colony. As Oxley archly observes, "depraved origins sit uncomfortably with colonial success" (12). This tension was apparent in one of the most important recent studies prior to Convict Maids, Portia Robinson's The Women of Botany Bay (1988). Oxley notes that Robinson recorded convict women running small businesses and practicing skilled trades, but failed to tell the reader how the women acquired skills and business sense. Robinson thought "the land itself somehow stirred initiative," but as Oxley comments, "sunshine cannot impart skills where none hitherto existed" (13), and why would dissolute convicts suddenly turn to the rigors and discipline of hard work and enterprise?

To resolve the inconsistencies, Oxley returned to the records-specifically, to 7,000 convict indents. The indents provide a rich source of information about each convict about to be transported. In effect, they were a kind of felon's passport, including a physical description of the convict, nature of sentence and criminal record. The indents also recorded religion, marital status, place of birth, level of education and, importantly, occupation or trade qualifications. The results of this examination were, as they say, revealing. As Oxley details in Convict Maids, the indents indicate that the convict women were, in the main, first offenders, convicted mainly for petty crimes against property- stealing clothes, cloth, household goods (for example candles, pots and pans), bedding and foodstuffs. The women came to Australia with a range of skills. Most were literate and numerate, young and healthy, had worked as weavers, as domestic servants, as bootmakers-and here the benefit of Oxley's close reading of the sources yields a compelling picture of the labor disciplines of the industrial revolution: as Oxley observes, "there were not just button makers but pearl button makers, not simply shoemakers and bootmakers, but shoe binders, shoe closers, boot closers, boot binders and boot corders-precise descriptions of tasks reflecting the extent of work-process fragmentation and the specialist skills acquired" (118). Disrupting the assumption that all "domestic servants" performed the same general tasks, 15 different types of servant were reportedgeneral house servants, country servants, indoors, outdoors-working alongside housemaids, kitchenmaids, nursemaids and laundrymaids. Oxley concludes that far from being unskilled, the convict women were predominantely skilled and semiskilled, with a total of 160 varied occupations recorded against their names (although most worked within a narrower range of about 40 occupations). Of prostitution, Oxley can find little evidence to sustain the stereotype, only ". . . unproved assertions [and] dubious interpretations of sexuality" (124).

In Convict Maids Oxley ranges exhaustively over the evidence, building a rich social history (backed by comprehensive transportation, crime, census and skills appendices) of the urban and rural women transported from Great Britain and Ireland between 1826 and 1840, and of their place in both the legal and economic systems of the "old country" and the new colony to which they were dispatched. Oxley has replaced the masculinist melodrama of traditional interpretations of the role of convict women with an understanding of the women in their own terms, as workers and individuals. Although we know few-if any-of their stories well, Oxley demonstrates that the voices of the convict women have not been entirely stilled by time and marginalisation.