Dumping ground for NZ’s unwanted
At least 110 New Zealand convicts were shipped across the Tasman – and almost no-one knew about it until a historian found a weathered file. Will Harvie reports.
About this week in 1845, Edwin Rose was probably making mischief in Auckland. In his mid to late teens, he’d been transported to the new colony of New Zealand as a pardoned convict, along with 122 other lads from Parkhurst Prison on the Isle of Wight.
Transporting convicts to New Zealand was rare but Rose has the distinction of also being transported as a convict from New Zealand to Tasmania, then called Van Diemen’s Land.
It’s still little known that New Zealand transported convicts abroad, says Dr Kristyn Harman, a Kiwi historian at the University of Tasmania.
Her book on the subject, Cleansing the Colony: Transporting Convicts from New Zealand to Van Diemen’s Land, was long-listed for a 2018 Ockham book awards and is something of a history scoop.
Almost nobody knew about convicts being shipped away from New Zealand until Harman uncovered a slightly battered, leather-bound record of the punishment in an Archives NZ vault in 2013.
She found solid evidence that at least 110 people were transported to Tasmania between 1843 and 1853. More were sentenced but didn’t cross the Tasman Sea because they appealed or escaped.
She found that 51 were soldiers or discharged soldiers from the British army. Six were Ma¯ ori warriors, one was a Polynesian from Hawaii. One was apparently Spanish. One was female.
Almost all were young single men like Rose – working class, illeducated, penniless.
His life before arriving in New Zealand was appalling. He was from Cheltenham, England, and entered history through court records. He was repeatedly convicted – and often whipped – for stealing loaves of bread, cheese and fish. These are crimes of hunger, says Harman. He was ‘‘simply hungry’’.
As a teen he was sent to Parkhurst, which was progressive for its time. It separated youths from adults and taught the boys vocational skills. Rose learned something about shoemaking and farming. But even progressive Victorian prisons were bleak.
Rose and 122 other Parkhurst boys arrived in Auckland on two ships in 1842-43. They were unexpected and their arrival soon created a ‘‘moral panic’’ among colonists, says Harman.
The New Zealand colony perceived itself as more morally pure compared with the colonies of Australia, where ‘‘convictism’’ was said to ‘‘infect’’ more respectable folk. Notions of the Noble Savage were also in circulation regarding Ma¯ ori and there were fears criminality could spread among them, Harman says.
‘‘Idealised as a new sort of colony to be populated by gentlefolk and free labour, New Zealand’s early image of itself could only be realised through the brutal suppression of challenges to that idea,’’ she writes. ‘‘New Zealand’s governing class was intent on cleansing the colony of what it considered a burgeoning criminal underclass,’’ she says.
‘‘Van Diemen’s Land . . . became a dumping ground for New Zealand’s unwanted.’’
The serving soldiers shipped out were typically convicted of drunkenness, striking officers or desertion, sometimes in the ‘‘vicinity of hostile natives’’. This is still a significant offence today.
The sole woman transported – Margaret Reardon – was convicted of perjury in September 1848. She had given contradictory evidence over the sensational murders of Lieutenant Robert Snow, his wife Hannah and their daughter Mary on the North Shore a year earlier.
A few of those transported committed white-collar crimes – forgery and counterfeiting,
The Ma¯ ori were sentenced for political crimes, Harman says.
Among them was Hohepa Te Umuroa, who took part in the attack on Almon Boulcott’s farm in the Hutt Valley in May, 1846. Later captured, he and other warriors were convicted of rebellion instead of as prisoners of war, according to Te Ara.
He was exiled for life and died of tuberculosis in 1847. Unusually for the time, he was given a headstone and it survives in Maria Island National Park.
Portraits of these Ma¯ ori prisoners still hang in Australian galleries, making their presence outside New Zealand known to history.
The Van Diemen colony stopped accepting new convicts in 1853, much to the displeasure of New Zealand authorities.
But the impulse to cleanse the colony persisted. In 1866, Te Kooti was exiled with a party of Pai Ma¯ rire prisoners to Chatham Island. There he established the Ringatu¯ Church before returning to Aotearoa to lead a major but failed rebellion.
As for Edwin Rose, he was convicted of stealing at a short trial in Auckland on December 1, 1845, and sentenced to seven years’ transportation.
Australian records claim he was 19 on arrival and sent into adult hard labour camps, although he probably also spent time as a shoemaker. He didn’t steer clear of trouble.
Records show he committed at
The New Zealand colony perceived itself as more morally pure compared with the colonies of Australia.
least seven new offences while in custody and his sentence was lengthened. Nonetheless, he received ‘‘indulgence’’ in May 1851, and was set free.
Rose resurfaced in Victoria in 1863 under the false name William Williams. In an age without formal identity papers, convicts often changed their names to avoid stigma, Harman says.
It didn’t help. Rose and mates got rowdy in a hotel and tried to rob the piggery.
An armed constable arrived and Rose was shot. Before dying he reportedly said ‘‘they only wanted a feed’’.
If true, his life had come full circle, Harman writes. He was hungry.