Book Review

Lucy Frost and Hamish Maxwell-Stewart (eds), Chain Letters: Narrating Convict Lives, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, 2001. pp. v + 248. $32.95 paper.

These two books illustrate that, despite the worldly success of the popularist Hughes, a new perspective and approach to convict history is now firmly established. Each contributes strongly to understanding the convict system as more complex, more sophisticated, more elaborate and varied than the simplistic slave or Gulag models allow. In doing this the two books endeavour to flesh out the convict experience by examining individual convict lives and scenarios although they do so in quite different ways.	1
The Convicts of the Eleanor is as much a detailed history of the agricultural revolution in rural England as it is of the convict system in the latter period of transportation to New South Wales. Kent and Townsend explain this duality with the 'conviction that ... Australian and British history cannot be sensibly separated' during the period of transportation (p. ix). As a consequence, the first half of the book examines in great detail the economic and employment conditions in rural England leading up to the 'Swing' disturbances in the early 1830s where rural labourers (and others) organised and articulated their opposition to technological and political changes. This examination of the Swing protestors is particularly vividly argued and documented. It has relevance not only for convict history but also for the study of the history of work, management and industrial relations generally. This half of the book is thoroughly well researched and written. It is, however, designed to inform and compliment the Australian-focused half which follows and so it may not offer quite as much analysis as is found in such specialist work as that of Hobsbawn and Rude. Kent and Townsend do not, for example, address the contradictory phenomenon of the introduction of labour saving technology at a time of falling agriculture wages.	2
In the second half of their book Kent and Townsend attempt the ambitious aim of personalising the history of the late convict period with individual details and experiences. In this they are generally very successful. By tracing the penal and life experiences of nearly 200 convicts within the context of the organisation of convict labour (both public and private), convict living conditions and domestic arrangements like marriage, they are able to construct strong insights into the whole operation of transportation. In this way they convincingly dismiss the 'slave' or victim thesis and emphasise the complexity of convict employment generally. For instance their analysis of the assignment of convicts to private settlers convincingly argues that the allocation of individual convicts was based more on rational economic considerations rather political ones and so they authoritatively question the idea that assignment was a 'lottery'. In a moving final chapter Kent and Townsend try to evaluate the quality of life experienced by their cohort of convict protestors and conclude that while such calculations are difficult it was clear that these men and their families were never again as hungry as they were in Wessex.	3
This book provides a strong and well researched contribution to the new more complex and analytical trend in convict history but, having said that, there are a number of reservations that should be noted. Firstly, it needs to be recognised that the Eleanor arrived at a specific time in the continuum of transportation and so the experiences of its human cargo are those of that time and cannot be simply spread across the whole history of transportation. Secondly, the personalisation of history can also distort the general conclusions drawn. It would seem, for example that the Swing convicts were relatively well behaved in New South Wales and so there is little appreciation in this book of convict resistance to their managers and employers. Although these concerns are not unappreciated by Kent and Townsend, the points needed to be more forcefully made. Indeed the third criticism that can be made of this book arises largely from the authors' concern to place their convicts into a wider context. Doing this, however, sometimes produced such great detail that a bigger picture perspective was occasionally overwhelmed. Finally, while this was a superbly researched and well-written book its usefulness as a text for the many academic disciplines to which it can legitimately contribute was limited by the lack of a subject index. The book has an index to people and places for obvious reasons but not one to guide readers through the myriad of topics, issues and concerns that so pepper the text.	4
In Chain Letters: Narrating Convict Lives, Lucy Frost and Hamish Maxwell-Stewart have also tried to give human form to the convict experience by editing an eclectic and intriguing collection of chapters, which explore, in a variety of ways, the voices of individual convicts. The 13 narrative chapters are organised into four discrete sections, and this arrangement is very useful for it alerts the reader to a range of historical themes, sources and, ultimately, interpretative problems. In the first section, Lies, Damned Lies and Convict Narratives, Pybus, Evans and Thorpe and Maxwell-Stewart examine a number of convict narratives or stories detailing the lives of real or composite convicts which were published in the nineteenth century. The danger with these sorts of 'historical' sources is that while their detail and colour are seductive and enduring, they are rarely accurate. Although all chapters in this section are strongly written it is Maxwell-Stewart who most explicitly confronts the dangers of these anonymous and pseudonym-hidden authors when he discusses how such accounts should be used by historians or readers of history.	5
In the second section, Words for the convict women, the emphasis is on giving voice to female convicts who seem to have been even more silent than their male counterparts. In Lucy Frost's chapter she provides a detailed account of the recorded but overlooked testimony of three female convicts given to an inquiry into the operation of the Hobart Female Factory. These are interesting accounts and show how even official documentation can contain 'narrative'. In Ballyn and Frost's chapter they give a lucid and engaging account of two conflicting narratives of a 'Spanish' convict woman, but in the end it is the problems of accuracy, reliability and authenticity which emerges most prominently. Caselle and Frost 'give' the convict Ellen Cornwall co-authorship of their chapter which, using the methods of historical 'triangulation', attempts to evaluate the fragments of a letter by Cornwall. This authentic and heartfelt source unleashes a personal voice and some interesting detective work by the living authors although its contribution to general convict life is probably limited.	6
In section three, Toeing the official line, the chapters by Duffield, Phillips and O'Connor explore the voices apparent within official documentation and in this each has considerable success. Duffield analyses the records of a number of convicts in an interesting way but it is in his evaluation of meaning embedded in official documentation that this chapter has most to offer. Duffield quite rightly argues that documentation must be seen as a player in controlling the lives and narratives of convicts. However he does this with scant regard to the fact that the system's documentation fetish emerged because for the first decades, in New South Wales at least, the authorities knew very little about the convicts while increases in documentation also reflected the implicit resistance of convicts to officialdom. In contrast, the chapters by Phillips and O'Connor both use convict family reunion correspondence and in this there are certainly vivid and emotionally charged voices.	7
In the section When you see this, Hindmarsh analyses the content of personal letters written by two half-brothers to their family in Britain which not only traces individual experiences but usefully contributes to our understanding of common British perceptions of New South Wales in the 1850s. Maxwell-Stewart, Donnelly and Millet explore the tattoo, body-art practices of convicts in fascinating detail and in doing so capture some of the insolence, defiance and solidarity of convict society. They effectively argue that there was a 'contested space' between the state and convicts over the decoration/identification of convict bodies. Bradley and Maxwell-Stewart follow this up in a chapter that tracks an illusive but indelibly tattooed convict through the various reincarnations he makes within the Tasmanian convict system.	8
In their final chapter, Frost and Maxwell-Stewart try to bring the highly varied chapters collected in this volume into some sort of overarching perspective. They fail but they know they fail and, in explaining this, disembody their own 'voices' into a new narrative, one that deals with the difficulties but importance of history. This is a stimulating, vivid, sometimes heart-breaking collection and is well written, referenced and indexed. However, although few of the chapters view their convict individuals as powerless and indeed try to give them presence, there is in all chapters a sense of the state and its documentation as being all-powerful and monolithic. Such an assumption strips convicts of power, leaving only the voice of victims. The state was not all-powerful. In fact, until the mid-1820s, the New South Wales bureaucracy grew and modified its mechanisms and strategies of control not only in response to its own agenda but also in reaction to the resistance, hostility and mischief of the convicts. This collection endeavours to give voice, literally, to convicts whereas in reality voices are embodied in all social relations. It also needs to be noted that, in a penal system, not having a distinctive voice, face or identity was not always bad or unfortunate for individuals intent on survival. A strategy of silence may have improved the convict experience, however difficult this now makes life for historians.	9
Charles Sturt University BILL ROBBINS

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