History

.... as everyone knows, Australia is entirely peopled by criminals. But what not everyone appreciates is the traces of those criminals that remain today. Check out these stones. Look closely at them. There's mossy lichen stuff, there's cement, and there are thousands of dents. The moss, that's natural, the result of age and weather. The cement, well that may have been redone, I'm not sure. But those dents? Every single one of them was chipped out by some convict sent out for committing some grievous crime. Perhaps that one on the far right was made by someone who stole a piece of bread. That stone in the centre? Carved out by a counterfeiter. The bottom left? Jail breaker. Each and every one of these stones that cover Tasmania, creating churches, houses, offices was hewn by someone sent out here for some crime.

The crimes that resulted in transportation were an odd mix as well. Murder and the like were still punished by hanging, and so it was lower ranking crimes, often those committed by lower classes perceived to have lesser value to society that earned a free trip to the land of sun and sand. But of course that's not what they looked forward to. Australia was the far off place, a wild, untameable and unforgiving land building itself up on the blood and sweat of everyone who couldn't hack it. Years later, the British realised their mistake and started to escape to Australia, condescending to raise it to the rank of 'the colonies' rather than 'that hell-hole', adding it to their category of 'The Antipodes' and conveniently finding a way to avoid embarrassment over the 'Australian? New Zealand?' accent business.

The convicts may have long gone, we may have learned to accept and be proud of our heritage (I say as a first generation Australian with no convict heritage whatsoever), but the traces still remain. I sometimes wonder at the irony of lawyers working in buildings constructed under the whip. Did the convicted slaves question the injustice of dying to build a grand cathedral or their own accommodation? Or were they simply too exhausted, too hungry, too sad to think beyond their current stone?