Charles Darwin – In Australiamilitary barracks which housed the commander, three sergeants, twenty-four rank-and-
file soldiers and eleven mounted police. Convicts sent from England were normally
freed after serving seven years as convict labour and given a ticket-of-leave, subject to
not committing any other offences. Darwin would have listened to the conversations
in the military barracks and learnt something about the real Australia and about the
various classes of convicts or former convicts in the district, as he explains:
A ‘squatter’ is a freed or ‘ticket of leave’ man, who builds a hut of bark in unoccupied
ground, buys or steals a few animals, sells spirits without a licence, buys and sells some
stolen goods, and so at last becomes rich and turns farmer: He is the horror of all his honest
neighbours. – A ‘crawler’ is an assigned Convict, who runs away and lives how he can by
labour and petty theft. - The ‘Bush Ranger’ is an open villain, who lives by highway robbery
and plunder; generally they are desperate and will sooner be killed than taken alive. – In the
country it is necessary, to understand these three names, for they are in perpetual use.On his return to Sydney, Darwin visits Captain Phillip Parker King, the Australian-
born commander of the Beagle’s first surveying voyage, at his property near Penrith
and then travels to Parramatta to visit King’s brother-in-law Hannibal MacArthur.
Here the dinner conversations would have been about sheep, wool, acquiring wealth,
as well as the never-ending debate and complaint about the new society that was being
formed by the convict emancipists now living together with the free settlers. Darwin
saw that the whole community was rancorously divided over almost every subject.
How disgusting, exclaimed Darwin, to be waited on by a man who the day before
was by your representation flogged for some trifling misdemeanour. However later in
his 1839 journal Darwin wrote that as a means of converting vagabonds most useless
in one hemisphere into outwardly honest citizens in another, the transportation of
convicts to Australia had succeeded to a degree perhaps unparalleled in history.
After the Beagle finished its chronometric measurements in Sydney the next port
of call was Hobart. Here Darwin explored the town and its surroundings, described
the geology and was entertained by the surveyor-general, George Frankland, at his
house at Battery Point, where Darwin said he spent ‘the most agreeable evening since
leaving England’. Here Darwin learnt of the disgraceful treatment of the Tasmanian
Aborigines by English settlers, as after just thirty years the entire Aboriginal population
had either been murdered or banished from their native lands and sent into exile. This
gave Darwin pause to think about the rapid destruction that one ‘variety’ of species
can inflict upon another, as he wrote in his 1839 journal:
All the aborigines have been removed to an island in Bass’s Straits, so that Van Diemen’s89