Convict Society And Its Enemies

The workings of the convict system and how a penal colony changed into a free society.

New South Wales government administration increased four-fold during the first six decades of the twentieth century and, with the growth in population came increasing community expectations. This tells how the Public Service Board became responsible for employing staff for this burgeoning administrative corps.

This work offers a new interpretation of Australia's convict past. It is based on a detailed analysis of records of 20,000 male and female convicts - one in three of those transported to New South Wales between 1817 and 1840.

Freedom on the Fatal Shorebrings together John Hirst's two books on the early history of New South Wales. Both are classic accounts which have had a profound effect on the understanding of our history. They also have long been unavailable, either new or second-hand. This combined edition includes a new foreword by Hirst. These are works that bring to vivid life the early days of convict Australia. They change our sense of how a colony that was also intended to be a prison actually worked, and how Australian democracy came into being, despite the opposition of the most powerful. Hirst overturns the standard picture, arguing- "This was not a society that had to become free; its freedoms were well established from the earliest times." "Colonial Australia was a more 'normal' place than one might imagine from the folkloric picture of society governed by the lash and the triangle, composed of groaning white slaves tyrannised by ruthless masters. The book that best conveys this and has rightly become a landmark in recent studies of the System is J. B. Hirst's Convict Society and its Enemies." - Robert Hughes, The Fatal Shore"Anyone with an interest in Australian political culture will find The Strange Birth of Colonial Democracyinvaluable." - Professor Colin Hughes, former Chief Electoral Commissioner for the Commonwealth.

This is a book on how and why workers come together. Almost coincident with its inception, worker organisation is a central and enduring element of capitalism. In the 19th and 20th centuries’ mobilisation by workers played a substantial role in reshaping critical elements of these societies in Europe, North America, Australasia and elsewhere including the introduction of minimum labour standards (living wage rates, maximum hours etc), workplace safety and compensation laws and the rise of welfare state more generally. Notwithstanding setbacks in recent decades, worker organisation represents a pivotal countervailing force to moderate the excesses of capitalism and is likely to become even more influential as the social consequences of rising global inequality become more manifest. Indeed, instability and periodic shifts in the respective influence of capital and labour are endemic to capitalism. As formal institutions have declined in some countries or unions outlawed and severely repressed in others, there has been growing recognition of informal strike activity by workers and wider alliances between unions and community organisations in others. While such developments are seen as new they aren’t. Indeed, understanding of worker organisation is often ahistorical and even those understandings informed by historical research are, this book will argue, in need of revision. This book provides a new perspective on and new insights into how and why workers organise, and what shapes this organisation. The Origins of Worker Mobilisation will be key reading for scholars, academics and policy makers the fields of industrial relations, HRM, labour economics, labour history and related disciplines.

This book looks at how the practice of law developed in early New South Wales.