I don't think there is anything to thanks in this case. Australia is one country to which worst British criminals were exported. In fact, it is the country to which the largest number of ALL WORLD convicts were sent. This is not my invention. It is a fact laid out on a world map in Hyde Park barracks in Sydney, which is a museum dedicated to Australia's past.
First of all, the "thanks" was intended to be sarcastic, secondly you are generalising all Australians as not only the descendants of criminals, but criminals in general, which is ridiculous and inflammatory.
If you are Australian, you should know the history of your own country.
A silly assertion. Australia was not founded for the purposes of being a penal colony; it was a territorial area discovered by the Cook voyage for the intended expansion of the British Empire. Australia’s enormous size made it suitable to send convicts there as opposed to any other place after the loss of the American colonies.
If you actually knew your history, you would know that what is now called the United States of America was the primary destination for convicts sentenced to “transportation.” The very place this section of this forum is dedicated to getting to. The American Revolutionary War put an end to that destination, so Australia was set up as an alternative.
Here are more facts (direct quotes) from that museum on the northeastern side of Hyde Park in Sydney (btw I have photographs of this info from museum):
Macquarie to Biggie, 1819:
"...above nine-tenths (9/10) of the population of this colony are or have been convicts ..."
Interesting how you claim that you provide “facts.” This is not a “fact” it is a
source, and moreover
you have been dishonest on you presentation of this quote from this source, the rest of it follows;
“...you have yet, perhaps, to learn that
these are the people who have quietly submitted to the laws and regulations of the colony... These are
the men who have built houses and ships, who have made wonderful efforts,
considering the disadvantages under which they have acted, in agriculture, in maritime speculation, and in manufactures." In
character, both
moral and
political, Macquarie declares,
they outweigh the free settlers, who struggle for their depression. Let not Mr Bigge's disposition for doing good be "overwhelmed by an overstrained delicacy, or too refined a sense of moral feeling: for such
I consider the preference given to a bad man who has
perhaps narrowly escaped the stigma of having once been a convict, to one
who is now good,
but who has been proved not to have been always so.”
The moral, which you appear to have missed, is the concept of how tarnishing everyone with the same brush because of the past is a mistake. Conversely, those who may appear to righteous at first, when tested are not so. The British Justice System which sent these people to penal colonies was hardly a stellar system of moral, fair or rigorous jurisprudence. Many of the convicts sent to Australia had done nothing more than assert rights they would have had under the United States Constitution, mainly freedom of expression, association and forming labour unions, prohibited under the The Blasphemous and Seditious Libels Act (or Criminal Libel Act) (60 Geo. III & 1 Geo. IV c. 8).
Unnamed plate:
"..PEOPLE OF CONVICT SYDNEY...Convicted men and women made up more than one third of Sydney's population at the time Taylor painted his panorama" (18th century)" Most of the convicts are shown busy at work, quaryying stone and cutting timber, grooming horses, cheperding....In fact , many critics argued that the colony was a "paradise" for convict]and not punishing enough to deter future crime in Britain"
No source, irrelevant, convicts set up businesses, employed and were employed, so? And as for those who apparently think it was "paradise" many such people also thought that women shouldn’t get the vote, nor be allowed to divorce or work, unions should not be allowed to organise and petition for better employment rights or withhold their labour by strike, and the people shall not have their liberty. Just because someone had an
opinion of something in the 18th century doesn’t make it a “fact,” nor correct.
The actual map of the world on the ground floor of the museum shows where British convicts were sent:
"France, Spain, Portugal, the Netherlands, Russia and Ergentina all transported criminals to dedicated penal colonies. However the scale of British transportation to Australia was far greater than that of any other nation in terms of the numbers sent, the duration of the journey and the area settled. ...Britain sent 166,000 convicts men, women and children to Australia between 1788 and 1868...
What you neglect to mention is that while 166,000 people were sent to Australia as convicts between 1788 and 1868, in 1852 alone, 370,000 immigrants arrived in Australia by their own free will, thus convicts throughout the entire period of transportation is less than a third of a single year; hardly a “nation of convicts.” It should be pointed out too that the gold rush made the population of Australia boom from over 400,000 people to over 1,000,000 during 1845 to 1896.
I wonder how Police Certificate issued in Australia looks like
Probably something like : "...No convictions...in the past week..."..and in small print at the bottom of the paper: "BTW, we don't store criminal records older than a week, because we don't have that much database capacity on our computers "
HAHA!
Childish, ignorant and immature.