OUT OF LUCK
‘This admirable book provides a clear and cogent narrative of the different forms and meanings of poverty in this country over the past two hundred years. With stringent economy Stephen Garton appraises the measures that have been employed to alleviate poverty and control the poor; with controlled passion he indicates the human consequences of these measures. I know of no better introduction to the subject.’ Stuart Macintyre, author of Winners and Losers.
POOR AUSTRALIANS AND SOCIAL WELFARE 1788–1988
ALLEN & UNWIN
Sydney Wellington London Boston
© Stephen Garton 1990
This book is copyright under the Berne Convention. No reproduction without permission. All rights reserved.
First published in 1990
Allen & Unwin Australia Pty Ltd
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National Library of Australia
Cataloguing-in-Publication entry:
Garton, Stephen.
Out of luck: poor Australians and social welfare 1788-1988.
Bibliography.
Includes index.
ISBN 0 04 442137 0.
eISBN 978 174269 675 1
1. Public welfare—Australia—History. 2. Social service—Australia—History. 3. Poor—Services for—Australia-History. 4. Australia—Social conditions. I. Title. (Series: Australian experience).
362.50994
Set in Times by Graphicraft Typesetters Ltd, Hong Kong
To my mother and her mother—their story lies here
This book preserves contemporary units of measurement. There are twelve pence to the shilling and twenty shillings to the pound. One pound is equal to two dollars and one guinea is equal to two dollars twenty.
A mile is equivalent to approximately 1.61 kilometres, and an acre to 0.405 hectares.
Illustrations
Abbreviations
Preface
Introduction
1 A poor colony
2 Survival of the fittest
3 Colonial charity
4 Workers’ welfare
5 Pensions and pills
6 One long Depression
7 A welfare state?
8 A banana republic?
Notes
Select bibliography
Index
Gray’s Inn Lane
The Sydney Rum Hospital
The Parramatta Female Factory
A member of the nomad tribe of workers
Melbourne beggar
Discovering the urban poor
Feeding the poor
The Sydney Benevolent Asylum
The Parramatta Women’s Asylum
A selector family near Katoomba
The sweated outworker
Ridiculing the struggle of the unemployed for assistance
Vicars Woollen Mills
The new Ministering Children’s League Home
The new cottage home
The independent aged poor
Dulwich Asylum, Queensland
The introduction of new nerve cures
Chippendale slums
Aboriginal woman and child at Billila
A food distribution depot at Pyrmont, Sydney
Melbourne street children in the 1920s
The Labour movement’s caustic comment that the nation would live within its income
Relief for the unemployed near Sydney
The emergence of the social worker
Poverty in the ‘lucky country’
The aged were still a large proportion of the poor
Advertisement for the Smith Family in 1976
Drug company advertisement
ACOSS |
Australian Council of Social Service |
ADB |
Australian Dictionary of Biography |
AONSW |
Archives Office of New South Wales |
BPP |
British Parliamentary Papers |
CPD |
Commonwealth of Australia Parliamentary Debates |
CPP |
Commonwealth of Australia Parliamentary Papers |
HRA |
Historical Records of Australia |
MJA |
Medical Journal of Australia |
NSWLAV&P |
New South Wales Legislative Assembly Votes and Proceedings |
NSWPP |
New South Wales Parliamentary Papers |
QLAV&P |
Queensland Legislative Assembly Votes and Proceedings |
QPP |
Queensland Parliamentary Papers |
SAPP |
South Australia Parliamentary Papers |
SMH |
Sydney Morning Herald |
VPP |
Victoria Parliamentary Papers |
VV&P |
Victoria Votes and Proceedings |
WAPP |
Western Australia Parliamentary Papers |
The Gospels declare that the poor are always with us. If that is so then many commentators on Australia have ignored their existence. Opinion makers as diverse as the novelist and essayist, Anthony Trollope, statistician and economic historian, Timothy Coghlan, and politician Harold Holt, have argued that poverty was negligible in Australia. Such men are part of a broad cultural stream which has perpetuated the image of Australia as a ‘workingman’s paradise’. But what of the man who could not find work? What of the woman whose work was remunerated at lower levels than men or not at all if she worked at home? What of those too old or too ill to work and families without breadwinners to support them? These Australians did not live in a worker’s paradise and their lives are an integral part of the Australian experience.
The terms ‘poverty’ and ‘the poor’ are convenient ones. They help describe a disadvantaged group but they also obscure the fact that there are different poor populations, whose misfortunes have different origins. The plight of the deserted mother, for instance, is different from that of the infirm pensioner or the unemployed labourer. The common link between diverse cases of material poverty is their origin in the failure of social and economic systems to provide adequately for all. To compensate, many societies have developed methods to assist the poor. In the modern market economy, a complex array of organisations and measures have evolved to cope with the problem of poverty, ranging from private benevolence to cash payments from the welfare state. The nature and extent of these forms of assistance are an arena of contest, where competing ideas about the causes of poverty have produced different remedies for the problem. What have been the results of these historical contests? How have they affected the experiences of poor Australians?
Any work which attempts to answer some of these questions is particularly reliant on the labours of others. My indebtedness to other works will be apparent from the endnotes but I owe a special debt to those historians—Dickey, Roe, Macintyre, Mendelsohn, Kewley, Jones, Castles, O’Brien and Kennedy, to name but a few—who have done much to advance the study of poverty and social policy in Australia. The influence of these works on my understanding of the problems discussed here is more than can be adequately acknowledged in reference notes.
The staff of a number of libraries and archives have helped in my researches; in particular those of the Mitchell Library, the John Oxley and Fryer Libraries, the La Trobe Library, the Archives Office of New South Wales, the Queensland State Archives, Fisher Library and the National Library of Australia. A number of authorities have granted permission to reproduce photographs; they are acknowledged in the text. Karen Yarrow, Joanna Martin, Joan Hitchen and Ruth Bennett typed drafts of this work with skill and patience. Hilary Weatherburn provided tremendous assistance with the hunt for illustrations. The Griffith University Division of Humanities Research Sub-Committee funded a number of visits to distant libraries. The University of Sydney History Department provided funds for research assistance and illustrations.
Heather Radi provided much needed criticism and spilled a great deal of ink on early drafts. Without the good-hearted but regular harassment of John Iremonger this work would have taken a lot longer to complete. The final manuscript benefited considerably from the editorial skills of Fiona Inglis and Michelle Wright. Judith Allen, Brian Dickey, Mark Finnane, Hilary Golder and David Walker made helpful suggestions at various stages. Colleagues at Griffith University allowed me to develop some of this work as course materials and their criticisms, particularly those of Geoff Dow and Ian Hunter, helped refine some of the arguments. Students at the University of Sydney discussed some of my ideas and forced me to clarify particular arguments. The efforts of Lesley and Gloria Garton to assist the struggles of the disadvantaged have been a constant inspiration. Marie Wilkinson spent many hours discussing ‘the welfare’ with me, prompting many fruitful inquiries. None of these people is responsible for the final product—the shortcomings of the account are mine alone. My father helped with repairs to my inner city hovel, leaving me with precious time to write. Without the constant encouragement and support of Lyn Garton and Pat White I would never have put pen to paper.
In 1883 Richard Twopeny, son of an Anglican archdeacon and a prominent journalist, wrote of his tours round the Australian colonies: The distribution of wealth is far more equal. To begin with, there is no poor class in the colonies. Comfortable incomes are in the majority, millionaires few and far between’.1 Twopeny was just one of many colonists and visitors who marvelled at the prosperity of Australia and the distribution of that prosperity to all its citizens. The colonies may have lacked the wealth and splendour of London but they also lacked the slums of a St Giles or Whitechapel. In Australia few were rich but all were comfortable. These views underpinned Australia’s reputation as a ‘workingman’s paradise’, an image of considerable longevity in Australian cultural commentary. Modern economic historians have echoed the views of Twopeny concerning colonial Australia. R.V. Jackson has argued: ‘Australians were well fed, well clothed and well housed . . . Australian cities were spacious, healthy, and free of large areas of extreme poverty’.2 Similar statements were made about Australia during its second ‘long boom’, after 1945. In 1969, W.C. Wentworth, Minister for Social Services in the Gorton Coalition government, concluded that Australia was ‘probably the country in the whole world where the impact of poverty is least’.3 In the 1960s and 1970s many commentators were fond of calling Australia ‘the lucky country’, overlooking the irony in Donald Home’s original formulation, perpetuating the notion of Australia as a prosperous and egalitarian society.
Leopold Muller, who arrived in Sydney with his family in 1880, did not share Twopeny’s view of Australia. He had been lured to the colony by ‘the glowing accounts, promises and prospects held in the papers .. . but upon arrival found myself deceived’. He had travelled throughout the colony in search of work but only found occasional employment. In a plaintive letter he wrote: ‘I beg to show that tho a man is heartily willing to work he may nevertheless not be able to obtain it’.4 Others agreed. In 1898, after the colonies had recovered from the depression of the early 1890s, charity workers found Mrs H, a widow with two young children, living in a ‘state of destitution under very painful circumstances’. She occasionally earnt a few shillings washing and received some food each week from the Benevolent Society. But her rent was 4s a week and the youngest child was dying of measles. The family lived on bread and water and only survived because a sympathetic landlady didn’t feel able to collect their rent.5
In the 1960s Mrs Hall, wife of a builder’s labourer and mother of twelve, was just one who did not share the view that Australia .was a ‘lucky country’. The Halls lived in a Housing Commission home in Melbourne, but even with cheap rent the family faced ‘just a bare existence’. For Mrs Hall ‘it was a constant struggle .. . after groceries there’s nothing left’. The strain proved too much and she suffered a nervous collapse.6 Another who struggled was Mavis, a 25-year-old deserted mother with two children and pregnant with a third. In 1969 her husband left after an argument and she survived in a small rented room for a few weeks, quickly running out of money after failing to find a job. In desperation she applied to the Brotherhood of St Laurence for emergency assistance. For more permanent help she was advised to take out a maintenance order on her husband in order to qualify for the government’s family assistance program. But she did not want to pursue this course of action for fear that her husband would never return.7
The evidence of these Australians was generally ignored by the purveyors of the ‘workingman’s paradise’ and ‘lucky country’ images. Only in times of serious economic depression, in the 1890s or 1930s, did images of poverty become part of the national consciousness; but these were quickly forgotten, except by those who lived through them, when prosperity returned. In the 1970s and 1980s Australia’s worsening economic climate and declining standards of living again challenged the widespread belief that Australians lived in an egalitarian and prosperous society. Prime Minister Bob Hawke and Treasurer Paul Keating enjoined all Australians to ‘tighten their belts’. But for over 12 per cent of the population, belt-tightening was near impossible. This was the group defined as living on or below the ‘poverty line’. Bald statistics miss the human dimension of the problem; two million people were in this situation.8 Even in the more prosperous 1960s, research suggested that 7 per cent, or over half a million people, lived on or below an austerely defined ‘poverty line’—and many more struggled to make ends meet.9 If this was the situation at a high point of prosperity, when a large social security system was in place for the maintenance of the poor, what are we to make of statements concerning the absence of extreme poverty in the colonial period?
Unfortunately, it is difficult to estimate the extent of poverty in Australia’s past. Australian historians do not have the benefit of Mayhew’s study of London’s poor in the 1840s, Charles Booth’s investigations into the extent of poverty in London in the 1890s nor Seebohm Rowntree’s 1901 survey of poverty in York. It was not until the 1966 Melbourne University Institute of Applied Economic Research survey of poverty in Melbourne that we began to get reliable estimates of the extent of poverty in Australia. But such complaints obscure more fundamental problems in defining and measuring poverty. Poverty is not a clear and obvious object that can be easily grasped. In some developing nations, notably Sudan in the 1980s, widespread starvation is perceived as an unproblematic case of absolute poverty. But in developed western nations poverty is a concept usually defined in a relative way: a situation worse than some other, more acceptable, situation. Differing views of what is an acceptable standard of living will markedly affect perceptions of the character and dimension of poverty in any society. Equally there are different types of poverty. Some people live in chronic or permanent poverty but others may suffer only temporary poverty due to unemployment or ill-health (crisis poverty) or due to declining fortunes in old age (life-cycle poverty). In this way many more people experience poverty at some point in their life than conventional poverty-line measurements indicate.
Despite the difficulties in defining and measuring poverty some Australian historians have attempted to estimate its dimensions. Jill Roe has persuasively argued that 10 per cent of the population lived in permanent poverty, and a similar proportion in temporary poverty (except during serious recessions), throughout the 19th and early 20th centuries.10 This is less than Charles Booth’s finding that 30 per cent of Londoners in the 1880s and 1890s were poor.11 Australia might have had less poverty, but a figure between 10 and 20 per cent is sufficiently large to undermine confident claims that Australia was immune to its effects. That there were fewer of them would have been of little comfort to those Australians who lived in impoverished circumstances. Although attempts to estimate the extent of poverty may be fraught with problems of definition and measurement, social, labour, urban, welfare and women’s historians have uncovered abundant evidence of poverty in Australia.12 They have charted the existence of urban slums and the plight of struggling farmers, unemployed labourers, the aged, and deserted and widowed mothers. These studies have provided a stock of information and methods to help identify the social groups vulnerable to poverty in Australia’s past. Although the actual experience of the poor may be elusive, the conditions in which they have lived and their responses to the world they inhabited are vital elements of Australia’s history.
Poverty is generated within specific social and economic structures. In the modern capitalist economies, these structures include the relations between workers and employers, the dynamics of international trade, finance and politics, and the ‘sexual economics’ of relations between men and women.13 It is these structures which have been largely responsible for the unequal distribution of goods and power. They have also provided the arena in which people have perceived their world and acted in it. Within the limits set by these larger forces, misfortune and bad luck have also contributed to that calamitous slip from the struggling working class to the dependent poor. Sudden illness, accident, infirmity and the death or desertion of a breadwinner had serious effects on many families. These misfortunes are a key element of the experience of poverty.
What have Australians done to alleviate the plight of the poor? Part of the answer to this question lies in the Christian heritage of the Anglo-Saxon culture that has dominated Australia since the late 18th century. St Paul deemed charity to be one of the three Christian virtues. If poverty was a constant, then benevolent alms-giving was the perpetual Christian duty. But what is laid down in scripture is subject to interpretation. The word ‘poverty’ has had a troubled history. In the middle ages, the vow of poverty was undertaken by monks believing that it would bring them closer to the path pursued by Christ. Nevertheless, those religious orders, notably the Franciscans, which embraced the vow of poverty found themselves in conflict with a Vatican hierarchy concerned with accumulating ever greater wealth and power.14 In the 18th century the evangelical revival in the Protestant churches challenged the notion of poverty as an inevitable or sanctified state. Some saw it as a personal corruption capable of being eradicated by moral reform. Evangelicals received support from a secular quarter. Some political economists, utilitarians and liberals believed that the market, and later the state, could contribute to the gradual disappearance of poverty.15 Poverty was no longer a state to respect but a blight on society to be cured or eradicated.
The European colonisation of Australia occurred at the height of these new ideas about poverty. In Britain they led to a questioning of the traditional right of the poor to receive parish assistance. In Australia they inspired a struggle to prevent the introduction of a Poor Law system into the colonies, Instead the colonial poor had to rely on the uncertain benefits of private benevolence and government charity. The uniqueness of colonial systems of poor relief continued into the 20th century with the emergence of a welfare state. At the turn of the century Australians were not afraid to forge new social policies for the fledgling nation and many believed that Australia had become the ‘social laboratory of the world’. The consequence was a system of social security benefits financed from general revenue at a time when the rest of the western world was moving towards insurance schemes for the alleviation of poverty. What were the historical contours of these peculiar systems of assistance? What were the consequences for the poor? How did the poor respond to these forms of assistance? These questions highlight the fact that charity and welfare have been important parts of the historical experience of poverty.
Aboriginal culture before European colonisation adapted to both times of plenty and times of hardship, but the effects of material hardship were relatively evenly distributed. In contrast, 18th century English society was marked by extremes of wealth and poverty. Moreover it was a society that had been undergoing a significant historical transformation, responsible for new forms of poverty and new understandings of what poverty meant. The roots of this transformation go back a number of centuries. How far is in dispute. But most historians agree that the gradual commercialisation of agriculture from the 14th century contributed significantly to the erosion of a ‘feudal’ society based on reciprocal duties and obligations, and the emergence of a new capitalist society based on wage labour, production and profit. Land became a commodity that could be bought and sold, and to accumulate wealth it was profitable to take uneconomical strip farms and create large fields geared to producing crops for sale and enclose village commons and turn the land into extensive pastures for sheep and cattle.
Properties geared to producing for larger markets needed a sizeable casual workforce and the villagers displaced by enclosures, land sales and the pursuit of profit became a landless labouring class, moving from property to property following seasonal labouring or going to towns in search of work in trades, manufactories and other employments associated with Britain’s growing mercantile economy. Labourers who left the old village communities were divorced from family and parish systems of support and were prey to the vagaries of the market, and seasonal or more permanent forms of unemployment. These were symptoms of the larger structures shaping 18th century British society and the consequences were vast wealth for the few, prosperity for the new middle classes and artisans, but material uncertainty for many. The convicts transported to Australia in the late 18th and early 19th centuries were largely drawn from those groups set adrift by the emergent forces of the market economy.
In 1700 London was a city of half a million people, swollen each year by 8000 people emigrating from the countryside. In the next century the pace of social change quickened, hastened by enclosures. Between 1761 and 1780 the British Parliament passed 4039 Enclosure Acts, facilitating the accumulation of property and the dispossession of villagers and small landholding families. Rural dislocation was rapid and momentous. By 1800 London’s population had increased to a million, twice the size of Paris, and there were fourteen other towns and cities with more than 20000 inhabitants.1
Those who went to the towns and cities were often disappointed. Many only found poorly paid and intermittent work as labourers, carters and domestic servants. Others found their skills, previously valued, undermined by the new factory system. They faced the choice of starvation or joining the ranks of the labouring classes. It is impossible to know the full extent of poverty. Some contemporaries stressed the plight of individual groups. In 1800 Patrick Colquhoun, police magistrate and pamphleteer, declared that there were 10000 unemployed domestic servants in London.2 But it is difficult to sift fact from fancy in the evidence of men like Colquhoun, who hoped to dramatise social evils to push the cause of improved police forces. Some recent estimates, however, suggest that as many as three-quarters of London’s population in 1800 were poor.3 This is probably an upper limit but one indicative of the dimensions of the social crisis confronting British authorities.
The victims of rural dislocation did not always submit meekly to their fate. Riots against rising bread prices were a frequent occurrence in villages and towns. Labouring families protested at the manipulation of the market by entrepreneurs, merchants and shopkeepers and asserted a ‘moral economy’ of fairness and the right of the people to food in opposition to market forces and the new ethics of profit. There may also have been a ‘political’ component to some rural crimes. People who burnt barns and haystacks on the properties of large landowners, or poachers who killed game on landed estates but left the evidence behind, gained nothing from their acts but signalled their anger over the enclosure of village commons.4 Against this evidence must be placed the high rates of crimes against fellow workers. Many did not pick wealthy targets but instead seized the opportunity to steal from neighbours and other inhabitants of the poorer areas of villages, towns and cities.
Rural unrest caused considerable anxiety amongst the propertied classes but conditions in the cities and towns also provoked concern amongst the magistrates, clergy and reformers who investigated the rookeries and lanes of the poorer districts. It was not just poverty that caused alarm. The ‘morals’ and habits of the urban poor were of even greater concern. Henry Fielding, novelist and magistrate, observed in the London poor of the 1750s: ‘the destruction of all morality, decency and modesty; the swearing, whoredom and drunkenness which is eternally carrying on in these houses . .. and the excess of poverty and misery of most of the inhabitants’.5 These were widespread sentiments among the ‘better-off classes influenced by the puritan, dissenting and evangelical currents in 18th century intellectual life. The culture of drinking, fighting, prostitution, stealing and begging which seemed the lifeblood of the urban poor was both offensive to these observers and the cause of deepening poverty.
Alarm at the life of the poor was not only a result of worsening conditions in 18th century London but also of sharper divisions in the city space.6 In 1700 London was the largest city in Europe. It was a city of narrow streets and lanes, gin palaces, tenements and lodging houses. Violence was common, drink an accepted part of social activity and gambling and thievery were rife. Smallpox, tuberculosis, typhoid and dysentery were epidemic. In the early 18th century, however, drinking, gambling and violence were just as much the habits of the aristocracy as they were of the poor. The rich could retire to their estates but in the city there was considerable social intercourse between the different social groups. Within the space of half a century this began to change. There was a growing geographical isolation between the classes. Two Londons were created; the better-off in the West and the poor in East London.
The emerging middle classes were powerful instruments of change. Horrified at the habits of aristocrat and labourer alike and concerned about the ravages of epidemic diseases, they sought greater regulation of the urban space. The Paving and Improvement Acts facilitated improved drainage, paving and lighting of the streets. Some parishes organised local police forces and magistrates to enforce good order on the streets. Parts of the city were cleaned up, both physically and ‘morally’, and became the preferred addresses of the respectable classes. As a result the poor were confined to parts of the city untouched by urban reforms—Chick Lane, St Giles, Saffron Hill, Covent Garden, Cow Cross and Grays Inn Lane and other parts of East London. Cheap rents attracted immigrant workers and areas like St Giles became ghettos for Irish labourers and domestics. Public and private greed exacerbated the differences between East and West London. A window tax encouraged landlords to brick-up or blacken the windows of the East London tenemerits. The poor were increasingly isolated both geographically and culturally. It was their growing ‘otherness’ which made them the brunt of popular fears and convinced many of the need to develop new methods to contain the threat of poverty.
There were two traditional systems of poor relief.7 One was charity. Churches and private organisations fulfilled their Christian duty to give alms to the poor by providing food and shelter to the destitute. From the 14th century charities and churches were also involved in the provision of hospitals, lunatic asylums and homes for the aged. During the 18th century evidence of increasing vagrancy and urban squalor led to greater charitable efforts. Old hospitals were extended, new hospitals and asylums built, foundling hospitals and orphanages opened for the care of children, the new dispensary movement distributed cheap medicine for the poor, and many new societies, such as the Society for Bettering the Condition of the Poor, were established to distribute food and religious guidance to the poor.
The second system of relief was a unique system of parish assistance known as the Poor Law. At its inception in the 14th century it had been designed to prevent labourers from leaving villages in search of work elsewhere and thus driving up wages in parishes where there was a shortage of labour, while reducing them where there were too many workers. It was a measure to regulate the labour market as much as a system to assist the poor. By 1790 the Poor Law was a complex system of laws and regulations governing the provision of poor relief to the impotent, able-bodied and criminal poor. Each parish (there were 15 000) in England and Wales had Poor Law overseers who levied rates on local property owners to provide a permanent fund for poor relief. Under the Act of Settlement (1662) the poor could only receive help in their designated parish of settlement, usually their birthplace, and Poor Law overseers could refuse assistance to people from other parishes, exacerbating the plight of those travelling in search of work.
There were different systems of relief under the Poor Law. Although practices varied from parish to parish, it was common for overseers to provide pensions and allowances, usually money but sometimes food, for the impotent poor—the aged, widowed and deserted families, and the sick. If incapable of looking after themselves, or homeless, the impotent poor were sheltered in parish workhouses. The able-bodied poor, however, were required to work in order to receive parish relief. This was sometimes work for local landowners or employment on projects of parish improvement: building roads and bridges. If there was no work the able-bodied had to agree to go to the parish workhouse where they were required to perform tasks such as breaking stones, or carrying out repairs to the building. This was known as the work or workhouse test. Able-bodied unemployed men had to demonstrate to overseers that they were genuinely unemployed by agreeing to work for the parish or be admitted to a workhouse in return for doles or food for themselves and their family. The test was intended as a deterrent to pauperism, the belief being that only those who were really in need would agree to dole work or workhouse incarceration.
The Poor Law established assistance as a right for all those who could not provide for themselves. Settlement provisions and workhouse tests were measures to prevent those who could work from seeking relief rather than employment, but by the early 1790s a combination of poor harvests and the return of men after the wars with France created acute rural unemployment and led to measures which undermined the workhouse system. In 1795 a number of Poor Law overseers and officials gathered in Speenhamland and drafted new regulations waiving the workhouse test for the unemployed and authorising the payment of doles to the unemployed and allowances to the employed whose wages were too low to allow them to support their families. These officials accepted that unemployment and starvation wages were not the fault of individuals, and that the poor had a legitimate claim on parish assistance.
In late 18th and early 19th century Britain few people found the Poor Laws satisfactory.8 Thousands of pamphlets, political broadsheets, articles and books discussed the faults of the Poor Law and proposed remedies. On one side of the debate were political economists such as Adam Smith, Frederick Eden and Rev. T.R. Malthus, who believed that despite the workhouse the Poor Law perpetuated poverty by encouraging people to remain unemployed and supported by parishes rather than seeking work. They advocated the free market and argued that the market forces of supply and demand would ensure that everyone who wanted employment would find it. People had to be free to search for adequate employment, leaving districts with an oversupply of labour for those where there was a scarcity. Adam Smith confidently predicted that market forces would eventually lead to higher wages and the eradication of poverty. They identified the Speenhamland allowance system as a major cause of idleness and misery. By artificially propping up low wages, allowances encouraged dependency rather than self-reliance.
On the other side of the debate were men like Samuel Taylor Coleridge, poet and conservative philosopher, who feared that the new forces of wage labour and industrialisation were undermining the traditions of English society which were the safeguard of peace and stability. Coleridge considered the Poor Law a means of preserving the village society and the habits of deference and paternalism which characterised relations between labourer and master.
Underpinning these debates were differences over the nature of poverty. For conservatives the poor were a part of the natural order of society and a reminder of one’s Christian duty to give alms. By some estimates they were a significant proportion of the population. In 1780 Arthur Young, prominent landowner, commentator and traveller, declared that out of a population of nine million in England, eight million could be categorised as poor.9 This estimate reflected beliefs that the poor were all those who lived in conditions worse than those of a skilled craftsman. The poor thus included the labouring poor (those working but receiving a small income) and paupers (those receiving charity or Poor Law assistance). Critics of the Poor Law, however, believed that allowances and pensions encouraged the labouring poor to become paupers. Poverty, in their eyes, was a choice and unemployment a sign of a preference for indolence. By the early 19th century these ideas contributed to an emerging language of class; the labouring poor were reclassified as the working classes and the term ‘poor’ came to signify a smaller group living on the margins of society.10
Advocates of the free market believed the solution to poverty and unnecessary pauperism lay in the abolition of assistance to the able-bodied or, at the very least, stricter enforcement of the workhouse test. These Poor Law critics supported the principle of less eligibility’; conditions in the workhouse and any assistance provided had to be lower than anything attainable by a worker in the lowest paid employment to ensure that people sought any work in preference to dependency. George Nicholls, critic and later Poor Law Commissioner, wrote: I wish to see the Poor House looked to with dread by our labouring class, and the reproach for being an inmate of it extend downwards from Father to Son . . . for without this where is the needful stimulus to industry?’11 The workhouse was seen as an important weapon against idleness and in the late 18th and early 19th century considerable efforts were made to increase the size and number of parish workhouses.
Evangelicals were also prominent critics of the Poor Law. They believed that pauperism was a sign of moral weakness. They helped forge a division between workers and the poor that allowed for a ‘moralisation of poverty’. In their view there were two types of pauper: the deserving, whose condition was no fault of their own and the undeserving and indolent, who sought to exploit the generosity of charities and Poor Law overseers. The deserving poor were the aged, the ill and widowed and deserted families. The undeserving were the ‘idle, indolent and immoral’ able-bodied poor. Evangelicals supported campaigns to force the undeserving back into the labour market. The poor were immoral because they lacked the habits of industry, thrift, abstemiousness and self-help. The children of the poor also lacked these habits, condemning them to further poverty. Education, industrial training and religious instruction were the means to moral reform, best achieved in the enclosed environment of an institution. There adults and children could be isolated from the urban squalor that bred indolence and placed under influences for moral improvement. Evangelicals criticised traditional workhouses and asylums because they provided shelter but paid little attention to the moral well-being of the inmates. The new ideal institutions were industrial schools and reformatories for wayward and neglected children, inebriate asylums for drunkards and lunatic asylums for the insane, where ‘moral therapy’ would make the idle industrious.12
Under the Poor Law of the 17th century criminality was a type of poverty and parishes were required to provide houses of correction for criminals. Few parishes had the means to provide such houses and by the 18th century the aim of law enforcement and punishment was to deter the poor from committing crimes. Deterrence involved the selection of only a few law-breakers and their subjection to public punishment. The focus of punishment was the criminal’s body. Whippings, brandings and hangings were the public spectacles calculated to instil horror, fear and presumably obedience in the general populace (the population of potential criminals). In this framework there was little need for a police force and fears that such a force might turn against the propertied classes reinforced the deterrence principle of law enforcement. But growing fears about urban unrest and increasing crime led to calls for improved police forces, the protection of property and harsher penalties for offenders.13
During the 18th century the number of capital offences rose from 50 to over 200. This dramatic escalation in the severity of criminal jurisdiction was known as the ‘Bloody Code’. The enforcement of the code, however, suggests a more complex picture than one of ruthless repression. More people were executed in the 17th than the 18th century and by the early 19th century, although convictions for capital offences rose, executions continued to decline.14 Despite the increasing severity of the code its enforcement seemed to be more lenient. Some magistrates were inclined to show mercy and deliver a stern moral lecture rather than pass sentence. Others convicted offenders on lesser charges or commuted the capital sentence to one of transportation. The number of people subject to the rule of law was small.
The absence of systematic statistical collections hampers investigation of crime rates, but in the early 19th century the first comprehensive figures on commitments to trial for indictable offences demonstrate that a rapid escalation in the crime rate only began in the early 19th century. In 1805 there were 4605 committals to trial and by 1845 this figure had risen to 24 303, a small figure by today’s standards. Contemporaries feared they were in the midst of a crime wave but recent investigations have suggested that these increases reflect the rationalisation of criminal law to reduce the number of capital offences, greater concern on the part of magistrates to implement the law, the emergence of centralised police forces and the escalation in private prosecutions. It was not until the early 19th century that the focus of criminal jurisdiction shifted from deterrence to the regular policing and prosecution of criminals and the construction of a rising crime rate fanned official and popular fears about a dangerous criminal class.15
The deterrence model of punishment also began to be challenged in the second half of the 18th century. A leading critic was the utilitarian philosopher Jeremy Bentham. He believed that the legal code needed to be reformed to ensure that a graduated scale of sentences tailored punishment to fit the seriousness of the crime. In tandem with this proposal was one for a new system of punishment. Its focus was not the body but the mind of the offender. Bentham’s scheme, the Panopticon, involved confinement in a new type of prison where the inmates would receive religious and moral instruction, isolated from their fellows and observed by warders for signs of moral improvement. Similar ideas were advocated by evangelical reformer John Howard whose 1777 work, The State of the Prisons, was an indictment of the state of gaols and a plea for a new reformative regime of discipline, labour and instruction. The evangelical and utilitarian schemes focused on criminality as a state of moral corruption, similar to other types of moral infirmity, and amenable to reform within the new institutional environment of the penitentiary.16
Conflict between the advocates of deterrence and the supporters of the penitentiary heightened with the revolt in the American colonies in 1776. The colonies refused to accept transported convicts. Accommodation in the hulks was seen as a temporary measure and new schemes for dealing with convicts were canvassed. It was in this context that Bentham developed his scheme for the Panopticon. This is a well-known story. The advocates of transportation and deterrence held sway and the colony of New South Wales was established. The critics of transportation, however, had an important and far-reaching influence in constructing new understandings of crime. These new meanings paralleled those given to poverty. Increasingly the able-bodied urban poor, the inhabitants of the city rookeries and criminals merged into a single category—the dangerous class—bred in an environment of moral corruption. The poor were no longer a natural part of the social order but a group to be disciplined and reformed.17
The convicts transported to the Australian colonies between 1788 and 1868 have been seen as the victims of industrialisation, but for many contemporary middle-class commentators there was little doubt that the convicts were from the dregs of society. The comments of magistrate Patrick Colquhoun, in his 1795 pamphlet Treatise on the Police of the Metropolis, are typical: It is in these receptacles (public-houses) that Thieves and Robbers of every description hold their orgies and concert and mature their plans of depredation of the peaceful subject’.18
The important investigations of Clark, Robson and Shaw have revealed that the majority of convicts were sentenced at urban courts, were usually single, aged between 20 and 45, commonly convicted of theft and the majority were convicted more than once. On this evidence they concluded that the convicts were professional criminals of the type described by Colquhoun. More recent studies, however, have complicated this picture. Although many of the early convicts were serious offenders, the majority transported to Australia came after 1820 and of these half were first offenders, and on average they were more literate and healthy than the general British working class. Moreover many were skilled workers. Far from being the dregs of society, the convicts may have been more skilled and better educated than the average British working-class person. Although they were usually convicted of larcency this was more often a casual workplace theft than a premeditated act of a desperate ‘Fagin’ surviving in the twilight world of drunkards, thieves and prostitutes. These historians question the existence of a professional criminal class, except in the minds of anxious reformers, magistrates and historians. By their account convicts were workers who stole.19
The problem in all these accounts is the attempt to classify the convicts as a single group. The convicts who arrived before 1820 were more likely to be serious offenders than the majority that came later, but even accounting for these differences there were clearly many convicts who by desire or force of circumstance made a living from thieving and prostitution. Equally there were many others who in hard times turned to theft to supplement inadequate or intermittent wages. These distinctions, however, were lost on contemporaries, who viewed the convicts through the moral lens of middle-class opinion. Nonetheless, their views shaped the experiences of the convicts in the colonies and the provisions made for the colonial poor.
A thousand people arrived on the First Fleet, bringing with them a culture attuned to producing and controlling poverty. By 1800 the colony’s European population was 5000, located in Sydney, Rouse Hill and Norfolk Island. By 1810 there were 10454 Europeans on the mainland and 1321 in Van Diemen’s Land. Only a third were convicts. Around Sydney there were 95 637 acres under cultivation to feed this population.20 Settlement was sparse, scattered and agriculturally based. The British government and their representatives, the colonial governors, did not recognise any Aboriginal entitlement to the land. In British eyes the continent was terra nullius (no person’s land), paving the way for unrestricted occupation and exploitation of resources.21
The first five years of European occupation have been called ‘the hungry years’.22 The story is a familiar one. Crops failed, seeds rotted in the ground or were destroyed by weevil, and the drought in late 1790 and early 1791 made conditions worse. Provisions were rationed but supply ships failed to arrive and the colonists, ignorant of the bountiful natural resources available, barely survived. Scurvy and other dietary diseases were chronic. The convicts were caught in a ‘vicious cycle’. There was not enough food and, as a consequence, they were too weak to work to produce enough food. Some convicts robbed their fellows to obtain sustenance. Governor Phillip’s response to this crisis was to disperse the burden. In 1790 the already reduced ration was cut again and officials were forced to accept the ration received by convict men, while women and children received only two thirds of the male allowance. This did not please officers who believed they were entitled to better rations than convicts, but Phillip realised that reducing food for convicts even further to accommodate the officers’ complaints ran the risk of starving the only labour force.
After the departure of Governor Phillip there was a shift towards private agriculture. Convicts were assigned to landowners who were required to maintain them. This was one means of reducing the call on government stores, a policy encouraged by the British government, concerned at the rising cost of administration. Another means was to grant land to emancipist convicts to encourage independence and self-sufficiency.23 By 1810 only a third of Sydney’s population were still clothed and fed at the crown’s expense.24 But the increasing number of emancipists and free immigrants not supported by the government were dependent on the seasons and their own skills to survive and prosper. Not all were successful.
By 1800 the economy of the colony was on a firmer footing. Productive farms were established near the Parramatta and Hawkesbury Rivers. Natural disasters, however, still undermined the colonial economy. Severe droughts in 1803 and 1809 reduced crop yields and threatened the livelihood of farmers. From 1813 to 1815 another drought reduced the wheat yield by two-thirds.25 Other hazards were common. In 1806 crops in some districts were destroyed by ‘flymoth, blight, smut and rust’.26 Early governors attempted to ease the burden of farmers and encourage agriculture by controlling the market. Damaged and weevilled crops were bought by the government stores which paid adequate prices to maintain farmers and stimulate production.
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