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NLA News - home July 2002 Volume XII Number 10
'Lags' and 'Lashes': The Vocabulary of Convict Australia, 1788-1850
[Flogging Prisoners, Tasmania]  by James Reid Scott

 

 

 

 

 

James Reid Scott (1839–1877)
[Flogging Prisoners, Tasmania] 
[185-?]
pencil drawing; 16.7 x 25.5 cm
Pictorial Collection R454

Amanda Laugesen describes the evolution of convict terminology, as revealed through books in the Library’s Collection

The National Library holds many sources that can illuminate the language of the Australian convict era. From its broad collection of newspapers, to its holdings of published observations, travel narratives and political tracts, it is possible to gain insights into the language of colonial Australia.

If one was to think of the language of the convict period, one would probably instantly think of the language of the convicts themselves: the flash or kiddy language observed by Watkin Tench, or the Billingsgate slang of London recorded by Peter Cunningham. Historical novels, such as Marcus Clarke’s For the Term of His Natural Life, have also provided us with a sense of a particular convict argot. Certainly, many of the convicts, particularly those from London and those who were experienced criminals, spoke a certain cant language that reflected their underworld culture, identity and community. James Hardy Vaux, in introducing his Vocabulary of the Flash Language (1819), dedicated it to Thomas Skottowe, a Justice of the Peace in New South Wales, and felt that it would aid Skottowe in understanding those brought before him. Vaux’s colourful compilation included many terms then current in the London underworld, many of which would probably have been brought to Australia with the convicts, although few remained in Australian English in the long term.

Copy of pardon issued in 1847
Copy of pardon issued in 1847
Pictorial Collection NL7915
Ticket of leave passport, or colonial ticket of leave
Ticket of leave passport, or colonial ticket of leave
Manuscript Collection MS 3879 

Contemporary observers such as Watkin Tench associated this cant language with the immorality of the convicts. Tench argued that ‘an abolition of this unnatural jargon would open the path to reformation,’ for ‘indulgence in this infatuating cant is more deeply associated with depravity, and continuance in vice, than is generally supposed.’ For those who came to Australia free, this cant language was a marker of the convicts’ ‘otherness’ and a way of promoting and maintaining criminality, and thus needed to be erased. Our knowledge of the cant language of convicts is limited by the very nature of those that observed and recorded it, for many were, like Tench, keen to link cant language with immorality. Few of the convicts themselves left written records, and those that did left few clues as to their ‘natural’ speech. The cant or flash language of the convicts thus remains somewhat obscure to us today. Nevertheless, it included some terms that took on a general currency in the colonies, for example: bellowser (a word from West Yorkshire and coming to mean one sentenced to life); lag (a popular colloquial term for a convict); gammon (meaning deceit or nonsense, and still used in Aboriginal English); and trap (meaning a police officer).

Beyond this criminal cant language, however, an entire vocabulary relating to convict Australia developed in the first 70 years of the colonies, which can provide us with many interesting insights into the development of early colonial society. Much of it was administrative language, reminding us that early colonial Australia was a place where government authority controlled most people’s lives. Our sources for the early period include: the first newspaper, the official government publication the Sydney Gazette; the many documents collected in the multi-volume Historical Records of Australia; and the observations of travellers and residents as they sought to describe the new society for an audience back home. The language of these first decades of settlement reveals the power of government in shaping the nature of colonial society. An entire vocabulary for administering a system came into being: there were absolute emancipations, conditional emancipations and tickets of leave; certificates of freedom could prove one’s new status after having served a sentence or gaining a pardon; if one was a convict, one worked on public gangs, or government gangs. The broad arrow, or ‘monarch’s mark’ that indicated government property from the seventeenth century (on both government stores and convict uniforms) was a powerful reminder of the government’s pervasiveness.

Convict Uniform and Two Caps [between 1830 and 1849]

Convict Uniform and Two Caps [between 1830 and 1849]
wool, leather uniform
Pictorial Collection OBJ A40001407

The lags of Australia were frequently subject to the lash—and the system of convict punishment and discipline provided a distinct vocabulary, including: flogging, lashes, the triangle (to which convicts were tied for flogging); and criminal sentences, for example re-transportation to a penal settlement such as Norfolk Island. The vocabulary of punishment and discipline owed something to military and naval procedures: for example, the triangle (mentioned above) was adopted for the convict system; while the tripod initially consisted of three halberds, in Australia it might consist of anything to which convicts could be tied. Subversion of the system also contributed to the vocabulary of convicts, and to Australian national mythology. Convicts absconded into the bush from their first arrival in New South Wales, and the term bushranger (used in the United States in the neutral sense—‘one who ranges in the bush’) by 1814 in Australia had a pejorative sense attached to it in describing those escaping the system.

A variety of terms for the convicts themselves also sprang up in colonial society. Some terms were euphemistic: government man, crown labourer, and servant of the Crown. Others were more colloquial in nature: lag (already mentioned), new chum, and old hand. Cunningham coined the descriptive term canary, which referred to both the yellow uniform of the convicts and the fact that they were jailed like a bird in a cage; magpie similarly referred to the convicts’ appearance. Gradations between convicts were also revealed in their labels—educated convict and gentleman convict were terms for those with more education and a trade or profession, thus creating divides within the convicts as a group. The use of convict as a noun was less common than its use as an adjective to describe various aspects of the system—for example, convict barrack, convict constable, or convict gang. As the presence of convicts in the colonies became an increasingly contentious issue, the term felon, and especially felonry (the convicts and ex-convicts as a class) was used to mark all convicts and ex-convicts as being beyond the pale of ‘respectable society’.

A Government Jail Gang, Sydney, N.S. Wales by Augustus Earle

Augustus Earle (1793–1838)
A Government Jail Gang, Sydney, N.S. Wales
lithograph print; sheet 28 x 37.6 cm
Rex Nan Kivell Collection; Pictorial Collection S50 or U2809

Some of these convicts are noticeably not dressed in uniforms, and there is little to distinguish them from the rest of society. Margaret Maynard in her Fashioned from Penury: Dress as Cultural Practice in Colonial Australia (1994) has argued that the lack of clear distinctions between convict and free persons caused much anxiety in colonial society—an anxiety reflected in the language.

The arrival of free settlers in ever-increasing numbers from the 1820s, led to the development of a contested vocabulary. Free was one such contested word. The status of the emancipated convict, or emancipist, was one already hotly contested, as emancipists sought to expand their citizenship rights; while the colonial elite, known as the exclusives, sought to prevent this. Inevitably this became an issue about the nature of democracy itself in the colonies. The free settlers, desiring to preserve and even uplift their own status and guarantee their rights to land, sought to make a distinction between the free and the freed. The Colonial Times observed in July 1844 that: ‘the community is composed of three classes, the free, the freed, and the bond.’ In 1837, James Mudie, a staunch opponent of both emancipist rights and convict privileges, observed in his The Felonry of New South Wales ‘that the admission of freed convicts, whether by pardon or expiry of their sentences, to the same social and legal rights as the emigrants, is not only a subject of discussion, but of bitter and well-grounded complaint’. As newspapers proliferated, and many political tracts, travel narratives, and pro-emigration literature dominated the published literature, the debates played themselves out. However, while much was made of such distinctions in public discourse, practicality demanded that the free and freed work closely together.

Increasingly, the system of convict labour, and the presence of convicts within the colonies, became a matter of concern for the growing, independent colonial society as it struggled for respectability. The report of the Molesworth Committee’s investigation into the convict system in 1837 used powerful and emotive language that equated it with slavery, and dwelled on the system’s horrors. Not only was transportation deemed to be an ‘inefficient, cruel, and demoralizing punishment’, the system also turned colonists into ‘cruel and hard-hearted slave-owners’. By the end of the 1840s, the anti-transportation movement was under way. The anti-transportationists were also known as being anti-convict, a more explicit sign of their opposition not just to convict labour but to the presence of convicts in colonial (‘respectable’) society, while their challengers weresometimes pejoratively labelled pollutionists.

Prisoners’ Barracks, Hyde Park  [1836?] by Robert Russell
Robert Russell (1808–1900)
Prisoners’ Barracks, Hyde Park  [1836?]
lithograph, hand col. print; 15.6 (18.3 incl. text) x 24 cm
Rex Nan Kivell Collection; Pictorial Collection U384

While transportation to New South Wales ended by 1840, it continued in Van Diemen’s Land, where a new probation system produced a new set of words, including probationer, probation gang and probation pass. The exile system introduced in 1840 was an alternative to transportation. Britain, still faced with a criminal population they could not cope with, sent to the colonies prisoners who had already served part of their sentence in British prisons and were thus meant to be a labour force already partially reformed. These exiles were quickly dubbed Pentonvillains—a play on the name of the British prison Pentonville, from which the first exiles had come. This term says much about colonial attitudes to the exiles, and to the British attitude that Australia was still little more than a dumping ground for convicts. Many in colonial society resented, even feared, the presence of these supposedly reformed characters, and finally the opposition won out. Only in Western Australia was convict labour still welcomed, and transportation continued there until 1868.

A new Australian language, based on a unique colonial society seeking to define itself, was thus slowly developing in these decades. While much of the vocabulary of the Australian convict era remained historically specific, it began the process of the development of an independent Australian English and identity. The vocabulary of the Australian convict era provides a fascinating insight into the politics of language in colonial society.

AMANDA LAUGESEN is the author of The Language of the Australian Convict Era (Oxford University Press, 2002), which was researched at the National Library of Australia and Australian National Dictionary Centre (ANU)

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