Convicts, Cotton and Western Australia in the Correspondence of the Third Earl Grey

The Scindian, the first convict ship to Western Australia, brought both cotton and convicts to the colony, in 1850. Both were linked to slavery in the minds of the colonists. Following the abolition of slavery in 1833, many abolitionists began to argue against the transportation of convicts, bringing transportation to an end in the eastern colonies of Australia. Yet, as the transportation of Britain’s convicts was ceasing in these colonies, it was just beginning in Western Australia. Historians have pointed to labour shortages in the colony as the explanation for this anomaly. The letters of the Colonial Secretary, the third Earl Grey, held in the Durham University Library, show that other reasons and justifications may have contributed to the advent and continuation of transportation in the west. Grey’s liberal ideals, in conceiving the sending of convicts to Western Australia as a reformative ‘experiment’, contributed in a large part to the formation of a penal colony in Western Australia. For the third Earl Grey, the risk of moral corruption caused by the transportation of convicts was obviated by its reformatory qualities.