Vice in a vicious society : crime and the community in mid-nineteenth century New South Wales

Abstract

As a receptacle for British convicts, New South Wales was popularly portrayed as a 'vicious' society. Crime and vice were considered the inevitable concomitants of a transported 'criminal class' and convict 'contamination'. The following study, focussing on the mid-nineteenth century, argues that the impact of convictism on colonial crime and mores was greatly exaggerated. Official criminal statistics, reportage in the press, as well as other contemporary evidence, all present in some ways a distorted view of crime. Crime was not simply grafted on to the colony, but reflected various concerns and interests, the conditions of a relatively affluent frontier community, and perhaps most importantly, an intense concern with respectability. The community's transformation from a penal colony was marked not only by a decreasing proportion of convicts in the population, but a reorientation in standards of public conduct, new fears concerning public order, and an obsessional interest in repudiating the convict stain.