C
ONVICT
W
ORK
G
ANGS
, 1788–1830
WILLIAMMURRAYROBBINS*
T
he present paper examines the evolution of the management of the labour process within the male convict gang system. The organisation of convicts into discrete and enduring collective work units was a vital and productive part of the colonial economy and of the convict labour process generally. In providing a detailed account of the history of management’s adoption of labour process structures and strategies the present paper shows that some of these were determined by changing management objectives while others were the result of covert and/or overt convict resistance. The paper offers evidence of the interaction between the management and the convict, and argues that the origins of Australian industrial relations are to be found amongst our convict workers rather than with the arrival of free labour.INTRODUCTION
The importance of the convicts as Australia’s first settlers has long been recognised (Robson 1965). Less well-appreciated is their importance as Australia’s first working class (Nicholas 1989). It is fair to say that there has been little system-atic analysis of convict work relations or modes of control beyond recognition of the brutality of the system. Little attention has been directed to understanding how convict labour was organised, what mechanisms of control were used at different times and what the convicts’ reactions or responses were to their work and its control. In short, the convict labour process has been neglected or misrepresented. The present paper will focus on male convicts employed in the public gang system; although, it should be noted that a similar, if not more complex, employment relationship was experienced by female convicts (Robbins 2002; Oxley 1996). Doing justice to the female labour process; however, awaits another article.
The concept of the employment relationship is of course problematic. In its most simplistic conception, the employment relationship is defined as a transactionally determined relationship between an employer and employee (Keenoy and Kelly 1998). It arises when an employer pays an employee to per-form work; moreover, this financial arrangement is not an indelibly permanent contract but can be dissolved. Such a definition is, therefore, historically located in a capitalist market economy where traditional rights and obligations have little impact. It is a product of market relations where employer and employee are so-called free agents. Defined in this manner, the employment relationship obviously presents problems for an historical examination of convict labour, and
indeed, for any analysis of work prior to modern industrial capitalism. But, it is argued here, that to see the employment relationship so starkly is to lose sight of the complexity of work relationships in other time periods, or even nations, and certainly to miss the hybrid employment relationship which can be apparent in the transition from traditional to capitalist, market-determined work relations.
The present paper offers an analysis of the convict labour process in order to map the origins of capitalist employment relationships in Australia. The modern employment relationship is not transported from Britain with the convicts, for it is still emergent in Britain in 1788. However, as Pollard (1968), Thompson (1972) and Littler (1979) have so clearly pointed out, traditional employment relationships were at this time already under threat or in tatters. The convicts transported to New South Wales were, in part, a product of such transition. The convict work experience was not a modern employment relationship but nor was it traditional. Indeed, it was not the same as that of a slave (Genovese 1967) and nor was it simply the penal labour system which might today characterise the employment of convicted felons (Lichtenstein 1996; Fox et al.1995).
The level of interaction between convict workers and the managers of convict labour (in the public sector at least) over work organisation, the intensity of work and even its rewards, was much more elaborate than in traditional labour processes (Thompson 1984; Littler 1979). More importantly, the strategies that colonial administrators adopted to assert control of convict labour were complex and sophisticated, considerably more so than Marx would have anticipated and more than those that prevailed in most private British industry at the time (Marx 1974; Pollard 1968). This makes the convict work experience and its management much more significant than they have so far been credited. Work relations under the convict system in New South Wales should be seen as the transitional, non-traditional starting point in the history of the Australian employment relationship.
1979) and this empowered convict workers to a greater degree than generally recognised.
BRIEF LITERATURE REVIEW
This is not a comprehensive or even an exacting shorthand discussion of existing literature. It is simply an attempt to provide a broad overview of the evolution of convict literature and to signal some important cross-roads. Essentially, the neglect of convict labour process has arisen because most historical inquiry into the convicts sent to New South Wales has concentrated on their criminality and has viewed them as poor unfortunates brutalised and exploited (Wood 1922), as shameful degenerates of bad stock (Hancock 1966) or as a lumpen proletariat (McQueen 1971). In the brief passages where Manning Clark (1971) actually viewed them as workers, he described the convicts as ‘an alienated working class...with no spiritual or material interest in the products of its work’. They had to be ‘driven or terrorised into labour’ and ‘physical terror was the one effective restraint’ that management had to control the labour process. Robert Hughes (1988) says much the same thing, only in his more colourful and entertaining style. These accounts ignore entirely the centrality of conflict in the modern or transitional employment relationship over labour effort. Even as late as the 1890s Fredrick Taylor noted ‘the natural instinct and tendency of men . . . to take it easy’ or worse of their ability to ‘systematically and collectively restrict effort’ (Littler 1979). The convicts did, or attempted to do, both.
In addition, the unique origins, purpose and penal nature of colonial New South Wales have also distorted the examination of the convict labour process. The problems of the convicts as bad, lazy workers and the challenges of penal settlement have been viewed as unique and wholly exceptional. However, accounts of the problems of recruiting and motivating an industrial workforce in British factories from the 1750s to the 1830s are very similar to the complaints levelled at the convict workers (Pollard 1968; Fox 1985). A variation of the orthodox view is David Neal’s (1991) argument that the convicts were a slave workforce and so had to be coerced and brutalised in ways quite different to those required for the management of a free workforce. This argument also simplifies the convict experience by ignoring that while the convicts were a coerced workforce they were not legally slaves but possessed more significant rights than workers in any slave society (Select Committee on Transportation 1812; Genovese 1967).
In addition, Atkinson’s protests were based on court records, but employment con-flict may not always or even mostly be taken to such overt levels of recognition. Indeed covert conflict can be no less strategic than the strike. Atkinson’s analysis is important, but its usefulness in employment relations needs to be more care-fully and completely thought through than is generally assumed.
Although John Hirst (1983) largely focused on explaining the character of transportation as a penal response to crime in Britain, he nevertheless recognised that the controls required to establish and administer it could not be explained by penal concerns only. There was, he found, a range of disparate influences shaping the nature of administration and control. The major one was that cham-pioned by Jeremy Bentham, that there were alternative penal policies to transportation, but another influence was the ability of convicts to shape the nature of their regulation. Echoes of convict protest are also to be found in the class analysis offered by Connell and Irving (1980) who saw the nature, incidence and the forms of convict protest as arising largely from the nature of ‘labour relations’ within the convict system. They noted that while government officials and private settlers complained consistently of the poor quality of the convict workers, these complaints were more a reflection of convict resistance to employers rather than their criminal status.
Of course, social historians are not alone in their neglect of the convict. Industrial relations, management and human resource management writers have also overlooked the complexity of the labour process of the convict period. In his otherwise insightful account of the history of Australian labour management Chris Wright (1995) ignores entirely the convict period. No industrial relations textbook includes the convict experience in accounts of the history of employ-ment relations in Australia. Many broad labour histories (Turner 1978; Hutson 1983; Buckley and Wheelwright 1988) have viewed the convicts with little more insight than pity as they waited for the arrival of free workers. An exception to this is the work by Patmore (1991), although his analysis was informed by the ground-breaking analysis of Stephen Nicholas’s team of economic historians (1988) in Convict Workers. Although this work explored the criminality of the convicts in great statistical detail, the general approach gave emphasis to the convicts, both male and female, as a workforce possessing skills, experience and motivations and whose work was organised and structured as a consequence of interaction between management and workers. Criticised by some social historians (Macintyre 1989; Shaw 1990; Davidson 1989) Convict Workershas, nevertheless, added complexity to our understanding of the contribution of convicts to work, control and class. And, once the mask of criminality is laid aside and the mantle of victim removed, how can industrial relations continue to ignore the first Australian workers?
CONVICT LABOUR PROCESS
In Marx’s view, one of the key dimensions of capitalist labour process was the dichotomy between labour power and labour use. Marx argued that when capital-ists engaged labour, this transaction only purchased the worker’s labour power: his/her potential. Owners of the means of production (or their managers) were consequently confronted with the task of extracting actual use from the potential of the labour they bought. That is, labour power needed to be turned into labour effort. This challenge meant that under the capitalist labour process, work had to be organised, labour controlled and motivated in ways that made labour productive. One of the simplest ways this was done in early British capitalism, but not in early New South Wales, was to increase the hours of work (Littler 1982).
It is argued here that, although the state in New South Wales did not pur-chase convict labour power but seized it through criminal conviction (Byrne 1993), this did little to simplify the task of managing convict labour. Criminal conviction essentially only meant that the state acquired convict labour power more cheaply than most (but perhaps not all) private British employers of free labour. That this acquisition was unfair, one-sided or compulsory, in no way diminishes the essential nature of the transaction. In the end, the state, like all employers of labour, still faced the basic problem of extracting labour use from labour power. It is also evident that colonial administrations, until 1822, were highly concerned with labour effort because there was an economic imperative to make convict labour productive. While the state did not directly generate surplus-value from convict labour, the critical importance of government activity in constructing economic and social infrastructure elevated labour effort beyond a normal public sector role. As a consequence, the state had to develop more ‘systematic’ (Littler 1979) control and motivational strategies to extract labour effort from convicts (Robbins 2001). However, the convicts also influenced the nature and effectiveness of the state’s management by a range of counter-measures or strategies of their own. In other words, up until 1822 there was an interaction between convict labour and state capital over labour effort.
PROBLEM OF COERCION
with transforming the convict experience. Darling in particular was determined to make transportation and public labour a punitive exercise (HRA 1, Vol. XIII, Darling to Bathurst, 1 March 1827).
Finally, the question of flogging and other forms of physical punishment also need to be understood within the broader context of British society throughout these years. It was, despite signs of an emerging humanitarianism, fundamentally brutal (Perkin 1971; Evans 1986; Robertson 2000). In 1788, public flogging was still commonplace in British civil society, while it was utterly endemic to the military and naval services (Scott 1996). Indeed, there is strong evidence to indicate that flogging was a more systematic and enduring feature of service in the British navy than it was for convicts transported to New South Wales before 1822 (Bigge 1822; Dening 1994). Admittedly, few private employers had the right to flog their workers, but the basic brutalities of life for ordinary British workers can be found in many other forms (Engels 1969; Hobsbawn 1974). For instance, hours of work for free labour in the British factory system were higher and generally increased faster than those worked by convicts (Nicholas 1989; Rule 1986), while factory work was, until the FactoryActs (Ashton 1972), reliant on the exploitation of child labour in ways that would horrify modern sensibilities (Evans 1986).
Having said this, of course there is no doubt that flogging or the threat of flogging was part of the armoury of labour control in New South Wales. It was a way that managers of convict labour endeavoured to control and coerce convicts to their labours. But, restrictions on its use by all employers of convict labour (both public and private) as well as variations in its use, particularly during Macquarie’s administration, indicates inherent limitations in it as a motivating mechanism. Unlike slave societies, no employer of convicts in New South Wales was able to flog a convict without recourse to the legal system (Report from the Select Committee 1812). Only Magistrates or the Governor could legally order convicts to be flogged and this complicated the use of corporal punishment, allowing, however muted, convicts to defend themselves. It has been suggested that the magisterial system was biased against the convicts because most were employers of labour (Macintyre 1985) but this was not a feature unique to New South Wales. The entire British legal system would have reflected a similar class bias (Rule 1986; Fox 1985; Thompson 1972).
In contrast, there is evidence that flogging was not a wholly terrorising control mechanism. Apparently, some convicts were at times prepared to suffer a flogging to facilitate a change in employer (Bigge 1822). There is also evidence that during Macquarie’s administration, senior administrators understood the limitations associated with flogging or other forms of coercive controls. Flogging damaged scarce labour, while at times, it merely entrenched convict hostility (Hutchinson 1819). Before 1822, flogging and other forms of corporal punish-ment must be seen not as a dominant labour control mechanism, but one of many.
GROWTH AND CONTRACTION OF THE CONVICT GANGS
labour force problems from the moment settlement began. He had insufficient numbers of convicts experienced in or familiar with farming (HRA I, Vol. I, Phillip to Grenville, 1790), no experienced supervisors and a military unwilling to perform this duty (Moore 1987). To make things worse, the colony faced a severe and persistent shortage of food that affected labour productivity because hours of labour had to be significantly reduced (HRA I, Vol. I, Phillip to Nepean, 1792). In addition, the basic technology brought by the First Fleet was found to be deficient and unsuited to local conditions (HRA I, Vol. I, Phillip to Nepean, 1788). It is argued here that the nature of the work demanded by a new settlement to accommodate and feed itself as well as the character of its workforce encouraged work to be organised into gangs or collective parties of labourers.
Although Phillip does not use the term ‘gang’, it is clear from his General Muster of Convicts in mid-1790 that much of the work performed in the early years at Sydney was organised into collective groups. Brick and tile making, trans-porting bricks, unloading ships, road making, timber fetching and gardening were clearly all organised into large or small work groups and engaged 57 per cent of the fit male convict workforce (HRA I, Vol. I, Phillip to Grenville, 1790). Other jobs, such as bricklaying, some carpentry, the sawing of timber and stone masonry also probably involved the cooperative organisation of small groups of workers for at least some of the time.
The first official reference to the term ‘gang’ was made in 1796 by Governor Hunter (1795–1800) when he wrote, ‘We have now a gang of people employed collecting sea-shells’ (HRA I, Vol. I, Hunter to Portland, 1796). This was not an attempt at recreational rehabilitation, rather, its efforts were central to public building. The shells were used as a source of lime, essential for making cement (Gibbons 1981). By the end of the 1790s, the term ‘gang’ was commonly used in reference to the permanent organisation of convicts into work groups. For example, the Agriculture Gang at Parramatta, the Town Gang, the Goal Gang and the Shell Gang were officially identified from 1800 through to 1825 (HRA I, Vols II–XI). Other trades or occupationally distinct activities were also clearly organised into gangs although sometimes not officially designated as such until about 1813 (HRA I, Vol. VII, Enclosure No. 7, 1813). These included most building trades, metalworking trades, road making, boat crews, carting and mining.
Between 1788 and 1830, the size of individual gangs varied between 40 and 60 men, but they commonly consisted of a core of skilled workers supported by a larger number of unskilled convict workers. This meant the skilled workers could concentrate their efforts on the more challenging tasks, leaving mundane and complementary work to be performed by the less skilled. The gang system also allowed the training of unskilled ‘adult learner’ convicts as multi-skilled labourers, although this was not a ‘shifting [of] control of training to the employer’ (Littler 1979) but empowered individual convicts (Dyster 1989).
(1792–1794) and Paterson (1794–1795), public sector gang employment prob-ably declined in favour of assignment to the private sector. This is apparent from Governor Hunter’s complaint that the growth in assignment to free settlers prior to his appointment ‘had reduced our numbers to work for the public so very low, that when I arrived, we could scarcely call together twenty [convicts] for any public purpose at Sydney’ (HRA I, Vol. I, Hunter to Portland, 1796). Governor King (1800–1806), Hunter’s successor, endeavoured to expand the gang system (HRA I, Vol. III, King to Portland, 1802), but his failure to do so is evident significantly from the dilapidated state of the public buildings and enterprises in Sydney when Governor Bligh (1806–1810) succeeded him (HRA I, Vol. VI, Bligh to Windham, 1807). It is also unlikely that Bligh expanded the gangs at the expense of assignment to private settlers given his difficulty with New South Wales Corp officers such as John Macarthur (Evatt 1965). The subsequent rebel administrations of Johnstone, Foveaux and Paterson (1808–1809) would most certainly have contracted the size of the public gangs and increased the assignment of convicts to private employers (Ward 1992; Crowley 1968).
With the arrival of Governor Macquarie (1810–1821), the gang system began to expand and, as Table 1 indicates, by the end of his administration the total number of male convicts employed within the gang system had risen to nearly 3000. This expansion was driven in part by Macquarie’s public works agenda, but also by the expansion in the numbers of convicts transported to New South Wales (Shaw 1966). Although Macquarie’s expansion of the gang system was largely by necessity, a cost-conscious British government was less impressed and it instituted a wide-sweeping review of the colony by Commissioner John Thomas Bigge in 1819. His report, which was produced in 1822, and is arguably Australia’s first management analysis, damned Macquarie in many ways, but most significantly in terms of the size of the gang system and its administration. The unfavourable Bigge report directly led to Macquarie’s resignation and his replacement by Governor Brisbane (1821–1825).
Table 1 Male workforce of gangs and total number of convicts maintained by
government for New South Wales, various dates
Date No. gang convicts
1790 360
1800 772
1820 2297
1821 2843
1825 2525
1827 2777
1828 2784
1829 2692
Responding to Bigge’s recommendations, Brisbane increased the assignment of convicts to private settlers and began to scale back the gang system. This contraction, however, was more apparent than real. In 1825 Brisbane claimed he had reduced the number of gangs and that the number of convicts employed within them had declined by 1613 since 1821 (HRA I, Vol. XI, Brisbane to Bathurst, 1825). This contraction though, is not apparent from Table 1 because Brisbane created a new form of gang, which he did not include in his 1825 figures. In response to a suggestion by Commissioner Bigge, Brisbane established the Clearing Gangs in 1822. These were small gangs of convict workers contracted out by the government to free settlers to clear land for a fee per acre (HRA I, Vol. X, Brisbane to Buchan, 1822). By 1823, these Clearing Gangs employed 700 convicts and by 1825 employed 1160 (HRA I, Vol. XI, Brisbane to Bathurst, 1825). In other words, by 1825, the Clearing Gangs had absorbed most of the gang labour ‘savings’ claimed by Brisbane.
Ultimately, the most significant attack on the nature and function of the gang system was implemented by Governor Darling (1826–1832), Brisbane’s successor. Darling curtailed the range of work the gang system performed by abolishing the Clearing Gangs and many of the Sydney based municipal gangs, and by downsizing most of the government’s agricultural gangs. This restructure was only moderated by his recognition that some minimum level of public employment was necessary to maintain urban and government services. Privatisation, it seemed, could only go so far ‘without serious injury to the Public Service’ (HRA I, Vol. XV, Darling to Hay, 1830). Indeed, he had to reconstruct and expand the road gangs because by 1826 ‘not a road in the colony was in a decent state of repair’ (Coghlan 1969). Governor Darling’s road gangs, though, were fundamentally different from those that had operated under Macquarie. Each gang was smaller, their activities were more closely coordinated, and they were more systematically regulated through closer supervision and more elaborate management controls. More importantly, the new road gangs also became deliberately and indelibly associated with punishment and harshness (AO/Reel 590, Assignment and Employment of Convicts, 1828–1830). To supplement the harsher road gangs, Darling also established Iron Gangs, in which convicts worked on the roads in leg irons and other forms of restraint.
CONVICT RESISTANCE
The power of some convicts in shaping, indeed controlling, their work experi-ence, is apparent from Governor Phillip’s negotiations with convict agriculture gangs in the setting of their task work (Tench 1793). Task work was a minimum quantity of output that individual convict workers or gangs had to achieve in a given period of time. It established a minimum not a maximum level of labour effort and was necessary because there were no ‘traditional effort norms’ for New South Wales conditions (Littler 1979). Hunter (1793), before his appoint-ment as Governor, was also required to ‘softly’ set task work for convict workers during the time he was in charge of the early settlement of Norfolk Island. In setting task work for clearing and cultivating land, he too was required to ‘consult’ his convict labourers in order to set realistic and achievable targets. Surely any consultation with a coerced workforce was a concession and reflects not only management sensitivity, but also a workforce needing to be persuaded because it can withhold labour effort (Littler 1979). Some years later in his capacity as Governor, Hunter confronted a gang of sawyers at the Hawkesbury settlement who had apparently set their own task work. They had set this at a level which was, in his opinion, too low, for it gave them half a day free. But his concern seems not so much with their low labour effort, but with the fact that they openly bargained with government officials over their reward for any extra labour above their task work or negotiated directly with free settlers on a contract basis (HRA I, Vol. II, Government Order, 1798). This gang had minimised their responsibility to government in order to maximise their private reward in the free labour market. In response and in anticipation of aspects of Scientific Management (Littler 1979), Hunter formalised task work for all government gangs and standardised output for gangs engaged in the same work. Hunter also attempted to curtail convict influence over hours of work (effort stabilisation––Littler 1979) by more specifically stipulating start and finish times, but in this he was less than successful because his successor, Governor King, was still trying to standardise the working day in 1801 (HRA I, Vol. II, Government Order, 1801).
influence over labour allocation from covert convict resistance or non-compliance.
Convicts allocated to gangs were also highly active in shaping their employment relationship. As will be seen, many convict gangs restricted the intensity of their labour effort, and improved the reward for their labour while some openly resisted management. For example, in 1817 the Pennant Hills sawyer gang was on strike for three weeks over its hostility to changes to their work practices and food rations (Druitt 1819). Such overt, collective action was not, it seems, common and was in this case savagely dealt with. But there was a postscript to this dispute, which suggests something more than protest. Although defeated, these sawyers, and indeed most other saw-milling gangs, continued to deliberately restrict their work output. Their task work quota was increased from 400 feet of lumber per week to 700 feet, but they continued to complete this task work by Thursday, leaving Friday and Saturday for their private work (Druitt 1819). They refused to work continuously for the government.
Under Macquarie, there is considerable evidence of endemic convict influence over the gang labour process. This influence was collective and, most alarming to senior management, involved the collusion between gang overseer and gang workers. Bigge (1822) wrote:
I can add my own testimony during a period of six months residence in the Town of Sydney, to the inactivity of the gangs of workmen, whenever they thought that they were unobserved, and the little dependence that is to be placed in the overseers for correcting it.
The discerning behaviour of the convict workers in this respect can be seen as a symptom of a covert militancy rather than mere protest. Although engaged in coerced labour, they were not a passive workforce, but were clearly prepared to vary their work effort when circumstances permitted. There is evidence this ‘inactivity’ was endemic and was identified in a strategy the convicts called the ‘Hawk’.
The Hawk was a convict selected by a gang to keep watch at a discrete distance and vantage point in order to give ‘a private signal’ warning the gang of the approach of any figure of authority (Druitt 1819). Protected by their Hawk, a gang could idle away part of their working day undetected. Like their ‘flash’ language (Ward 1974) the gang convicts developed a secret code of signals but, more than this, the convicts were ‘always successful in concealing’ their private signals (Druitt 1819). Despite the penal system’s explicit reliance on the propensity of convicts to inform on one another, none in the gangs ever revealed the secrets of their Hawk’s warning signals. This is not surprising, given the egalitarian nature of the Hawk arrangement. It was inherently ‘collective’ for it benefited all convicts in a gang, not just a few.
example of where the administration deemed it prudent to offer concessions (soft human resources policies) to a body of workers in exchange for an increase in their task work. Commissioner Bigge (1822) explained that:
Those of the grass-cutters that are well conducted, are allowed to lodge in the town [Sydney], and after they have procured the quantity that is given as a task to each man, they are allowed to dispose of the surplus for themselves; those likewise who have been able to furnish on the Fridays the quantity required for that day and the Saturday, are allowed the use of the government boats to procure it for themselves on the Saturday, and to sell it in the town. The daily task to the grass-cutters has been raised lately from 40 to 60 bundles of grass for each man . . .
There is no evidence that the grass-cutters resisted this increase in their task work. However, it is clear that, to encourage an acceptable minimum level of labour productivity from the convicts employed in this gang, a number of very significant concessions were given to them. If well-behaved, they were able to enjoy independent, private (non-work) lifestyles outside the Hyde Park Barracks and, in this way, they minimised the penal system’s regulation of their lives. This example also highlights the fact that task work divided a convict’s work effort into publicly and privately owned spheres. As long as the convict grass-cutter produced the required task work during his public employment, he was then allowed to work in a private capacity for part of the day or week. And it was in this latter capacity that the system allowed reward for greater personal effort. When working for themselves, the convict grass-cutters could increase their personal rewards by increasing their work effort. But more than this, the personal or private work effort of these convicts was subsidised by the public sector. Government property, in the form of the boats, tools and even the vacant land upon which they harvested the grass, was made freely available to them. In other words, the state sanctioned private enterprise amongst those convicts who conformed to acceptable habits and patterns of behaviour.
(Littler 1979). Attention was also directed toward transforming other positions within the convict system. For example, in detailing the duties associated with the superintendence of the Government Stock gang, Macquarie anticipated many features of the modern job description (HRA I, Vol. VII Macquarie to Bathurst, 1813). In this document, Macquarie defined core activities and responsibilities, as well as those that needed to be performed occasionally or as need demanded. He defined clear objectives, lines of authority and delegation and he formalised the reporting processes for this superintendent. In other words, under Macquarie there is evidence of the formalisation of the hierarchy of control within the gang system.
With the elongation of his chains of command Macquarie also instigated what may now be seen as ‘a separated monitoring system of subordinate activities’ (Littler 1979). He made his superintendents produce detailed work reports on the activities and performance of their gangs and these documents were compiled and submitted monthly and/or weekly and detailed how much work was performed by individual gangs or work sites such as the Lumber Yards in Sydney and Parramatta (Robbins 2000). Weekly work reports recorded the number of convicts in each gang, trade or work team and the quantity of work performed (ML A2086–A2088, CY Reel 1116, Weekly Work Sheets). For relevant trades, these reports also detailed the quantity of raw materials used, the weight of finished products and the amount of waste. These records were designed to record convict employment, measure labour productivity, circumvent theft and help set work task amounts. They were mechanisms of bureaucratic control and were both elaborate and exhaustive (Edwards 1979).
After the departure of Macquarie, the underlying rationale of the gang system changed. Both Brisbane and Darling replaced the productive imperative behind gang labour with one that was increasingly punishment-orientated. But neither did this simplistically, for both extended Macquarie’s elaborate control strategies. Both, for example, addressed the problem of controlling convicts by restructuring the gang system and by improving the character and nature of supervisory controls. They improved overseer motivation and accountability by enmeshing convict overseers in a structure of promotion, reward and status, which was designed to shift their allegiances away from the convicts and into the arms of the system of penal administration (HRA I, Vol. XII, Government Order, 1826). Accountability was improved by imposing greater scrutiny of work measurement through new positions of supervision. The role Superintendent, Assistant Superintendent, Assistant Surveyor of Roads or even the short-lived position of Sub-Inspectors of the Clearing Gangs, were changed to be more explicitly and directly involved in maintaining control of the overseers (Robbins 2002).
work achieved, including estimates, for example, of the amount of dirt removed from a road to the quantity of rock and gravel spread, how many men were employed at what tasks on what days, and where they worked. However, while these reports did not often identify individual convict workers, they certainly measured minutely the effectiveness of the overseers of each gang.
Under Darling, the functions of colonial government were more rationally departmentalised with clearer distinctions between the roles of each department, while within them, a more professional and effective administrative bureaucracy was created (Fletcher 1984). Under the stricter controls of Darling, the ability of convicts to utilise the Hawk arrangement was greatly reduced. There was far less scope for negotiating informally with their overseers because task work was no longer relied upon to set an acceptable quantity of work output. In fact, it was replaced by unremitting and seemingly never-ending toil, for Darling also increased hours of work (HRA I, Vol. XIII, Darling to Bathurst, 1827). By 1830, the convict had to work from sunrise to sunset and the overseer was required and forced to impose a regime of regular and constant toil.
Nevertheless, it would be wrong to conclude that the changes implemented by Brisbane and Darling stopped all convict resistance or attempts to influence the labour process. The growth in the number of convicts sent to the Road and Iron Gangs and the penal settlements are testimony to the fact that convicts continued to resist their government and private employers (HRA I, Vol. XV, Return of Convicts in Government Employment, 1829). Many were sentenced to these gangs or prisons for work-related conflicts, such as neglect of work or disobeying lawful commands. While Governor Darling liked to describe the Road and Iron Gang convicts as ‘double distilled villains’, at least some of them were convicted of ‘crimes’ that can now be seen as attempts to influence employment relations rather than as merely acts of dishonesty (HRA I, Vol. XIV, Darling to Huskisson, 1828). Convict resistance to management control of the labour process did not disappear, even within the road gangs. Significant numbers of convicts working with these gangs were convicted of work-related crimes and punished by being sentenced to an iron gang, to being lumbered, flogged or incarcerated in a penal settlement (AO 590 Weekly Work Reports 1828-1830). John Hirst (1983) also describes the difficulty overseers faced in trying to assert control over convict work attendance and performance on the Busby Tunnel, an underground water supply scheme for Sydney, constructed between 1827 and 1837. Convicts employed in this semi-public work gang continued to display an ability to negotiate greater leniency from their overseers.
of protest were utilised, reflecting the increasing complexity of the social and political divisions in colonial New South Wales.
CONCLUSION
The management of convict labour can be divided into two distinct periods. In the first, from 1788 to 1821, the labour process of the convict gangs, how their work was organised, supervised and measured, reflected the state’s need for labour productivity and its inability to completely dominate the convicts. In other words, the state had to adopt bureaucratic control mechanisms and strategies in order to extract labour effort from the labour power of the convicts. Simple, direct or even brutal control strategies were mostly inappropriate. That the state was required to develop positive as well as negative rewards, that it could not maximise labour effort and that it conceded shorter hours of labour and other freedoms or concessions, highlights the bargaining power of convicts. The convicts were able to influence the labour process and influence the benefits they derived from their labours or at least the nature or effectiveness of the physical controls imposed on them. There is evidence that the state was aware of convict bargaining power and attempted both to confront as well as to accommodate it.
In the second period, from 1822 to 1830, the situation was quite different. During these years, the purpose of convict labour and, therefore, convict management, was redefined. After 1822, the vast majority of convicts were assigned to free settlers, while the gang system operated not as a productive organisation for the performance of public labour, but as a means of imposing punishment. More importantly, this punishment imperative was designed to control labour not only in New South Wales, but also in Britain. The British government believed a more severe convict experience would better deter crime in Britain (HRA I, Vol. XII, Bathurst to Darling, 1826) as well as more effectively subdue convicts assigned to private settlers in the colony. In this way, the public gang system strengthened the managerial prerogative of private employers of convict labour and for the first time, but not the last, public sector employment practices set the pace for the private sector. The severity of the convict gangs was also designed to confront and weaken convict bargaining power, which it did very significantly. However, the organisation of harsh work gangs did not stop convict resistance or protest completely, as the growth in the size of the road and iron gangs testifies. On the other hand, the more severely organised and controlled gang system did change the nature of that resistance. After the mid 1820s there was probably much less collective convict resistance compared with covert individual actions (Atkinson 1979), some of which found expression in ‘bushranging’ (White 1995).
application of these were also influenced by interaction between managers and convict workers, particularly at the work-site level. Convicts, often as collective groups of workers, frequently bargained with their gang supervisors over the intensity of work, the flexibility of hours and sometimes even over the level of earnings. More importantly, it needs to be recognised that at least until 1822, the convicts enjoyed some success in their interactions. Indeed, until this date, their efforts to moderate the extraction of labour effort was, in the opinion of the British government at least, frequently more successful than that of many free workers in Britain. The origins of Australian industrial relations are, therefore, to be found amongst the convicts rather than with the arrival of free workers. Australia’s first workforce was coerced, but it was not powerless.
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