What I'm Reading - June 2026

Chris Feik (ed.), ‘John Hirst Selected Writings’, Collingwood: La Trobe University Press, 2025

On his own admission, John Hirst (1942-2016) was ‘ropeable’ when Robert Hughes published The Fatal Shore (1987), Hughes claiming that his was the first book to seriously examine the convict experience. Hirst's own work, Convict Society and its Enemies (1983), had been published several years earlier, and as Frank Bongiorno explains in this selection of Hirst's writings, it ‘announced the arrival of an historian of real originality’.

Hirst was surprisingly gentle in his treatment of Hughes (given how 'original' Hughes was in his treatment of convict society), but when Convict Society and The Strange Birth of Colonial Democracy were published as a single volume in 2008, Hirst titled the book, Freedom on the Fatal Shore. He summarised his central conclusion in the preface: ‘This was not a society which had to become free; its freedoms were well established from the earliest time.’

John Hirst was the first historian to make the point that early Australian convict society was a penal settlement not a gaol, and to illustrate what that meant with a multitude of examples. My copy of Freedom on the Fatal Shore is well-thumbed with underlining, marginal notes and additional endnotes, and occupies a prime location on my bookshelf. Fatal Shore does not.

So it was with great joy that last year, I acquired a recently released collection of his essays, edited by one of his former publishers, with introductory notes by three of his former colleagues. It covers much more than convict society, which has given me a much deeper appreciation of his approach, but my primary purpose in reading (and re-reading parts of) this collection was to better understand his conclusions about the convict system.

Hirst always said that researching Convict Society had changed his mind: 'I began my researches with the usual assumption that convict society was cruel and degraded with masters being corrupted by the power they held over the convicts.' He had started by asking how such a brutalised society had transformed into a free democratic society and came to realise that it was a society ‘which had always preserved crucial legal rights and economic opportunities for convicts’.

As a former Cabinet Secretary and head of a state government department, I have long been fascinated by how convict society worked, so I was delighted to discover that Hirst was ‘very sympathetic to the problems of governing’. Historians have paid little attention to the commissaries and clerks, the superintendents of works and overseers of work gangs charged with implementing the orders of the great and the good.

It is important to know that a week after the First Fleet sailed from the Solent, Phillip issued an instruction that all of the (male) convicts were to be freed from their irons. (The women were never kept in chains unless they were unruly.) This was decent of him, but waving your arm and making a pronouncement does not set convicts free. Who cut the manacles from the convicts’ legs? Who decided which convicts could not be trusted with such freedom? And how was the ship managed with so many felons wandering about the upper deck?

To be clear, there are aspects of Hirst’s approach with which I have long disapproved. He covers too long a time period, making it difficult to identify appreciate the developments in the system over time, and in covering so much ground, he sometimes misunderstands what was going on.

By way of example – in speaking of First Fleet society, he says that the marines ‘went on strike’ and refused to supervise the convict workers. This is the old canard. There was no strike: it was simply not part of the marines’ duty to serve as convict overseers (although numbers of them did).

‘Phillip created a police force and had no choice but to staff it with convicts.’ Sort of. The idea of a convict nightwatch (in reality, it was closer to a police force) was put forward by the convicts themselves. Hirst also misunderstood the role of the marine commandant, Major Ross, in the protest by the marines at being arrested by the nightwatch for being in the female convicts’ camp after taptoo. Ross approved of the nightwatch, and one of his convict overseers was appointed as its first principal, but as the commanding officer, he had an obligation to warn the Governor of the men's anger.

I don’t agree with all of his arguments on the origins of Australian egalitarianism, particularly on what Hirst called the ‘egalitarianism of manners’ – ‘Jack is as good as his master’. Because he did not spend long enough in the original sources, Hirst missed the strong evidence of an inverted snobbishness in First Fleet society – a middle-class convict (and head of the nightwatch) calling out a marine private and his wife for associating with convicts, and warning they could lose their reputation by doing so.

In spite of his legendary status, I wonder if Hirst would not struggle to get published today. In an article entitled, ‘Nothing But Bad’, written in 1988, Hirst lamented the ahistorical tendency to read the past in light of modern values: ‘History as skittle alley, where people are set up merely to be knocked over’, with writers checking the ideological soundness of past society.

'Faced with the amazing phenomenon of eleven ships bringing convicts halfway round the world to found a new society, they can only regret that Governor Phillip did not order the production of an environmental impact statement before they landed.'

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