Manajemen | Fakultas Ekonomi Universitas Maritim Raja Ali Haji 2003 1 (22)

MANAGEMENT AND RESISTANCE IN THE
CONVICT WORK GANGS, 1788–1830
WILLIAM MURRAY ROBBINS*

T

he present paper examines the evolution of the management of the labour process
within the male convict gang system. The organisation of convicts into discrete and
enduring collective work units was a vital and productive part of the colonial economy
and of the convict labour process generally. In providing a detailed account of the history
of management’s adoption of labour process structures and strategies the present paper
shows that some of these were determined by changing management objectives while
others were the result of covert and/or overt convict resistance. The paper offers evidence
of the interaction between the management and the convict, and argues that the origins
of Australian industrial relations are to be found amongst our convict workers rather
than with the arrival of free labour.

INTRODUCTION
The importance of the convicts as Australia’s first settlers has long been recognised
(Robson 1965). Less well-appreciated is their importance as Australia’s first
working class (Nicholas 1989). It is fair to say that there has been little systematic analysis of convict work relations or modes of control beyond recognition

of the brutality of the system. Little attention has been directed to understanding
how convict labour was organised, what mechanisms of control were used at
different times and what the convicts’ reactions or responses were to their work
and its control. In short, the convict labour process has been neglected or
misrepresented. The present paper will focus on male convicts employed in the
public gang system; although, it should be noted that a similar, if not more
complex, employment relationship was experienced by female convicts (Robbins
2002; Oxley 1996). Doing justice to the female labour process; however, awaits
another article.
The concept of the employment relationship is of course problematic. In
its most simplistic conception, the employment relationship is defined as a
transactionally determined relationship between an employer and employee
(Keenoy and Kelly 1998). It arises when an employer pays an employee to perform work; moreover, this financial arrangement is not an indelibly permanent
contract but can be dissolved. Such a definition is, therefore, historically located
in a capitalist market economy where traditional rights and obligations have
little impact. It is a product of market relations where employer and employee
are so-called free agents. Defined in this manner, the employment relationship
obviously presents problems for an historical examination of convict labour, and
* School of Business, Charles Sturt University, PO Box 789, Albury, NSW 2640, Australia. Email:
WRobbins@csu.edu.au

THE JOURNAL OF INDUSTRIAL RELATIONS, VOL. 45, NO. 3, SEPTEMBER 2003, 360–377

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indeed, for any analysis of work prior to modern industrial capitalism. But, it is
argued here, that to see the employment relationship so starkly is to lose
sight of the complexity of work relationships in other time periods, or even
nations, and certainly to miss the hybrid employment relationship which can
be apparent in the transition from traditional to capitalist, market-determined

work relations.
The present paper offers an analysis of the convict labour process in order to
map the origins of capitalist employment relationships in Australia. The modern
employment relationship is not transported from Britain with the convicts, for
it is still emergent in Britain in 1788. However, as Pollard (1968), Thompson
(1972) and Littler (1979) have so clearly pointed out, traditional employment
relationships were at this time already under threat or in tatters. The convicts
transported to New South Wales were, in part, a product of such transition. The
convict work experience was not a modern employment relationship but nor was
it traditional. Indeed, it was not the same as that of a slave (Genovese 1967) and
nor was it simply the penal labour system which might today characterise the
employment of convicted felons (Lichtenstein 1996; Fox et al. 1995).
The level of interaction between convict workers and the managers of convict
labour (in the public sector at least) over work organisation, the intensity of work
and even its rewards, was much more elaborate than in traditional labour processes
(Thompson 1984; Littler 1979). More importantly, the strategies that colonial
administrators adopted to assert control of convict labour were complex and
sophisticated, considerably more so than Marx would have anticipated and more
than those that prevailed in most private British industry at the time (Marx 1974;
Pollard 1968). This makes the convict work experience and its management

much more significant than they have so far been credited. Work relations
under the convict system in New South Wales should be seen as the transitional,
non-traditional starting point in the history of the Australian employment
relationship.
In analysing the emergence of the employment relationship the present
article will use labour process theory. This perspective offers a way of systematically analysing the nature of convict work and work relations. It allows insight
into how convict labour was organised, how it was supervised and how work and
convict workers were controlled. The question of control and resistance is an
integral part of labour process analysis (Freidman 1978) and this ensures that the
control of convict workers is seen as a dynamic outcome of the interaction between
colonial administrators and convict workers. Indeed, such interaction can be seen
as one of the first signs of the emergent modern employment relationship. Labour
process theory also emphasises a point that is sometimes overlooked: industrial
relations is not simply about establishing the cost of labour or about how
and who bargains over the terms and conditions of employment. In practice,
industrial relations is as much concerned with influencing the nature of the
work experience. Convict workers may not have been engaged in bargaining over
wage scales, but they were highly active in affecting effort scales (Littler 1979).
The inappropriateness of traditional effort standards to early New South Wales
required ‘the creation of new social mechanisms for constituting’ them (Littler

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1979) and this empowered convict workers to a greater degree than generally
recognised.

BRIEF

LITERATURE REVIEW

This is not a comprehensive or even an exacting shorthand discussion of
existing literature. It is simply an attempt to provide a broad overview of the

evolution of convict literature and to signal some important cross-roads.
Essentially, the neglect of convict labour process has arisen because most
historical inquiry into the convicts sent to New South Wales has concentrated
on their criminality and has viewed them as poor unfortunates brutalised and
exploited (Wood 1922), as shameful degenerates of bad stock (Hancock 1966)
or as a lumpen proletariat (McQueen 1971). In the brief passages where Manning
Clark (1971) actually viewed them as workers, he described the convicts as
‘an alienated working class...with no spiritual or material interest in the products
of its work’. They had to be ‘driven or terrorised into labour’ and ‘physical
terror was the one effective restraint’ that management had to control the labour
process. Robert Hughes (1988) says much the same thing, only in his more
colourful and entertaining style. These accounts ignore entirely the centrality
of conflict in the modern or transitional employment relationship over labour
effort. Even as late as the 1890s Fredrick Taylor noted ‘the natural instinct and
tendency of men . . . to take it easy’ or worse of their ability to ‘systematically
and collectively restrict effort’ (Littler 1979). The convicts did, or attempted to
do, both.
In addition, the unique origins, purpose and penal nature of colonial New
South Wales have also distorted the examination of the convict labour process.
The problems of the convicts as bad, lazy workers and the challenges of penal

settlement have been viewed as unique and wholly exceptional. However, accounts
of the problems of recruiting and motivating an industrial workforce in British
factories from the 1750s to the 1830s are very similar to the complaints levelled
at the convict workers (Pollard 1968; Fox 1985). A variation of the orthodox view
is David Neal’s (1991) argument that the convicts were a slave workforce and so
had to be coerced and brutalised in ways quite different to those required for
the management of a free workforce. This argument also simplifies the convict
experience by ignoring that while the convicts were a coerced workforce they
were not legally slaves but possessed more significant rights than workers in any
slave society (Select Committee on Transportation 1812; Genovese 1967).
Disquiet with orthodoxy is not entirely absent from the literature. Alan
Atkinson (1979) added complexity by examining the incidence of convict protest
and classifying it into four categories: attack; appeal to authority; withdrawal of
labour; and retribution. By emphasising the complexity of individual protest,
Atkinson allowed the convict experience to be viewed in more elaborate and
sophisticated terms. However, its usefulness here is limited by the fact that the
timescale of his focus was largely after 1830, while his perception of ‘protest’ is
different to the industrial relations conception of conflict. The concept of protest
is implicitly passive and reactive. Conflict in an employment relationship can
involve protest, but it can also include actions that reflect strategic initiative.

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In addition, Atkinson’s protests were based on court records, but employment conflict may not always or even mostly be taken to such overt levels of recognition.
Indeed covert conflict can be no less strategic than the strike. Atkinson’s analysis
is important, but its usefulness in employment relations needs to be more carefully and completely thought through than is generally assumed.
Although John Hirst (1983) largely focused on explaining the character of
transportation as a penal response to crime in Britain, he nevertheless recognised
that the controls required to establish and administer it could not be explained
by penal concerns only. There was, he found, a range of disparate influences

shaping the nature of administration and control. The major one was that championed by Jeremy Bentham, that there were alternative penal policies to
transportation, but another influence was the ability of convicts to shape the
nature of their regulation. Echoes of convict protest are also to be found in
the class analysis offered by Connell and Irving (1980) who saw the nature,
incidence and the forms of convict protest as arising largely from the nature of
‘labour relations’ within the convict system. They noted that while government
officials and private settlers complained consistently of the poor quality of the
convict workers, these complaints were more a reflection of convict resistance
to employers rather than their criminal status.
Of course, social historians are not alone in their neglect of the convict.
Industrial relations, management and human resource management writers have
also overlooked the complexity of the labour process of the convict period. In
his otherwise insightful account of the history of Australian labour management
Chris Wright (1995) ignores entirely the convict period. No industrial relations
textbook includes the convict experience in accounts of the history of employment relations in Australia. Many broad labour histories (Turner 1978; Hutson
1983; Buckley and Wheelwright 1988) have viewed the convicts with little more
insight than pity as they waited for the arrival of free workers. An exception to
this is the work by Patmore (1991), although his analysis was informed by the
ground-breaking analysis of Stephen Nicholas’s team of economic historians
(1988) in Convict Workers. Although this work explored the criminality of the

convicts in great statistical detail, the general approach gave emphasis to the
convicts, both male and female, as a workforce possessing skills, experience and
motivations and whose work was organised and structured as a consequence
of interaction between management and workers. Criticised by some social
historians (Macintyre 1989; Shaw 1990; Davidson 1989) Convict Workers has,
nevertheless, added complexity to our understanding of the contribution of
convicts to work, control and class. And, once the mask of criminality is laid
aside and the mantle of victim removed, how can industrial relations continue
to ignore the first Australian workers?

CONVICT

LABOUR PROCESS

The labour process, according to Marx (1974), occurred naturally whenever
human ‘activity, with the help of the instruments of labour, effects an alteration,
designed from the commencement, in the material worked upon’. In other words,
human labour reshapes the natural world to produce the necessities of life.

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In Marx’s view, one of the key dimensions of capitalist labour process was the
dichotomy between labour power and labour use. Marx argued that when capitalists engaged labour, this transaction only purchased the worker’s labour power:
his/her potential. Owners of the means of production (or their managers)
were consequently confronted with the task of extracting actual use from the
potential of the labour they bought. That is, labour power needed to be turned
into labour effort. This challenge meant that under the capitalist labour process,
work had to be organised, labour controlled and motivated in ways that made
labour productive. One of the simplest ways this was done in early British
capitalism, but not in early New South Wales, was to increase the hours of
work (Littler 1982).
It is argued here that, although the state in New South Wales did not purchase convict labour power but seized it through criminal conviction (Byrne 1993),
this did little to simplify the task of managing convict labour. Criminal conviction
essentially only meant that the state acquired convict labour power more cheaply
than most (but perhaps not all) private British employers of free labour. That
this acquisition was unfair, one-sided or compulsory, in no way diminishes the
essential nature of the transaction. In the end, the state, like all employers of
labour, still faced the basic problem of extracting labour use from labour power.
It is also evident that colonial administrations, until 1822, were highly concerned
with labour effort because there was an economic imperative to make convict
labour productive. While the state did not directly generate surplus-value from
convict labour, the critical importance of government activity in constructing
economic and social infrastructure elevated labour effort beyond a normal
public sector role. As a consequence, the state had to develop more ‘systematic’
(Littler 1979) control and motivational strategies to extract labour effort from
convicts (Robbins 2001). However, the convicts also influenced the nature
and effectiveness of the state’s management by a range of counter-measures or
strategies of their own. In other words, up until 1822 there was an interaction
between convict labour and state capital over labour effort.

PROBLEM

OF COERCION

The state did possess greater coercive powers than free employers, but the reliance
on physical punishment can be easily distorted, if not exaggerated. First, there
are very few surviving records of the incidence of flogging before the mid-1820s
(Byrne 1993) and so the significance of flogging cannot now be accurately
quantified. Although there appears to be more evidence of flogging in the late
1820s and particularly the 1830s, these figures cannot be transposed to the
pre-1822 period. Second, whatever the level of physical punishment in the first
decades of the 1800s, there are signs that the state curtailed and moderated its
use. In 1802 Governor King ‘forbade any master from beating his convict
servant’ and threatened to punish offenders (Historical Records of Australia
Series [IHRA I], Vol. III, Government Order, 1802) while Governor Macquarie
limited the number of lashes a single magistrate could order (for any reason) to
either 25 or 50 lashes (HRA I, Vol. VII, Macquarie to Liverpool, 1811; Druitt
1819). Third, that flogging became more systematic and savage after Macquarie
should be no surprise. Governors Brisbane and Darling were explicitly concerned

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with transforming the convict experience. Darling in particular was determined
to make transportation and public labour a punitive exercise (HRA 1, Vol. XIII,
Darling to Bathurst, 1 March 1827).
Finally, the question of flogging and other forms of physical punishment also
need to be understood within the broader context of British society throughout
these years. It was, despite signs of an emerging humanitarianism, fundamentally
brutal (Perkin 1971; Evans 1986; Robertson 2000). In 1788, public flogging was
still commonplace in British civil society, while it was utterly endemic to the
military and naval services (Scott 1996). Indeed, there is strong evidence to
indicate that flogging was a more systematic and enduring feature of service in
the British navy than it was for convicts transported to New South Wales before
1822 (Bigge 1822; Dening 1994). Admittedly, few private employers had the
right to flog their workers, but the basic brutalities of life for ordinary British
workers can be found in many other forms (Engels 1969; Hobsbawn 1974).
For instance, hours of work for free labour in the British factory system were
higher and generally increased faster than those worked by convicts (Nicholas
1989; Rule 1986), while factory work was, until the Factory Acts (Ashton 1972),
reliant on the exploitation of child labour in ways that would horrify modern
sensibilities (Evans 1986).
Having said this, of course there is no doubt that flogging or the threat of
flogging was part of the armoury of labour control in New South Wales. It was
a way that managers of convict labour endeavoured to control and coerce
convicts to their labours. But, restrictions on its use by all employers of convict
labour (both public and private) as well as variations in its use, particularly
during Macquarie’s administration, indicates inherent limitations in it as a
motivating mechanism. Unlike slave societies, no employer of convicts in New
South Wales was able to flog a convict without recourse to the legal system
(Report from the Select Committee 1812). Only Magistrates or the Governor
could legally order convicts to be flogged and this complicated the use of
corporal punishment, allowing, however muted, convicts to defend themselves.
It has been suggested that the magisterial system was biased against the convicts
because most were employers of labour (Macintyre 1985) but this was not a
feature unique to New South Wales. The entire British legal system would
have reflected a similar class bias (Rule 1986; Fox 1985; Thompson 1972).
In contrast, there is evidence that flogging was not a wholly terrorising
control mechanism. Apparently, some convicts were at times prepared to suffer
a flogging to facilitate a change in employer (Bigge 1822). There is also evidence
that during Macquarie’s administration, senior administrators understood the
limitations associated with flogging or other forms of coercive controls. Flogging
damaged scarce labour, while at times, it merely entrenched convict hostility
(Hutchinson 1819). Before 1822, flogging and other forms of corporal punishment must be seen not as a dominant labour control mechanism, but one of many.

GROWTH

AND CONTRACTION OF THE CONVICT GANGS

The formation of work gangs seems apparent from the outset of white settlement at Sydney Cove and this collective organisation of work was necessitated
by the circumstances of settlement. Governor Phillip (1788–1792) faced massive

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labour force problems from the moment settlement began. He had insufficient
numbers of convicts experienced in or familiar with farming (HRA I, Vol. I, Phillip
to Grenville, 1790), no experienced supervisors and a military unwilling to
perform this duty (Moore 1987). To make things worse, the colony faced a
severe and persistent shortage of food that affected labour productivity because
hours of labour had to be significantly reduced (HRA I, Vol. I, Phillip to Nepean,
1792). In addition, the basic technology brought by the First Fleet was found to
be deficient and unsuited to local conditions (HRA I, Vol. I, Phillip to Nepean,
1788). It is argued here that the nature of the work demanded by a new
settlement to accommodate and feed itself as well as the character of its
workforce encouraged work to be organised into gangs or collective parties
of labourers.
Although Phillip does not use the term ‘gang’, it is clear from his General
Muster of Convicts in mid-1790 that much of the work performed in the early
years at Sydney was organised into collective groups. Brick and tile making, transporting bricks, unloading ships, road making, timber fetching and gardening were
clearly all organised into large or small work groups and engaged 57 per cent of
the fit male convict workforce (HRA I, Vol. I, Phillip to Grenville, 1790). Other
jobs, such as bricklaying, some carpentry, the sawing of timber and stone masonry
also probably involved the cooperative organisation of small groups of workers
for at least some of the time.
The first official reference to the term ‘gang’ was made in 1796 by Governor
Hunter (1795–1800) when he wrote, ‘We have now a gang of people employed
collecting sea-shells’ (HRA I, Vol. I, Hunter to Portland, 1796). This was not an
attempt at recreational rehabilitation, rather, its efforts were central to public
building. The shells were used as a source of lime, essential for making cement
(Gibbons 1981). By the end of the 1790s, the term ‘gang’ was commonly used
in reference to the permanent organisation of convicts into work groups. For
example, the Agriculture Gang at Parramatta, the Town Gang, the Goal Gang
and the Shell Gang were officially identified from 1800 through to 1825
(HRA I, Vols II–XI). Other trades or occupationally distinct activities were
also clearly organised into gangs although sometimes not officially designated as
such until about 1813 (HRA I, Vol. VII, Enclosure No. 7, 1813). These included
most building trades, metalworking trades, road making, boat crews, carting
and mining.
Between 1788 and 1830, the size of individual gangs varied between 40 and
60 men, but they commonly consisted of a core of skilled workers supported by
a larger number of unskilled convict workers. This meant the skilled workers
could concentrate their efforts on the more challenging tasks, leaving mundane
and complementary work to be performed by the less skilled. The gang system
also allowed the training of unskilled ‘adult learner’ convicts as multi-skilled
labourers, although this was not a ‘shifting [of] control of training to the employer’
(Littler 1979) but empowered individual convicts (Dyster 1989).
As Table 1 indicates, the size and organisation of the gang system increased
over time, although the paucity of figures in early decades obscures some
contractions of the gang system. Under the interregnum administrations of Grose

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(1792–1794) and Paterson (1794–1795), public sector gang employment probably declined in favour of assignment to the private sector. This is apparent from
Governor Hunter’s complaint that the growth in assignment to free settlers
prior to his appointment ‘had reduced our numbers to work for the public so
very low, that when I arrived, we could scarcely call together twenty [convicts]
for any public purpose at Sydney’ (HRA I, Vol. I, Hunter to Portland, 1796).
Governor King (1800–1806), Hunter’s successor, endeavoured to expand the gang
system (HRA I, Vol. III, King to Portland, 1802), but his failure to do so is
evident significantly from the dilapidated state of the public buildings and
enterprises in Sydney when Governor Bligh (1806–1810) succeeded him (HRA
I, Vol. VI, Bligh to Windham, 1807). It is also unlikely that Bligh expanded the
gangs at the expense of assignment to private settlers given his difficulty with
New South Wales Corp officers such as John Macarthur (Evatt 1965). The
subsequent rebel administrations of Johnstone, Foveaux and Paterson
(1808–1809) would most certainly have contracted the size of the public gangs
and increased the assignment of convicts to private employers (Ward 1992;
Crowley 1968).
With the arrival of Governor Macquarie (1810–1821), the gang system began
to expand and, as Table 1 indicates, by the end of his administration the total
number of male convicts employed within the gang system had risen to nearly
3000. This expansion was driven in part by Macquarie’s public works agenda,
but also by the expansion in the numbers of convicts transported to New South
Wales (Shaw 1966). Although Macquarie’s expansion of the gang system was
largely by necessity, a cost-conscious British government was less impressed
and it instituted a wide-sweeping review of the colony by Commissioner John
Thomas Bigge in 1819. His report, which was produced in 1822, and is arguably
Australia’s first management analysis, damned Macquarie in many ways, but most
significantly in terms of the size of the gang system and its administration.
The unfavourable Bigge report directly led to Macquarie’s resignation and his
replacement by Governor Brisbane (1821–1825).
Table 1 Male workforce of gangs and total number of convicts maintained by
government for New South Wales, various dates
Date

No. gang convicts

1790
1800
1820
1821
1825
1827
1828
1829

360
772
2297
2843
2525
2777
2784
2692

Source: Historical Records of Australia Series I, Vols. I, II, III, VII, VIII, XI and CO 201/119, reel
106-107.

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Responding to Bigge’s recommendations, Brisbane increased the assignment
of convicts to private settlers and began to scale back the gang system. This
contraction, however, was more apparent than real. In 1825 Brisbane claimed
he had reduced the number of gangs and that the number of convicts employed
within them had declined by 1613 since 1821 (HRA I, Vol. XI, Brisbane to
Bathurst, 1825). This contraction though, is not apparent from Table 1 because
Brisbane created a new form of gang, which he did not include in his 1825
figures. In response to a suggestion by Commissioner Bigge, Brisbane established
the Clearing Gangs in 1822. These were small gangs of convict workers
contracted out by the government to free settlers to clear land for a fee per acre
(HRA I, Vol. X, Brisbane to Buchan, 1822). By 1823, these Clearing Gangs
employed 700 convicts and by 1825 employed 1160 (HRA I, Vol. XI, Brisbane
to Bathurst, 1825). In other words, by 1825, the Clearing Gangs had absorbed
most of the gang labour ‘savings’ claimed by Brisbane.
Ultimately, the most significant attack on the nature and function of the
gang system was implemented by Governor Darling (1826–1832), Brisbane’s
successor. Darling curtailed the range of work the gang system performed by
abolishing the Clearing Gangs and many of the Sydney based municipal
gangs, and by downsizing most of the government’s agricultural gangs. This
restructure was only moderated by his recognition that some minimum level of
public employment was necessary to maintain urban and government services.
Privatisation, it seemed, could only go so far ‘without serious injury to the
Public Service’ (HRA I, Vol. XV, Darling to Hay, 1830). Indeed, he had to
reconstruct and expand the road gangs because by 1826 ‘not a road in the
colony was in a decent state of repair’ (Coghlan 1969). Governor Darling’s
road gangs, though, were fundamentally different from those that had operated
under Macquarie. Each gang was smaller, their activities were more closely
coordinated, and they were more systematically regulated through closer
supervision and more elaborate management controls. More importantly, the
new road gangs also became deliberately and indelibly associated with
punishment and harshness (AO/Reel 590, Assignment and Employment of
Convicts, 1828–1830). To supplement the harsher road gangs, Darling also
established Iron Gangs, in which convicts worked on the roads in leg irons
and other forms of restraint.

CONVICT

RESISTANCE

While this overview of the evolution of the gang system has obviously concentrated on the policies and strategies of colonial administrations, these were by
no means the only factors in determining the character and nature of the management of the gang system. Convict workers were also highly active in shaping their
management and were surprisingly successful in influencing the intensity of
their work experiences. Essentially, convict influence was at its greatest between
1788 and 1822 when the purpose of the gang system was to utilise in a productive
manner convict labour. Only after 1822, when the role of the gangs was
more indelibly linked to punishment was convict bargaining power effectively
challenged and restrained by the state.

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The power of some convicts in shaping, indeed controlling, their work experience, is apparent from Governor Phillip’s negotiations with convict agriculture
gangs in the setting of their task work (Tench 1793). Task work was a minimum
quantity of output that individual convict workers or gangs had to achieve in a
given period of time. It established a minimum not a maximum level of labour
effort and was necessary because there were no ‘traditional effort norms’ for
New South Wales conditions (Littler 1979). Hunter (1793), before his appointment as Governor, was also required to ‘softly’ set task work for convict workers
during the time he was in charge of the early settlement of Norfolk Island. In
setting task work for clearing and cultivating land, he too was required to ‘consult’
his convict labourers in order to set realistic and achievable targets. Surely any
consultation with a coerced workforce was a concession and reflects not only
management sensitivity, but also a workforce needing to be persuaded because
it can withhold labour effort (Littler 1979). Some years later in his capacity as
Governor, Hunter confronted a gang of sawyers at the Hawkesbury settlement
who had apparently set their own task work. They had set this at a level which
was, in his opinion, too low, for it gave them half a day free. But his concern
seems not so much with their low labour effort, but with the fact that they openly
bargained with government officials over their reward for any extra labour
above their task work or negotiated directly with free settlers on a contract
basis (HRA I, Vol. II, Government Order, 1798). This gang had minimised
their responsibility to government in order to maximise their private reward
in the free labour market. In response and in anticipation of aspects of
Scientific Management (Littler 1979), Hunter formalised task work for all
government gangs and standardised output for gangs engaged in the same
work. Hunter also attempted to curtail convict influence over hours of work
(effort stabilisation––Littler 1979) by more specifically stipulating start and
finish times, but in this he was less than successful because his successor, Governor
King, was still trying to standardise the working day in 1801 (HRA I, Vol. II,
Government Order, 1801).
Government regulation confronted but did not dampen or defeat convict
resistance. In fact, it seems that during Macquarie’s administration, when the
gang system was most rapidly expanded and its productivity was most
highly prized, convict workers displayed their most influence. And, more
importantly, they displayed influence not through ‘protest’ but through
bargaining strategies. For example, although the allocation to gangs was
more rationally determined under Macquarie, there is evidence that many
individual convicts managed to manipulate their allocation to a gang (Druitt 1819).
Convicts did this by the concealment of skills or by claiming skills they
did not possess. This allocation problem was so serious that Macquarie
demanded more occupational details on each convict from the British
penal authorities, while his administrators increasingly sought to quarantine
newly arrived convicts (Hutchinson 1819). As a consequence, convict transports
were moored away from Sydney Cove and no one was permitted to approach
these vessels until after officials had inspected, interviewed and allocated
newly arrived convicts. This was a management strategy designed to wrest

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influence over labour allocation from covert convict resistance or noncompliance.
Convicts allocated to gangs were also highly active in shaping their employment
relationship. As will be seen, many convict gangs restricted the intensity of their
labour effort, and improved the reward for their labour while some openly resisted
management. For example, in 1817 the Pennant Hills sawyer gang was on strike
for three weeks over its hostility to changes to their work practices and food rations
(Druitt 1819). Such overt, collective action was not, it seems, common and was
in this case savagely dealt with. But there was a postscript to this dispute, which
suggests something more than protest. Although defeated, these sawyers, and
indeed most other saw-milling gangs, continued to deliberately restrict their work
output. Their task work quota was increased from 400 feet of lumber per week
to 700 feet, but they continued to complete this task work by Thursday, leaving
Friday and Saturday for their private work (Druitt 1819). They refused to work
continuously for the government.
Under Macquarie, there is considerable evidence of endemic convict influence
over the gang labour process. This influence was collective and, most alarming
to senior management, involved the collusion between gang overseer and gang
workers. Bigge (1822) wrote:
I can add my own testimony during a period of six months residence in the Town
of Sydney, to the inactivity of the gangs of workmen, whenever they thought that
they were unobserved, and the little dependence that is to be placed in the overseers
for correcting it.

The discerning behaviour of the convict workers in this respect can be seen as
a symptom of a covert militancy rather than mere protest. Although engaged in
coerced labour, they were not a passive workforce, but were clearly prepared
to vary their work effort when circumstances permitted. There is evidence this
‘inactivity’ was endemic and was identified in a strategy the convicts called the
‘Hawk’.
The Hawk was a convict selected by a gang to keep watch at a discrete
distance and vantage point in order to give ‘a private signal’ warning the gang
of the approach of any figure of authority (Druitt 1819). Protected by their
Hawk, a gang could idle away part of their working day undetected. Like their
‘flash’ language (Ward 1974) the gang convicts developed a secret code of
signals but, more than this, the convicts were ‘always successful in concealing’
their private signals (Druitt 1819). Despite the penal system’s explicit reliance
on the propensity of convicts to inform on one another, none in the gangs ever
revealed the secrets of their Hawk’s warning signals. This is not surprising, given
the egalitarian nature of the Hawk arrangement. It was inherently ‘collective’ for
it benefited all convicts in a gang, not just a few.
Faced with convict resistance, covert or overt––collective or individual,
Macquarie was forced to design more elaborate and bureaucratic controls over
the labour process. However, in doing this, he could not adopt brutal or
‘simple’ control strategies (Edwards 1979) because he needed, not a passive or
defeated workforce, but one that was productive. The Grass Cutters gang is an

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example of where the administration deemed it prudent to offer concessions
(soft human resources policies) to a body of workers in exchange for an increase
in their task work. Commissioner Bigge (1822) explained that:
Those of the grass-cutters that are well conducted, are allowed to lodge in the town
[Sydney], and after they have procured the quantity that is given as a task to each
man, they are allowed to dispose of the surplus for themselves; those likewise who
have been able to furnish on the Fridays the quantity required for that day and the
Saturday, are allowed the use of the government boats to procure it for themselves
on the Saturday, and to sell it in the town. The daily task to the grass-cutters has
been raised lately from 40 to 60 bundles of grass for each man . . .

There is no evidence that the grass-cutters resisted this increase in their task
work. However, it is clear that, to encourage an acceptable minimum level of
labour productivity from the convicts employed in this gang, a number of very
significant concessions were given to them. If well-behaved, they were able to
enjoy independent, private (non-work) lifestyles outside the Hyde Park Barracks
and, in this way, they minimised the penal system’s regulation of their lives. This
example also highlights the fact that task work divided a convict’s work effort
into publicly and privately owned spheres. As long as the convict grass-cutter
produced the required task work during his public employment, he was then
allowed to work in a private capacity for part of the day or week. And it was in
this latter capacity that the system allowed reward for greater personal effort.
When working for themselves, the convict grass-cutters could increase their
personal rewards by increasing their work effort. But more than this, the
personal or private work effort of these convicts was subsidised by the public
sector. Government property, in the form of the boats, tools and even the
vacant land upon which they harvested the grass, was made freely available to
them. In other words, the state sanctioned private enterprise amongst those
convicts who conformed to acceptable habits and patterns of behaviour.
Clearly, Macquarie was prepared both to confront and to accommodate
convict bargaining power because he needed convict cooperation in the
labour process of the gang system. This flexibility is also apparent in his use of
the Ticket-of-Leave and pardons (Ellis 1958). Macquarie gave well-behaved convicts a ‘ticket’ to live and work outside the convict system within a proscribed
region and rewarded many others with a conditional or full pardon. While
these legal devices have been readily seen as evidence of Macquarie’s liberal
humanism or as part of his penal management, they should also be understood
by industrial relations analysts as elaborate motivational rewards for convict
workers. Macquarie was active in the ‘Manufacture of Consent’ (Burawoy 1979).
Under Macquarie, the hierarchy of command within and over the gangs was
made more sophisticated by the creation of new supervisory positions and by
delineating more clearly and formally the differing levels of authority, power and
function of supervisory managers. Macquarie retained the traditional position of
gang Overseer but created the new positions of Principal Overseer, (who was
commonly in charge of a group of gangs) and Deputy Overseer (Robbins 2002).
Macquarie created new divisions of labour within his management structures

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(Littler 1979). Attention was also directed toward transforming other positions
within the convict system. For example, in detailing the duties associated with
the superintendence of the Government Stock gang, Macquarie anticipated many
features of the modern job description (HRA I, Vol. VII Macquarie to Bathurst,
1813). In this document, Macquarie defined core activities and responsibilities,
as well as those that needed to be performed occasionally or as need demanded.
He defined clear objectives, lines of authority and delegation and he formalised
the reporting processes for this superintendent. In other words, under Macquarie
there is evidence of the formalisation of the hierarchy of control within the gang
system.
With the elongation of his chains of command Macquarie also instigated what
may now be seen as ‘a separated monitoring system of subordinate activities’
(Littler 1979). He made his superintendents produce detailed work reports on
the activities and performance of their gangs and these documents were
compiled and submitted monthly and/or weekly and detailed how much work
was performed by individual gangs or work sites such as the Lumber Yards in
Sydney and Parramatta (Robbins 2000). Weekly work reports recorded the
number of convicts in each gang, trade or work team and the quantity of
work performed (ML A2086–A2088, CY Reel 1116, Weekly Work Sheets). For
relevant trades, these reports also detailed the quantity of raw materials used,
the weight of finished products and the amount of waste. These records
were designed to record convict employment, measure labour productivity,
circumvent theft and help set work task amounts. They were mechanisms of
bureaucratic control and were both elaborate and exhaustive (Edwards 1979).
After the departure of Macquarie, the underlying rationale of the gang
system changed. Both Brisbane and Darling replaced the productive imperative
behind gang labour with one that was increasingly punishment-orientated. But
neither did this simplistically, for both extended Macquarie’s elaborate control
strategies. Both, for example, addressed the problem of controlling convicts
by restructuring the gang system and by improving the character and nature of
supervisory controls. They improved overseer motivation and accountability
by enmeshing convict overseers in a structure of promotion, reward and status,
which was designed to shift their allegiances away from the convicts and into the
arms of the system of penal administration (HRA I, Vol. XII, Government Order,
1826). Accountability was improved by imposing greater scrutiny of work
measurement through new positions of supervision. The role Superintendent,
Assistant Superintendent, Assistant Surveyor of Roads or even the short-lived
position of Sub-Inspectors of the Clearing Gangs, were changed to be more
explicitly and directly involved in maintaining control of the overseers (Robbins
2002).
These positions were all required to more strictly monitor the allocation of
rations and clothing, to muster the gangs more frequently, to more closely set
and evaluate the quantity and quality of work performed by the gangs and to
generate even more detailed weekly and monthly reports of work performance
(AO Reel 590; AO Reel 593 4/1916). These reports became particularly
comprehensive documents. They generated detailed statistical measurement of

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work achieved, including estimates, for example, of the amount of dirt removed
from a road to the quantity of rock and gravel spread, how many men were
employed at what tasks on what days, and where they worked. However, while
these reports did not often identify individual convict workers, they certainly
measured minutely the effectiveness of the overseers of each gang.
Under Darling, the functions of colonial government were more rationally
departmentalised with clearer distinctions between the roles of each department,
while within them, a more professional and effective administrative bureaucracy
was created (Fletcher 1984). Under the stricter controls of Darling, the ability
of convicts to utilise the Hawk arrangement was greatly reduced. There was far
less scope for negotiating informally with their overseers because task work was
no longer relied upon to set an acceptable quantity of work output. In fact, it
was replaced by unremitting and seemingly never-ending toil, for Darling also
increased hours of work (HRA I, Vol. XIII, Darling to Bathurst, 1827). By 1830,
the convict had to work from sunrise to sunset and the overseer was required
and forced to impose a regime of regular and constant toil.
Nevertheless, it would be wrong to conclude that the changes implemented
by Brisbane and Darling stopped all convict resistance or attempts to influence
the labour process. The growth in the number of convicts sent to the Road and
Iron Gangs and the penal settlements are testimony to the fact that convicts
continued to resist their government and private employers (HRA I, Vol. XV,
Return of Convicts in Government Employment, 1829). Many were sentenced
to these gangs or prisons for work-related conflicts, such as neglect of work or
disobeying lawful commands. While Governor Darling liked to describe the Road
and Iron Gang convicts as ‘double distilled villains’, at least some of them were
convicted of ‘crimes’ that can now be seen as attempts to influence employment
relations rather than as merely acts of dishonesty (HRA I, Vol. XIV, Darling to
Huskisson, 1828). Convict resistance to management control of the labour process
did not disappear, even within the road gangs. Significant numbers of convicts
working with these gangs were convicted of work-related crimes and punished
by being sentenced to an iron gang, to being lumbered, flogged or incarcerated
in a penal settlement (AO 590 Weekly Work Reports 1828-1830). John Hirst
(1983) also describes the difficulty overseers faced in trying to assert control over
convict work attendance and performance on the Busby Tunnel, an underground
water supply scheme for Sydney, constructed between 1827 and 1837. Convicts
employed in this semi-public work gang continued to display an ability to
negotiate greater leniency from their overseers.
Convict resistance to management control and their attempts to moderate the
employment experience were not eradicated; although, it is fair to say resistance
became more difficult to express and was more swiftly and brutally dealt with.
Perhaps as a consequence of the curtailment of convict resistance, others in
colonial society began to champion their cause. By 1827, The Monitor, a Sydneybased newspaper ‘written expressly for the convict population’, began to
campaign against the treatment of convict workers by Governor Darling’s
administration (HRA I, Vol. XIII, Darling to Bathurst, 1 March 1827). As the
ability of convicts to influence their employment relations declined, other avenues

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of protest were utilised, reflecting the increasing complexity of the social and
political divisions in colonial New South Wales.

CONCLUSION
The management of convict labour can be divided into two distinct periods. In
the first, from 1788 to 1821, the labour process of the convict gangs, how their
work was organised, supervised and measured, reflected the state’s need for labour
productivity and its inability to completely dominate the convicts. In other words,
the state had to adopt bureaucratic control mechanisms and strategies in order
to extract labour effort from the labour power of the convicts. Simple, direct or
even brutal control strategies were mostly inappropriate. That the state was
required to develop positive as well as negative rewards, that it could not
maximise labour effort and that it conceded shorter hours of labour and other
freedoms or concessions, highlights the bargaining power of convicts. The
convicts were able to influence the labour process and influence the benefits
they derived from their labours or at least the nature or effectiveness of the
physical controls imposed on them. There is evidence that the state was
aware of convict bargaining power and attempted both to confront as well as
to accommodate it.
In the second period, from 1822 to 1830, the situation was quite different.
During these years, the purpose of convict labour and, therefore, convict
management, was redefined. After 1822, the vast majority of convicts were
assigned to free settlers, while the gang system operated not as a productive
organisation for the performance of public labour, but as a means of imposing
punishment. More importantly, this punishment imperative was designed to
control labour not only in New South Wales, but also in Britain. The British
government believed a more severe convict experience would better deter
crime in Britain (HRA I, Vol. XII, Bathurst to Darling, 1826) as well as more
effectively subdue convicts assigned to private settlers in the colony. In this way,
the public gang system strengthened the managerial prerogative of private
employers of convict labour and for the first time, but not the last, public sector
employment practices set the pace for the private sector. The severity of the
convict gangs was also designed to confront and weaken convict bargaining
power, which it did very significantly. However, the organisation of harsh work
gangs did not stop