Protesters gather near the entrance to the Bishop Henry Whipple Federal Building in Minneapolis, Minn. on Friday.OCTAVIO JONES/AFP/Getty Images
England had a problem.
It was the late 18th-century. A rising population and an industrializing economy had flooded towns and cities with striving, struggling newcomers. In the hurly burly of city life, some turned to crime to support themselves. The jails were overflowing.
The authorities were so desperate they took to housing prisoners in decommissioned ships moored in English seaports. But these rotting “hulks,” as they were known, filled up, too. The revolt in the American colonies made things worse. It meant that prisoners could no longer be shipped off to work in plantations there.
Then England hit on a solution. Why not send the surplus prisoners to serve their time in the most remote of His Majesty’s possessions: The eastern coast of the Australian continent, which had been claimed for the Crown by the famous explorer Captain James Cook.
Opinion: The world is finally standing up to Donald Trump. It’s time for Republicans to do the same
It was a deranged idea. No English ship had touched the shores of what would become Australia since Cook’s brief sojourn in 1770. No one really knew whether the place could sustain a penal colony or how its Indigenous people would respond to the invasion.
Yet what Australians call the First Fleet arrived on Jan. 26, 1788, settling in what is now Sydney harbour. Over the next eight decades, 160,000 men, women and children were “transported” to the far side of the world.
The old prison colony on the Tasman Peninsula, which was the landing site of some England's toughest convicts sent into Australian exile in the 1800s.The Associated Press
Today you can visit several historical sites around Australia to learn about what they endured. The most important is in Port Arthur, Tasmania. The colony established there in 1830 held convicts who had reoffended after reaching Australian shores. They were put to work felling trees, sawing timber and raising food. Many died from scurvy, dysentery, flogging or overwork.
“Fishing contrary to orders: 3 months weeks in irons,” reads an entry in the punishment record of one Port Arthur inmate. “Having a quantity of vegetables in his possession: 1 month on a chain gang,” reads another.
Visiting the site, it is hard not to hear echoes in recent events. This week the United States was consumed by the killing of a second citizen at the hands of federal agents in Minneapolis. President Donald Trump has sent thousands of masked, armed, armoured henchmen into U.S. cities, tasked with snatching migrants, whom he has called human “garbage.”
In depth: Minnesotans are resisting ICE – and they’re more galvanized than ever
England was in the grip of a kind of hysteria when its leaders settled on transportation to Australia as a solution to its prisoner problem. The upper orders of society lived in fear of a new “criminal class” that had sprung up all around them.
As Robert Hughes put it in his brilliant 1986 history The Fatal Shore, “the mob, as the urban proletariat was called, had become an object of terror and contempt…” seen by respectable society as “a malign fluid, a sort of magma that would burst through any crack in law and custom, quick to riot and easily inflamed to crime by rabble-rousers.”
The same kind of panic is being whipped up by the current U.S. leadership (if you can call it that) over undocumented immigrants. As The New York Times reported this week, Mr. Trump has “stoked the darkest fears about immigrants,” warning a friendly crowd this week they would “blow up our shopping centres, blow up our farms, kill people.”
This is the man, of course, who said with a straight face that Haitian immigrants in one American city had been eating local cats and dogs. “They’re coming into our country, from Africa, from Asia, all over the world,” he has said of migrants. “They’re poisoning the blood of our country.
Who owns Greenland? All of us, and none of us, Inuit say
Invent a threat as dire as that and you can justify any measure, no matter how extreme. You can send storm troopers into the cities of a democratic country to break down doors, smash car windows and gun people down in the street. You can send people convicted of crimes as small as picking pockets to a land so distant that it might as well be in deep space.
In both cases – 18th-century England, 21st-century America – the aim is to demonize, dehumanize and finally to expel these agents of disorder. The Trump administration deports migrants to Honduras, El Salvador and Africa. England’s rulers dispatched prisoners to Australia.
As Mr. Hughes puts it, transportation was an attempt to uproot “an enemy class from the British social fabric.” Sending the convicts away “conveyed evil to another world.”
But it never worked. England’s crime wave rolled on. The early 19th-century was a time of protest and upheaval. Nor did the exiled convicts prove to be the irredeemable human detritus they were often said to be.
Many earned their freedom – their “ticket of leave” – for hard work and good behaviour. Together with the free settlers who began arriving in time, they and their children built thriving colonies in this vast and distant continent. Out of those colonies sprang a thriving, stubbornly democratic nation: Australia.