Hyde park barracks
Every day at dawn convict men were formed into their respective gangs at the barracks and marched to worksites around town. Each man was checked on entry and exit, to make sure he wasn't sneaking stolen property out or contraband back in. The convict barracks was not a jail, but its many rules and regulations made confinement here feel like a punishment compared with normal social life in the town. Some well-behaved convicts continued to be allowed to live out of barracks, even after 1S19, particularly those who were married.
Landing in NSW
On arrival in Sydney convicts were transferred from ship to shore, and marched under military guard through the streets of the town to the Hyde Park Barracks for assignment. Transportation was a mixed blessing for many convicts. They knew they were being cast out from their homeland and would probably never return, but they also hoped for new opportunities in the new land, once they had served out their sentences.
Farewell to old England
Transportation to a penal colony became the ‘humane’ alternative to death by hanging. Convicted criminals wallowing in overcrowded jails and hulks could be made ‘useful’ to the mother country if taken to places where their labour was needed. Britain shipped convicts first to America from 1718 and to its Australian colonies from 1778. Men, women and children were sentenced to transportation across the seas for 7 or 14 years, or for life. Most convicts had little prospect of returning home, but life was surely better than the alternative.
The bloody code
The Industrial Revolution and soaring population growth caused poverty and misery. To curb crime and social unrest, authorities implemented an increasingly cruel penal code in the 17th and 18th centuries. Eventually more than 200 crimes were punishable by death, including pick-pocketing more than a shilling, cutting down trees, forgery, arson, piracy, being out at night with a blackened face, and being an unmarried mother concealing a stillborn child. Public executions were supposed to deter crime, but they became mass entertainment.