What were the crimes of transported convicts?

Convicts transported to Australia were convicted of a wide range of offences under English (and later Irish and Scottish) law, mostly property crimes rather than violent crimes. Of the about 162,000 convicts transported to Australia between 1788 and 1868, the great majority were sentenced for theft, burglary, larceny, and similar property offences, with smaller numbers for violent crimes, political offences, and military offences.

Theft was the dominant offence. The Bloody Code of eighteenth-century England punished hundreds of property offences with death, with transportation often substituted as a mercy. Many First Fleet and early convicts had stolen small amounts: a loaf of bread, a few yards of cloth, a handkerchief, a lamb. Punishment-by-transportation was typically seven years for minor theft, 14 years for more serious property crime, and life for the most serious offences. Female convicts were more often sentenced for shoplifting, receiving stolen goods, prostitution, and minor property offences.

Political offences also led to transportation. The Tolpuddle Martyrs (six English farm labourers who formed an early trade union in 1834) were sentenced to seven years' transportation for swearing illegal oaths. Irish political prisoners after the 1798 Rebellion, the Young Ireland movement of 1848, and the Fenian uprising of the 1860s were sent to Australia in significant numbers. Canadian rebels involved in the 1837 to 1838 rebellions, Welsh Chartists after the 1839 Newport Rising, and Scottish radicals after various agitations all appeared among the convicts. Convicts from the West Indies, the Cape Colony, India, and other parts of the British Empire added further diversity.

Military offences sent soldiers and sailors to Australia. Desertion, mutiny, and disobedience produced a steady stream of military convicts. The 1801 mutiny on HMS Bounty's nearby Pitcairn-based descendants did not directly produce convicts but the British Navy's discipline system did. Violent offences (murder, manslaughter, rape, assault) were a relatively small share of total transportations because such offences usually attracted the death penalty rather than transportation. About 25 per cent of transported convicts were Irish, about 5 per cent from continental Europe and elsewhere in the empire, and about 70 per cent English, Scottish, or Welsh. The convict heritage now produces intense genealogical research, with the great-great-grandchildren of convicts now widely embracing rather than hiding their convict ancestry as a marker of authentic Australian history.