Poor Laws: A Historiography of Vagrancy in Australia

Abstract

The study of vagrancy forms part of a larger investigation into the social origins of law, the structures of inequality and the gendered and racially discriminatory aspects of societies. A full analysis of vagrancy in Australia must necessarily begin with the inherited traditions of its colonial master, its convict origins and the defensive nature of European settlement. While the former provided the moral and legal framework, the latter played a longer and more influential role in establishing the interventionist nature of government in Australia. Despite sharing significant commonalities with the British, Australia's vagrancy laws differed in their application in important ways. As with other colonial regimes, most notably the United States and South Africa, vagrancy laws provided authorities with broad powers, which enabled them to punish vice and to impose social order on the structures of inequality in class, race and gender.The image of the vagrant 1 is both place bound and universal. In Australia, the swagman, captured in the poem turned song Waltzing Matilda, lingers in the popular imagination, with his 'apotheosis' described in Russel Ward's The Australian Legend. 2 While 20th century vagrants would borrow heavily from the language and culture of the North American hobo, his 19th century counterpart was a bushman, beloved in abstract and romanticised in print. But as with other places, the personification of the vagrant-as-swagman contradicts the realities of Australian society: increasingly urbanised and just as prone to moral panics about the degenerate and criminal class as elsewhere. As this suggests, the popular image of the vagrant and the laws of vagrancy are not synonymous, though their coexistence reveals something of the propagation of myths about personal liberty despite the limits of freedom.Laws against vagrancy can be found in almost all states that rely on the buying and selling of labour. Australia's vagrancy laws were, like other former British colonies, inherited and adapted to suit local conditions. 3 William Chambliss, the pre-eminent scholar of vagrancy laws, has noted their earliest iteration, directed at free labour, in England in 1349. In Caleb Foote's words, these laws became a 'substitute for serfdom', 4 designed to provide labour for landowners 'at a price he could afford to pay'. 5 As has been described elsewhere, these laws prohibited the giving of alms to those who could work, while later amendments circumscribed people's movements by criminalising those leaving towns during harvest times. 6 While work lay at the heart of vagrancy laws, it was the fear of idle hands and the mobility of the mob that gave these laws their moral force. In this, distinctions were made between the 'settled' and the 'vagrant' poor. 7 Despite debate as to the extent to which the vagrancy laws were enforced over the subsequent 200 years, there is consensus that by the mid-16th century they were being used to construct a 'social order of England'. 8 By the early 19th century, numerous changes had b...

The Vagrancy Concept, Border Control, and Legal Architectures of Human In/Security

“…For centuries, anti‐vagrancy regulation and its “heavily encoded, culturally laden, and morally charged category of ‘vagrant’” (Hitchcock 2012:35) shaped public thinking around homelessness by presenting it as anathema to modem standards for respectable, productive, and highly‐valued lives and spaces (Shapira 2018). Such laws were applied as a “criminal making device” (Kimber 2013:544) and “catch‐all detention rationale” (Agee 2018:1659) targeting persons deemed threats for their supposedly transgressive or “wayward interiority” (Nicolazzo 2014:339) measured against raced, gendered, ableist, and classed norms for conduct and appearance (Althammer 2018; Coleborne 2020; Illuzzi 2010). Through the mid‐20 th century, vagrancy laws were aggressively used to control migration, encourage labour, and otherwise produce appearances of social order (Goluboff 2018; Hitchcock 2012; Kimber 2013; White 2004).…”

“…Such laws were applied as a “criminal making device” (Kimber 2013:544) and “catch‐all detention rationale” (Agee 2018:1659) targeting persons deemed threats for their supposedly transgressive or “wayward interiority” (Nicolazzo 2014:339) measured against raced, gendered, ableist, and classed norms for conduct and appearance (Althammer 2018; Coleborne 2020; Illuzzi 2010). Through the mid‐20 th century, vagrancy laws were aggressively used to control migration, encourage labour, and otherwise produce appearances of social order (Goluboff 2018; Hitchcock 2012; Kimber 2013; White 2004). As vagrancy laws fell out of favour, Rosenheim (1966) noted that a “vagrancy concept” nonetheless thrived in welfare systems that similarly meted out punishment for ostensibly vagrant‐like qualities (see also Garland 1981).…”

Affective technologies of welfare deterrence in Australia and the United Kingdom

“…O'Connell (2009) points to the Royal Commission into the Poor Laws as foundational to 'policies and knowledge categories about deserving and non-deserving populations that continue to thrive today', and that is 'foundational to the history of social policy, political economy, and state formation ' (p. 171). Given this foundational nature, we will briefly outline the New Poor Law to give context, while at the same time considering the longer colonial history and continued coloniality of welfare deterrence, as well as examples of deterrence in British parliamentary acts that predate the New Poor Law, such as those related to vagrancy (see Foote, 1956;Kimber, 2013;Vorspan, 1977).…”

“…The English poor laws were never introduced in the Australian colonies. The colonial government instead promoted private charities to establish and run institutions, including workhouses, which were shaped by deterrence (Kimber, 2013). These included the 'workhouse test' (relief only in exchange for work), the notion of 'less eligibility' (any relief offered to poor destitute people had to be worse than that obtainable through work of the lowest paid), and separation between the deserving and undeserving poor, particularly through the legislation related to vagrancy (Vorspan, 1977).…”

“…Attempts of elimination in settler Australia were not just through killing outright, but also through processes of assimilation where First Nations people were compelled to take on settler behaviours and norms (Wolfe, 2006). Vagrancy laws coalesced with the assimilation process as a deterrent and were used to label and criminalize First Nations people who did not exhibit settler behaviour (Kimber, 2013), operating in part through the affective generation of both fear and shame (Shaw, 1992).…”