Anti-Transportation: The Statesmen's Perspective

David Andrew Roberts has already noted in this Forum how John West's 'History of Tasmania' (1852) portrayed the anti-transportation campaign as a struggle between the "tyranny of irresistible despotism", embodied in Colonial Secretary, Henry George Grey ("the evil genius of the Colonial Office", as John Dunmore Lang described him), and "the steady and determined operations of truth and right", represented by colonists asserting their desire for self-determination. It has now been over fifty years since J. M. Ward's biography of Grey offered a meaningful counterpoise to that nationalist perspective by (in part) demonstrating some of the difficult political and social imperatives Grey faced when assuming the role of Colonial Secretary in 1846, and how these realities shaped his approach to the question of convict transportation. A. G. L. Shaw's seminal 1966 work, 'Convicts and the Colonies', also explored the metropolitan perspective, providing detailed analysis of the motives of imperial statesmen such as Grey, Stanley, Russell, Gladstone, and influential public servants like James Stephen. John Ritchie's 1976 work on William Molesworth's Select Committee on Transportation demonstrated how analysis of the machinations at the heart of the Empire could change our understanding of the early phase of anti-transportation, although Ritchie succumbed to a somewhat nationalist view in condemning Molesworth for making Australians uncomfortable about their past.