For over 150 years from the early eighteenth century, convict transportation was a primary method of punishing serious crime in Britain and Ireland. Convicts were first sent to the colonies in North America and the Caribbean and then to three newly established Australian colonies on the other side of the world. Conditions were very different between the two locations, yet the fundamental law of transportation remained the same for decades after the process began in Australia.
When it was established in 1788, New South Wales became the most remote, and most peculiar, of the British empire's overseas colonies. The founding colony of what would eventually become Australia, it was established as a penal colony, a place to send the unwanted criminals of Britain and Ireland. Britain lost more than the majority of its North American possessions in the late eighteenth century. It also lost its principal repository for unwanted felons. New South Wales filled the gap.
The penal colony of New South Wales was founded in January, 1788, with a population of convicts, military people, and a few civil officers. The settlement displaced one of the oldest cultures on earth, as English law failed to recognize that the Aborigines had any right to the land they had occupied for 40,000 years. On their first night ashore the women convicts were greeted by mass debauchery that deserved to be recorded by Hogarth, all under a heavy thunderstorm.
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