(John Harland’s post from the QUORA on 17 February 2020.)
The now-celebrated First Fleet of eleven English convict ships brought convicts, marines, and their families from Britain to Australia, arriving in January 1788. The primary purpose was to establish a penal colony to relieve overcrowded prisons in Britain. The fleet carried between 750 and 780 convicts, and their arrival in Sydney Cove marked the beginning of European colonization and the transportation of convicts to Australia, which lasted until 1868.
“Has the gene pool in Australia truly been affected
by the fact that a certain number of convicts were sent there as settlers?” It
had a strongly positive effect. The people who were sent represented a far
broader genetic range than the relatively inbred gentry of Britain. They were
also people whose ancestors had faced more-rigorous selection pressure than
those living in relative luxury.
Their designation as “convicts” resulted from circumstances. Many were refugees in their own country, having been thrown off the land of their ancestors through the Enclosure of Lands, where the local lord decided that broad-acre agriculture earned him more than having smallholders each farming part of the land.
The crowding of those refugees into the cities,
because there was no other place most could go, meant high levels of
unemployment and disadvantage. The landholders, who alone could vote, used
Parliament to impose stringent laws that made large numbers of people felons,
subject to transportation.
It is helpful to realise that many, particularly Irish and Scottish, were sent without trial. In reality they were exiles, not convicts because they had not been convicted of anything. However they were included in numbers of convicts.
All told, we got some pretty good people out of it. Far better than so many of the inbred, decadent and self-righteous folk who saw themselves as the “quality” and comprised a proportion of the emigrants to the 13 colonies of North America.
(Blogger’s Notes: According to some liberal estimates nearly 50% of all modern Australians have bloods of original convicts from Britain. Seems overly exaggerated for modern Australia half-filled with foreign born immigrants with non-English ethnic backgrounds from all over the world. But I do honestly believe that 50% figure just by looking at my own little family.
We immigrated here in 1988 and My only daughter was born in Sydney, now a 34-years-old assistant-nurse-cum-social worker, and her partner since she was a teenager was an English-Aussie direct-descendant from one of the First-Fleet convicts.
And now, their three sons, my three blonde-haired, blue-eyed, and white-skinned grandsons (14, 12, and 8) also are the proud direct descendants of that First-Fleet English convict, their paternal English great ------ great grandpa. Nearly 300 years gap. Strange, isn’t it? My pure Burmese warrior bloods mingling with English convict bloods in my grandsons. And my Burmese grandfathers and my father had fought against the English all their lives, for what?
Especially My late father who joined the invading Japanese Army voluntarily at the young age of 16 during WW2 just to fight the hated English. He would definitely be turning in his grave now if he found out his three great-grand sons are happily half-English.)
