scholarly journals TRANSPORTED TO BOTANY BAY: IMAGINING AUSTRALIA IN NINETEENTH-CENTURY CONVICT BROADSIDES

2015 ◽  
Vol 43 (2) ◽  
pp. 235-259
Author(s):  
Dorice Williams Elliott
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Community Service ◽  
Word Of Mouth ◽  
New South ◽  
Men And Women ◽  
Working Classes ◽  
South Wales ◽  
British Colonies ◽  
Convicted Felons

The speaker of this ballad(circa 1828) laments the fact that, though he was born of “honest parents,” he became “a roving blade” and has been convicted of an unspecified crime for which he has been sentenced to “Botany Bay,” a popular name for Australia. Although he addresses his audience as “young men of learning,” the rest of the ballad implies that he, as is conventional in the broadside form, is a working-class apprentice gone astray. Like this fictional speaker, approximately 160,000 men and women convicted of crimes ranging from poaching hares to murder – but mostly theft – were transported to one of the new British colonies in Australia between the years 1787 and 1867. Minor crimes such as shoplifting, which today would merit some community service and a fine, yielded a sentence of seven years, while other felons were sentenced for fourteen years to life for more serious crimes. While non-fictional accounts of the young colony of New South Wales were published in Britain almost as soon as the First Fleet arrived there in 1788, these were written by people with at least a middle-class education, whereas the vast majority of the convicted felons who were transported came from the working classes. Since books and newspapers were expensive and the level of literacy among working-class people varied considerably, few of them would have had access to such accounts of the new colonies. Several descriptions, mostly borrowed from the writings of the officers who accompanied the First Fleet, were published in cheap chapbook form, while occasional letters from convicts to their families were printed and distributed, and of course there were unpublished letters plus word-of-mouth reports from convicts or soldiers who did return. But none of these were broadly disseminated among working-class people.

Never Happier in Her Life

2020 ◽  
pp. 176-192
Author(s):  
Allison Dorothy Fredette
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Working Class ◽  
White Women ◽  
Social Ethic ◽  
Men And Women ◽  
Class Society ◽  
Fertile Ground ◽  
Border Culture ◽  
Poor White

This chapter explores the lives of working-class and poor white women of the border South. Their story reveals the potential of border culture—how it gave a voice and agency to women whose stories could be more easily suppressed in a less fluid community. The border created fertile ground for ideas of mutuality and individualism. While this led many to pursue friendship, love, and partnership in their relationships, elite and middle-class husbands and wives of the border South still often adhered to a social ethic which dictated certain gendered behaviors to men and women. In working-class society, however, these philosophies gave women a greater sense of independence and authority, allowing them to push the boundaries of the household and assert themselves in new ways.

scholarly journals A cross-sectional study of correlates of imprisonment in opioid-dependent men and women in New South Wales, Australia

2015 ◽  
Vol 35 (6) ◽  
pp. 686-692 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sarah Larney ◽  
Elena Cama ◽  
Elliot Nelson ◽  
Briony Larance ◽  
Louisa Degenhardt
Keyword(s):  
New South ◽  
New South Wales ◽  
Cross Sectional Study ◽  
Sectional Study ◽  
Cross Sectional ◽  
Men And Women ◽  
South Wales

National Identity in Australian Literature

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tanya Dalziell
Keyword(s):  
White Women ◽  
New South ◽  
South Australia ◽  
Conscious Awareness ◽  
Special Role ◽  
South Wales ◽  
Indigenous Knowledge Systems ◽  
New Nation ◽  
The 19Th Century ◽  
British Colonies

On January 1, 1901, Australia became a nation; six British colonies—New South Wales, Victoria, South Australia, Queensland, Western Australia, and Tasmania—joined to form the Commonwealth of Australia. At the time of Federation, debates raged over who or what constituted a new national type; the forms best suited to convey the values these figures represented; and the proper settings for their stories. These arguments were had not only with aesthetic interests in mind but with a conscious awareness, or conviction, that literature had a special role to play in establishing what was (thought to be) unique about this new nation. Alliances between literature and the Australian nation have been observed, perpetuated, and contested since at least the last decades of the 19th century, and the result has been multiple imaginings of Australia with many conflicting ideas and interests at play. From the notion that Australia, as a “new nation,” might present white women with the opportunity to shed oppressive gender identities to indigenous knowledge systems questioning the very idea and authority of the nation, literary imaginings of Australia speak to national myths and political interventions alike.

Class in the Millennium Memory Bank, 1998–2000

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Florence Sutcliffe-Braithwaite
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Social Mobility ◽  
Upper Class ◽  
Memory Bank ◽  
Men And Women ◽  
Middle Group ◽  
Upward Social Mobility ◽  
Post War ◽  
Sociological Studies

This chapter examines discourses of class in interviews for the Millennium Memory Bank, at the end of the 1990s. It finds similar themes to those traced in earlier chapters: ordinariness, authenticity, and ambivalence were prominent in interviewees’ testimonies—working-class, middle-class, and even upper-class. Many thought the idea of ‘classlessness’, as espoused by John Major, was attractive; none thought he had achieved this goal, but many did think class divides had declined in the post-war period, and that an ‘ordinary’ middle group was now the largest in society. This chapter also examines narratives of upward social mobility in the 1990s, suggesting that the range of important sociological studies of the ‘hidden injuries’ and cultural facets of class that appeared in that decade were shaped by the experiences of upwardly mobile men and women who knew about the dislocations of moving class because they themselves had done it.

VICTORIANS LIVE: AUSTRALIA'S VICTORIAN VESTIGES

2006 ◽  
Vol 34 (1) ◽  
pp. 342-346
Author(s):  
Margaret Harris
Keyword(s):  
New South ◽  
New South Wales ◽  
Moreton Bay ◽  
South Wales ◽  
British Colonies

ON 1 JANUARY 1901, at the beginning of a new century, the Commonwealth of Australia was proclaimed a political entity by the federation of six separate British colonies. Queen Victoria's formal assent to the necessary legislation of the Westminster Parliament was one of her last official acts; she died on 22 January. For all the tyranny of 20,000 kilometres distance, the impress of the monarch on her far-flung colony was evident. Two of the states of the Commonwealth, Victoria and Queensland, had been named for her. When the Port Phillip settlement separated from New South Wales in 1851, it became Victoria; in 1859, when the Moreton Bay settlement also hived off, its first governor announced “a fact which I know you will all hear with delight–Queensland, the name selected for this new Colony, was entirely the happy thought and inspiration of Her Majesty herself!” (Cilento and Lack 161)

A Survey of Publicly Funded aged Psychiatry Services in Australia and New Zealand

2006 ◽  
Vol 40 (4) ◽  
pp. 368-373 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel O'connor ◽  
Pamela Melding
Keyword(s):  
Mental Health ◽  
New Zealand ◽  
Word Of Mouth ◽  
New South ◽  
Community Outreach ◽  
Publicly Funded ◽  
Old People ◽  
Younger Adults ◽  
South Wales ◽  
Australian State

Objective: To map the size and distribution of publicly funded aged psychiatry (psychogeriatric) services in Australia and New Zealand in 2003. Method: Services were tracked exhaustively through personal, professional and academic contacts, electronic searches and word-of-mouth. Directors or managers of services were asked to complete a brief questionnaire concerning their locality, services, staff profile and patient contacts. Results: Services varied widely with respect to their numbers, size and community outreach. Victoria was the only Australian state to provide specialist, multidisciplinary aged psychiatry teams with community, acute inpatient and residential arms in all its major cities. New South Wales, the state with the largest aged population, performed relatively poorly on most indicators. New Zealand performed relatively well despite its small size and widely dispersed population. Conclusions: Publicly funded aged mental health services are effective and reach frail, multiply disabled old people who cannot access private psychiatrists and are often overlooked by services for younger adults. At the time of our survey, such services were distributed in Australia in a highly inequitable fashion.

Bodies, Sexuality and the “Modernization” of the British Working Classes, 1920s to 1960s

2006 ◽  
Vol 69 (1) ◽  
pp. 104-122 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephen Brooke
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Full Employment ◽  
Sexual Pleasure ◽  
Postwar Period ◽  
Class Identity ◽  
Working Classes ◽  
Class Society ◽  
Female Bodies ◽  
Working Class Women

A neglected aspect of the perceived “embourgeoisement” of the British working-classes in the 1950s was the representation of a blurring of class difference around questions of sexuality. In different ways, female bodies and sexuality in the postwar period became a means of talking about changing class identity and the modernization of society. In the 1920s and 1930s, the working-class body and working-class sexuality served as counterpoints to largely middle-class ideas of modern femininity and sexuality. Working-class women's inability to control their reproduction was portrayed as one cause of the deprivation experienced by the working classes. In the fifties, by contrast, working-class bodies and sexuality had become signifiers of the modernization of British class society. Working-class women were perceived as being able to control the size of their families. Such control was, with full employment and better housing, a mark of a modern, affluent working class. At the same time, working-class marriage was represented as increasingly incorporating notions of companionability and sexual pleasure previously only seen in middle-class life. “Embourgeoisement” in postwar Britain was thus represented as having a sexual aspect.

From Whips to Wages

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jennie Jeppesen
Keyword(s):  
New South ◽  
Dynamic Change ◽  
New South Wales ◽  
Work Hours ◽  
Living Standards ◽  
Work Patterns ◽  
Working Lives ◽  
South Wales ◽  
British Colonies

One might perhaps not expect to find many similarities between labor in Virginia 1660-1750 and in New South Wales 1800-1840. However, there was a crucial unfree white labor stream that fed both British colonies in these two periods: convicts. At first glance, the convicts’ working lives look similar—Virginian convicts were held by a master, often on a plantation, and were working for the master’s profit, while New South Wales convicts were assigned to a master, often on a farm, and worked for the master’s profit. However, this is where the similarities end. The control over the convicts by the New South Wales government meant that there were greater rules and regulations over convict living standards, work hours, usage, and punishment. None of these controls existed for Virginian convicts, who were wholly controlled by their masters. As a result of this difference in control, we see a dynamic change in the method used to motivate effective labor from the convict population. While masters of Virginian convicts relied on coercion and punishment to force work patterns, employers in New South Wales instead relied on incentives and rewards. This chapter explores the impacts on method of control, and how it influenced the shift from coercive-driven labor to incentive-driven labor.

scholarly journals Administration and Finance of the Reform League, 1865–1867

1965 ◽  
Vol 10 (3) ◽  
pp. 385-409 ◽  
Author(s):  
Aldon D. Bell
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Trade Unions ◽  
Political Awareness ◽  
Middle Classes ◽  
Working Classes ◽  
National League

In the first months of 1865 artisan and middle class Reformers in London established the Reform League with the publicly stated political goals of “manhood suffrage and the ballot”. Reflecting a new political awareness among artisan workingmen as well as a realization that workingmen and sympathetic bourgeois Reformers might achieve more when agitating together, the League resulted from experiences and associations in several recent working class and bourgeois campaigns, concerns, and agitations. London artisans, for instance, had been involved in trade unions (both amalgamated and local), the London Trades Council, Trades Union Manhood Suffrage and Vote by Ballot Association, Workingmen's Garibaldi Committee, Universal League for the Improvement of the Working Classes, and International Working Men's Association (“First International”). They also joined organizations and campaigns more closely associated with the middle classes: temperance groups, Liberation Society, National League for Polish Independence, Emancipation Society, and Ballot Society. Here the artisans met bourgeois Reformers who helped establish and finance the Reform League.

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