Convicts Bloods Dominant in Modern Australia!

             (John Harland’s post from the QUORA on 17 February 2020.)

The so-called 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 wise estimates nearly 50% of all modern Australians have bloods of original convicts from Britain. Just look at my own case. My daughter was born in Sydney but her partner was an English-Aussie descendant from one of the First-Fleet convicts. 

And now, their three sons, my three blond-haired and blue-eyed grandsons (15, 13, and 9) also are the proud direct descendants of that First-Fleet English convict. Strange, isn’t it? My pure Burmese bloods mingling with English convict bloods in my grandsons.)