Whatever the aims of the British government may have been, the immediate human outcome of the effort was, so far as Australia's settlement was concerned, summed up for a long period in one word: convicts. Convicts made up for most of the first 60 years of Australian history, the dominant flow of human beings, the primary increment to the population and the main source of labour. (Butlin 1985c, p. 1) The contours of Australian colonial economic development are well established (McLean 2013; Butlin 1986b, 1993, 1994; Madsen, this volume). This chapter focuses on the contribution made to economic growth by British penal transportation. In one sense everything that happened in early European Australia was due to penal transportation because without it the colonies would not have been formed. Nevertheless, at a less general level it is possible to explore the nature of the system that brought over 163000 people to Australia, who they were and how they built an economy which surprised their contemporaries (Goodwin 1974, p. 14). The chapter commences with the development of penal policy before examining convicts as criminals, then as coerced workers. Coerced labour has often been associated with high land-to-labour ratios in areas of European settlement and in this respect Australia appears to have been no exception (Nicholas & Shergold 1988d; Meredith 2013). We then examine the role of convicts in creating a free labour force. We conclude by assessing the importance of penal transportation for colonial economic growth and the legacy white Australia inherited from its convict origins.
