In March 1825, the editor of the Hobart Town Gazette and Van Diemen’s Land Advertiser sat down to write about what he saw as one of the most pressing problems facing the infant colony. His concern was not the shortage of labour, the violence of the frontier, or the brutal conditions endured by convicts under assignment. It was the men walking the streets of Hobart Town who had no visible means of support.
Hobart Town is infested by these caterpillars on the verdure of morality, he wrote, calling for all such persons to be committed as rogues and vagabonds. In the absence of any evidence that they possessed a legal source of revenue, he argued, they should be locked up. The colony, he warned, faced increasingly fatal results if these men were allowed to prowl its public paths unmolested.[1]
The men he was describing were emancipists: transported convicts who had served their sentences and were legally free. Free, but without money, without property, without the social networks that might have sustained them in the communities they had left behind in Britain and Ireland. The transportation system had taken years of their life and labour, and deposited them, at the end of it, onto the streets of a town with no mechanism for supporting them. Their poverty was the entirely predictable consequence of a system designed to extract labour, not to rehabilitate or resettle the people it processed.
The editor saw none of this. What he saw was moral failure made visible. A poor man on the street was not a man in difficult circumstances: he was a veteran in the rank of infamy, a man whose very idleness was proof of his criminal nature. The logic was circular and it was deliberate: these men had no money, therefore they must be stealing, therefore they should be imprisoned. The possibility that a free man might simply be poor did not arise, because poverty was not understood as a condition requiring a social response. It was understood as a character flaw requiring punishment.
Image: TROVE
The legal instrument the editor was reaching for had a long history before it arrived in Van Diemen’s Land. English vagrancy law, codified most recently in the Vagrancy Act of 1824, defined vagabonds as persons wandering without fixed residence, without visible means of support, or unable to give a satisfactory account of themselves to a magistrate. The law was a status offence: it required no proof of a specific criminal act, only proof of a condition. To be poor and mobile was, in itself, an offence.[2]
Image: The Statutes Project
In Van Diemen’s Land this imported legal framework landed in a society where it had enormous practical utility for those in authority. The convict system was built around surveillance, fixed location, and the relationship between assigned servant and master. The unattached, mobile person – the man who belonged nowhere, answered to no one, and could not account for his movements – was a direct threat to that system of control. The vagrancy charge allowed magistrates to act on suspicion rather than evidence. It allowed the propertied classes to look at a poor man and see a criminal without the inconvenience of proof.
What made this particularly punishing in the colonial context was the complete absence of any poor relief infrastructure. In England and Wales, the poor law – however inadequate and punitive in its own right – at least provided some mechanism for supporting the destitute. Parishes were legally obliged to provide some help to the poor of their district. In Van Diemen’s Land no such obligation existed. The Hobart Town Benevolent Society, established in 1832, collapsed by 1839, and did not reconstitute itself until 1859. Even when it operated, relief was far from unconditional. The reconstituted Society based its approach on what it called a scientific method of welfare, borrowed from the Charity Organisation Society of London, which meant in practice a rigorous sorting of applicants into the deserving and undeserving poor.
Image: 1955 TAHO NS3195-1-1263
Charity Officers questioned applicants closely. A man who was willing to work in the Society’s wood yard demonstrated that his poverty was not the product of laziness – and only then might he qualify for assistance. Recipients received rations rather than money, lest they spend it on drink, and those rations were kept deliberately minimal so as not to encourage dependency. As historian Joan Brown observed, charitable institutions in Van Diemen’s Land were established not out of humanitarian concern but as a means of restricting the movement of those deemed undeserving and controlling their social interaction. The ex-convict on the street, a man whose history marked him as morally compromised before he opened his mouth, rarely passed that test.[3]
The result was a revolving door that contemporaries noticed and complained about without ever questioning its logic. Vagabonds arrested in the rural districts surrounding Launceston were conveyed to the Launceston city gaol at considerable expense, held briefly, and released onto Launceston streets — where they promptly became Launceston’s problem rather than the district’s. The ratepayers of Launceston were aggrieved. Nobody asked why these men had been vagabonding in the first place.
for begging, Launceston,1919
Image source TAHO LMSS754-2-217
The government’s own response followed a similar logic. Governor Arthur had established the rudiments of a welfare system in the late 1820s and early 1830s, but it grew directly out of the convict system and retained its character — institutional, controlling, and punitive. The aged, the infirm, and the mentally ill were confined rather than supported. Port Arthur served for a time as an invalid depot. The New Norfolk asylum absorbed those who could be classified as insane, along with many who simply had nowhere else to go. The Poor Asylum in Hobart caught those who fitted no other category. Each institution operated on a principle stated with remarkable candour in the 1871 Royal Commission into Charitable Institutions.
The Commission declared that it would oppose any attempt to make institutions for the poor more comfortable than the home an honest, hardworking man could hope to earn for himself in old age through temperance and thrift. Public charity, it continued, should not be a benefit so much as a slight softening of the consequences of a person’s own failure to live by decent principles.[4]
According to the reasoning of the members of this Royal Commission, poverty was not misfortune. It was the consequence of personal failure, and charity existed not to relieve poverty but to slightly soften the punishment the poor had earned. The institutions existed to confirm that verdict, not to challenge it.
Image: TAHO PH30-1-5093
The people who did not fit any institutional category – not old enough, not sick enough, not certifiably insane – remained on the street, where they could be arrested as a vagabond, briefly confined, and released to begin the cycle again. The Launceston ratepayers who complained about this arrangement were not wrong about the mechanics of it. They were simply asking the wrong question. The problem was not where these people were being released. The problem was that a society which had transported them, worked them, and freed them with nothing had then built a legal and institutional apparatus specifically designed to punish them for being poor.
Two hundred years later, Tasmania has a welfare state, however imperfect, that the emancipists of 1825 could not have imagined. And yet in 2021, 2,350 people in Tasmania were homeless: a figure that had risen 45% since 2016. More than 120,000 Tasmanians live below the poverty line. One in every 81 Tasmanians sought homelessness assistance in 2021–22, a higher rate than the national average. On any given day, 42 requests for help go unmet.[5]
The structural explanation for this is not difficult to find. The chronic shortage of affordable rental housing in Tasmania is the primary driver of homelessness: an economic condition, not a moral failing. Housing costs have risen faster than incomes. The supply of social housing has not kept pace with need. These are facts about markets and policy, not about the character of the people sleeping in cars or on friends’ couches or in crisis shelters.
And yet the instinct to moralise poverty – to locate its cause in the individual rather than in the conditions that produce it – has proved extraordinarily durable. The language has changed. Nobody writes about caterpillars on the verdure of morality any more, or calls for vagabonds to be committed lest they revert to their second nature. But the permission structure that language created, the licence to look at a visibly poor person and see a problem of social order rather than a fellow human in difficulty, remains active. It surfaces whenever a council or parliament debates move-on powers for rough sleepers, whenever a letter to the editor complains about people begging in the mall, whenever a state or federal politician finds an identifiable group to blame for the anxieties of people who feel the economy is leaving them behind.
The editor of the Hobart Town Gazette was not writing about a problem unique to 1825. He was road-testing an argument that has never really gone out of fashion.
[1] Hobart Town Gazette and Van Diemen’s Land Advertiser, 25 March 1825
[2] 5 George IV C.83: An Act for the Punishment of idle and disorderly Persons, and Rogues and Vagabonds, in that Part of Great Britain called England.
[3] https://www.findandconnect.gov.au/entity/hobart-benevolent-society
[4] Report of the Royal Commission into Charitable Institutions, Legislative Council of Tasmania, 1871
[5] https://sheltertas.org.au/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/ST_FACT-SHEET_Homelessness-March2023-1.pdf
