The Tin Ticket_ The Heroic Journey of Australia's Convict Women - Deborah J. Swiss [126]
Yet transportation didn’t end for humanitarian reasons. Instead, the British government phased it out after slave labor had served its purpose and free laborers began to fear competition for their jobs. Bitter prejudice about the deep imprint of the convict stain on proper society fueled a rising sentiment to erase the true history of Van Diemen’s Land. The clergy, in particular, incited hysteria about homosexuality among male convicts and heightened the urgency to stop the influx of those they considered breeders of vice.
Both the press and the pulpit called for prayer as a means to rescue the colony “from ruin and degradation.”42 In its 1849 Christmas edition, the Colonial Times appealed to divine intervention to accomplish what a petition to Queen Victoria, signed by six thousand Hobartians, could not:
We must petition the throne of Almighty God and pray that the curse be removed; and should all fail, then we must shake off the dust of our feet against our oppressors and depart to place our families where they can form honest associations and earn honest bread.43
The Anti-Transportation League of Van Diemen’s Land, established by Reverend John West in 1849, led to the formation of the Australasian Anti-Transportation League on the mainland. The gold rush in the Colony of Victoria offered further reason to end forced migration, based on concern that people in Great Britain would commit crimes as a way to reach a continent paved in riches.
Pressure from free settlers in Van Diemen’s Land escalated when they threatened to abandon a colony blighted by the “scum and dregs of the offscourings of mankind,” as described by William Ullathorne, a Catholic priest who had served in Australia and a leading critic of transportation. 44 Rejecting the possibility of reform and redemption for young mothers like Janet Houston and Agnes McMillan, newspapers on both sides of the world declared: “It is impossible to import the criminal without importing crime.”45 The Edinburgh Review, called “the recognized manifesto of the British government” by the Colonial Times, asked:
On what grounds . . . does England assume the singular privilege of establishing colonies to be deluged and drowned with the flood of her own wickedness? What right has any country to turn even a wilderness into a school of sin, to create, even at the antipodes, huge nurseries of depravity, to pollute a young nation from its very birth, and to saturate with its own corruption the sources whence countless generations are to spring?46
The Irish Exile and Freedom’s Advocate, an 1850 emancipist newspaper published in Hobart Town, disputed such claims by purporting that families who lived alongside convicts for twenty years had suffered no “moral contamination.”47 Hoping to encourage acceptance with the help of Christian compassion, emancipists formed the “Society of the Propagation of the Charities, etc., of the Gospels.” As it celebrated the strength in their numbers, a Society publication denounced the seeds of bigotry that polluted the pristine island they now called home:
“ They” came to make their fortunes and now “They” rail at you who “They” forced to come. “You” outnumber “Them” by many thousands. . . . Have you not made the colony what it is? Has not your sweat, in so few years, made this land . . . ? Have not your labors given these wandering adventurers at least the position of settled abodes . . . ?48
As tension escalated between the free settlers and the freed convicts, antitransportation advocates displayed their vitriol and solidarity by pinning blue rosettes on their well-pressed lapels, flooding the newspapers with lengthy editorials, and hosting public forums about how to oust the convict population. Their quest for social power rested precariously on the perceived horrors of a classless society in Van Diemen’s Land. John Morgan, the head of the Hobart Town Trades Union, penned an editorial outlining his concerns about emancipist “tyranny”:
Presently, we shall have here, not a war of races and colours, but of castes and classes.