Australia: The Culture of Distance - The Wise World Traveler: Becoming a Part of All that You Meet - page 285

Overall, about 113,000 convicts came to Australia in the years from 1788 to 1840, the
year that transportation ended. Officers in the corps of guards bought or took farmland and
sheep pastures from the Aboriginal people. Free settlers (colonists) followed. And as con-
vict sentences ran out or were reduced, convicts and former convicts took jobs with the
free settlers. As Robert Hughes notes, Australia became the first open prison to allow con-
tact between prisoners and the free, which led to self-reliance among the former as well as
their learning job skills and being rewarded for good conduct. [254] Sydney's early Gothic
and Georgian architecture came from the drawing board of Francis Greenway, a convicted
forger, pardoned for his work.
SETTLEMENT MOLDS THE AUSTRALIAN OUTLOOK
Convict beginnings are thought to account for two mainstays of the Australian character,
or its habits of the heart: a strong insistence on social equality and a mistrust of those striv-
ing too hard for success. Strivers are admonished, “Tall poppies get cut down.” And social
equality finds expression in the usual address, “Good day, mate” (usually spoken as “Goo'
dye, mite.”), and in everyday behaviors: a lone taxi passenger usually sits with the driver
rather than being chauffeured in the back seat.
Convict beginnings also gave Australia its folk heroes. In the United States, the fron-
tier gave America its mythic hero, the cowboy, the moral man, the straight shooter. The
escaped convict created Australia's mythic hero, the bushranger, the escapee, the outlaw,
the rebel against society. Ned Kelley and Jack Donahue are the most celebrated. Stock-
men in Australia were sheepherders (not cowboys), hired hands on vast sheep stations.
They worked alongside migratory workers during shearing season. A strong tradition of
working-class solidarity (and later, the power of workers' unions) was one result, along
with a cult of informality.
Australia's population grew slowly in the decades after the end of transportation. Free
colonists were welcome, but passage was expensive. A passage from Liverpool to North
America cost five pounds. Passage to Australia cost at least twenty pounds. Then, in 1851
gold was discovered near Melbourne. Prospectors and fossickers from around the world
rushed to Australia. And Australia's population soared. More than a million came in the
first decade of the gold rush and nearly a million more in the second. The gold rushes were
the main factor in raising the population from 437,000 in 1851 to 1,700,000 in 1871. [255]
Gold was Australia's second beginning.
Gold added to Australia's collective memory. Local authorities required miners to buy
a permit to dig. Miners resisted, fought battles with the police, and one incident, the Eureka
Stockade Revolt of 1854, became a byword for workers' wariness of an overbearing gov-
ernment. It was a wariness balanced against expectation that government would provide