Convicts and Rebels

May I comment briefly on H. McQueen's interesting but mis leading article, Convicts and Rebels, in your last issue? In the introductory section he states that his aim is to prove that 'the political influence of the convicts has been over-rated'. Certainly their political influence was hugely over-rated by G. A. Wood whom he quotes in the introduction, but I know of no historian writing in the last twenty years who has not preceded McQueen in agreeing that Wood was wrong in this, as in his warm-hearted but untenable estimate of convict 'innocence and manliness'. Of course, McQueen is free to write an article concurring with the accepted view, but he confuses the issue by irrelevantly and intemperately criticising Manning Clark, A. G. L. Shaw, Lloyd Robson and other historians, who agree with him on the point at issue, for views or alleged views on quite other issues. To illustrate, let me quote McQueen's first few sentences from Section VII: 'R?ssel Ward claims that we know about the convicts shows that egalitarian class solidarity was the one human trait which usually remained to all but the most brutalised'. [133] From this we must conclude that Ward knows very little about the convicts and that he has a quaint notion of class. Ward uses class to mean nothing more than that group of people who came to the colony as convicts and ignores all social and national divisions within this category

Economic history · Political science · Australian History and Society · History

• The 'Knotted Hands that Set Us High

  Open Access•Dorothy Roberts, David Andrew Roberts et al.•Labour History•2011

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