Transported for life, transported by love: love and the Australian convict romance novel

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    Abstract

    The 21st century has seen the rise of the Australian convict romance – a subgenre of both the Australian historical novel, as well as the romance novel. While the first and most well-known Australian convict love story, Catherine Gaskin’s Sara Dane (based on the life of convict woman Mary Reiby), was published in 1954 and made into a television miniseries in 1982, it was not until the end of the twentieth century that novelists returned to the convict romance in works such as Candice Proctor’s Night in Eden (1997) and Whispers of Heaven (2001), Joanna Lloyd’s Beyond Innocence (2012), Tea Cooper’s Matilda’s Freedom (2013), and Lena Dowling’s Convict Wives series: The Convict’s Bounty Bride (2013), His Convict Wife (2013), and Convict Heart (2017). The choice of Australian convicts as the romantic protagonists of a love story is somewhat disconcerting given what we know about gender relations during this period of Australian history.
    The history of white heterosexual romantic love and intimacy in Australia is different from other English-speaking countries such as Britain or the United States because of Australia’s particular conditions of colonial settlement. The east coast of Australia was first settled as a penal colony at Sydney in 1788, followed by the establishment of other penal settlements in Tasmania, Victoria, Queensland and Western Australia. It was not until after the 1820s that free immigrants began to settle in the colonies, contributing to the push by the “respectable” middle classes to end the convict system in Australia. Transportation was progressively ended throughout the different colonies between 1839 and 1868, when the last convict ship arrived in Western Australia.
    The convict system created special conditions that made gender relations in the early colony vastly different to social conditions in Britain and the United States at the same time. The percentage of male prisoners far outnumbered female convicts. This gender imbalance had a significant impact on the history of love, intimacy and marriage in colonial Australia that is unmatched in Europe or America during the same period. In colonial Australia during the convict era, there was no such expectation among the majority convict population of romantic love or an emotional or psychological intimacy gradually established in courtship through self-disclosure. As many Australian feminist scholars from Anne Summers (1975) to Joy Damousi (1997) show, gender relations in the early colony at Sydney were characterised by sexual assault and exploitation of convict women by other convict men as well as the naval and military officers in charge of their punishment and servitude, but also their well-being. In an attempt to clean up the morals of the colony, convicts were encouraged to marry. Convict women believed that marriage would provide “protection and an escape from destitution” (Damousi 1997: 36). Certainly, there was nothing at all romantic, loving or intimate about the way convict courtship or marriages were initially arranged.
    Given this history, it is clear that the Australian convict romance novel misrepresents gender relations among the convict and emancipist class in the early nineteenth century. Yet to simply accuse novelists of being historically inaccurate tells us little about what they are trying to do with these stories. What kinds of reparative readings of history might they be performing in these convict romance novels, and to what purpose? This essay considers what we can glean about the emotional history and romantic relationships of Australian convicts during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, before looking at how these relationships have been represented in Australian romantic fiction, and what these convict romances reveal about contemporary Australian attitudes about love, and towards the past.
    Original languageEnglish
    Title of host publicationThe Routledge companion to romantic love
    EditorsAnn Brooks
    Place of PublicationLondon ; New York
    PublisherRoutledge, Taylor and Francis Group
    Chapter15
    Pages191-202
    Number of pages12
    ISBN (Electronic)9781003022343, 9781000432732
    ISBN (Print)9780367900694, 9781032061474
    DOIs
    Publication statusPublished - 2022

    Publication series

    NameRoutledge Companions to Gender
    PublisherRoutledge

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