Convicts to Australia: How Britain's Exiled Thieves Built a Nation

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Between 1784 and 1868, Britain shipped roughly 160,000 men, women, and children to penal colonies in Australia, and about four million Australians now trace their ancestry to them. This episode begins in the crowded, gin-soaked cities of 18th century England, where the Bloody Code made 222 crimes punishable by death, including stealing a rabbit. Juries refused to convict, jails overflowed into rotting prison hulks on the Thames, and the American Revolution closed the old outlet across the Atlantic.

The First Fleet of 11 ships left Portsmouth in May 1787 with about 775 convicts and reached Botany Bay in January 1788, only to find sandy soil and no reliable fresh water. Starvation followed at Sydney Cove. The episode moves through the horror of the Second Fleet, the ticket of leave that turned prisoners into wage earners and landowners, the freezing timber camps of Macquarie Harbour, and the silent cells of Port Arthur, before free colonists organized to end transportation altogether.

• The Second Fleet was contracted to slave trading firms paid per convict embarked, not per convict delivered alive, so they packed the ships and withheld rations.
• At Port Arthur's separate prison, men spent 23 hours a day in soundproof cells and wore cloth masks at exercise. An asylum was built next door.
• When Governor Richard Bourke capped floggings at 50 lashes in the 1830s, landowners protested that discipline and the economy would collapse.
• Roughly 80 percent of convicts were petty thieves, about one in seven were women, and thousands were political prisoners such as Irish nationalists, Chartists, and the Tolpuddle Martyrs.
• Samuel Speed, who burned a haystack in 1863 to get a jail cell and a meal, was transported in 1866 and died in Perth in 1938, believed to be the last surviving convict.