What [the convicts] bequeathed to Australian character, or to our sense of ourselves as a nation, is much more debatable than the economic results of their labor. Probably, it was not what Australians like to think – the truculuent independence on which, with shaky justifications, we are apt to pride ourselves.
To see the opposite effects of the System on those who lied it out, one may consider Tasmania, which stagnated. Its population had crept from 69, 000 in 1851 to 102, 000 in 1871, not even doubling in twenty years. Visitors at the end of the 1860s saw apathy and depression everywhere: silent streets, building at a standstill, farmers sinking into rural solipsism, empty docks, a static populace heavy with old people and children but deserted by the young and energetic, who ahd gone across Bass Strait. The flood of immigrants to Victoria, Queensland and New South Wales passed Tasmania by. The island was decaying, like the Southern slave states of America after Abolition….
So Tasmania is a problem for those who would like to believe that most Austrlian bush virtues – intransigence, sticking to your 'mate', distrust of judge, trap and nob, unpolished self-reliance, democratic and brusquely dissenting tempter – were created by the convict system. If this were so, one would naturally expect these traits to be vividly emblazoned one the social fabric of Tasmania, the colony with the highest density of convicts and their descendants. But they were not. Workers were less sure of themselves as a class there than in New South Wales, because they were selling their labor in a buyer's market… Moreover, Tasmania had little sense of the frontier and hence no context in which the 'bush ethos' however sentimentalized, could flourish. It could not expand, and this marked its people. It remained a close-settled, leaf-green microcosm, where the roving bush-worker, beholden to no squatter and picking up his check where he wandered, was a complete anomaly. Nomads made respectable Tasmanians wince; they thought of eccaped probation gangers.
What convictry left to the island, then, was the very opposite of its supposed legacy in New South Wales: a malleable and passive working class, paternalistic institutions, a tame press and colonized Anglophile values. The idea that rebels are the main product of oppression is a consoling fiction. In any penal society the rebel is always the exception and never the rule. Tasmania was a factory, a 'mill for grinding rogues honest,' which turned out an unleavened human mass, a submissive lumpenproletariat of men and women, cudgelled into humility by repetitive task-work and the all-pervasive threat of corporeal punishment. They had learned to eat out of the hand of Authority, because Authority had always fed them. They illustrated the melancholy truth of Vauvenargue's maxim: 'Servitude debases men to the point where they end up liking it.'
The Fatal Shore by Robert Hughes, p. 580-590 and 594.
