Joseph Mason: Assigned Convict 1831-1837

ON 26 JUNE 1831 the convict transport Eleanor anchored in Sydney Cove. Its unhappy human cargo consisted of 133 agricultural labourers and rural craftsmen who had been exiled for taking part in the protests which had swept across the English countryside late in the preceding year. The labouring men from Berkshire, Dorset, Hampshire and Wiltshire did not deserve their fate and it is doubtful if any convict vessel ever left England with a less criminal body of men aboard. Among them was Joseph Mason, the author of the remarkable document reproduced in this volume, a gardener and labourer from the little village of Bullington in central Hampshire. The convict records list Mason's crime as machinebreaking, yet he broke no machines; he was tried and convicted for robbery, yet he robbed no-one. His real offence, for which he could not be openly charged, was that he was a radical, a critic of the status quo which condemned rural labourers in southern England to live in desperate poverty and kept them politically powerless to alter their circumstances. Joseph's younger brother, Robert, who was also transported to New South Wales, was entirely correct when he wrote to a fellow Villager that they were banished 'because we advocated the cause of him who lived in a land of plenty, yet never knew what it was to have enough'. The Masons undoubtedly played a prominent role in organising the labourers' protest in their locality, but they were convicted of trumped-up offences in order that the nation might be safe from dangerous men who dared to demand that working people be fairly treated.