Liberty Unchained: Anti-Convict Lobbying, Popular Politics and Settler Self-Government in the Australian Colonies and Cape of Good Hope, 1846–1856

Abstract

This thesis examines mid-nineteenth century demands for greater colonial autonomy in the eastern Australian colonies and Cape of Good Hope (Cape Colony), in southern Africa, and how this was expressed through popular politics against convict transportation. It considers shifting conceptions of accountable governance and British loyalism expressed in public meetings, the press, petitions, pamphlets, election campaigns, and celebrations, and the methods of lobbying within the colonies and Britain to end convict transportation, and bring about settler self-government. Colonial opposition was stirred into action by an Order-In-Council of October 1848, passed at the instigation of Britain’s secretary for war and the colonies, the 3rd Earl Grey, which designated the Cape Colony as a destination for ticket-of-leave convicts, and continued transportation to Van Diemen’s Land, and recommenced it to New South Wales. I argue that settler accusations of a ‘breach of faith’ by Earl Grey reveal not only a breakdown in trust in existing colonial governance, but also how the constitution was conceived as a fraternal pact of consent, as the governing structures of the family and male associationalism were writ large as the colonial state. This gave particular expression to concerns of emerging settler states soon to gain greater legislative autonomy through their own constitutions. I argue that anti-convict propaganda decrying convict depravity not only exhibited the persuasive power of abolitionist rhetoric, but also drew on vagrancy and the threat of convict mobility across borders to advocate immigration restriction. I further contend that popular protest in mass meetings and boycotts exposed administrative difficulties faced by colonial governors in claiming legitimacy to govern, as well as anxieties over the rule of law; this was expressed in part in debates over mass movements as either threatening mobs, or as justifiable extra-parliamentary expressions of popular will. Although colonists took organisational cues from Chartists and the Anti-Corn Law League in Britain, I argue that the inclusive associationalism of various classes under the banner of popular constitutional loyalty to the British monarch was not merely tactical but also based on genuine affinities. The anti-convict movements in the Cape and Australian colonies saw the emergence of assertive settler patriotisms under the Crown that gave legitimacy to popular protest mediated through mass meetings and petitions. While these colonial patriotisms may have replaced the overt patronage of governing elites with emergent liberal politics, the interests of settler capital undergirded settler self-government. The purported inclusive popular politics of anti-convict movements in Australia and the Cape thus masked the racially exclusionary logics of the incipient settler state.