Where did the convicts of the first fleet live?

Answer 1

At first, there were no buildings, so the convicts ate and slept out in the open. Once tents were erected, they had some shelter, but huts were not built for many months.

They lived at Port Jackson, the site where Sydney now stands.

Answer 2

Whilst on board the ships, the convicts of the First Fleet lived below decks, in the bottom part of the ship, except for the rare occasions when Captain Arthur Phillip deemed it safe for them to come up above the decks.

Once in New South Wales, they had no shelter except for tents at first. Lean-tos and open slab shacks were used by the male convicts when enough timber was gathered, while the women who were not assigned as servants eventually had a large, cold barrack constructed for their shelter. Some of the women also married other convicts or even marines, so they lived in a basic hut.

Answer 3

Convict colonies were at Sydney Cove, Risdon Cove in Tasmania (then Van Diemen's Land), the Mornington Peninsula at Port Phillip (although that one lasted only a year), Moreton Bay (Humpybong and later Brisbane), Fremantle and Newcastle. From the 1820s, women convicts were housed at the Female Factory in Parramatta.

The earliest convicts lived in tents and rough huts built from local timber, and later, stone buildings were constructed. Many convicts were sent to work for farmers and free settlers, and these people would provide their accommodation.

Answer 4

In the early years, convicts were put to work immediately on building projects, particularly roads, and farming. New buildings needed to be constructed as the first shelters were just tents and lean-tos.

The convicts were the ones who did all the foundational work - tilling, planting and harvesting seed; establishing their own farms or setting up their own trades once they were free; constructing the roads and bridges of the new colony while on the road gangs; felling the timber, making the bricks, literally constructing so many of the buildings in the early decades, such as the first administrative buikdings in Sydney, and early churches.

Many of the original convict-built buildings are no linger standing, but those that have survived until now include the following:

• The 'Round House', Fremantle
• Fremantle Prison
• Old Government House, Sydney
• Hyde Park Barracks, Sydney
• Convict buildings on Cockatoo Island in Sydney Harbour
• The Old Windmill on Wickham Terrace, Brisbane

Answer 5

Life for the convicts who were sent to Australia was very difficult to begin with. They travelled for eight and a half months far from their home country, mostly being kept below decks. The last couple of months they were on very rough seas, and were hardly allowed up on deck at all, for their own safety.

The convicts were most commonly punished by being placed on reduced rations, meaning they were given less food, or certain privileges such as tobacco, tea or sugar were withdrawn.

The Cat o' nine tails was a particularly vicious type of punishment. This was a whip with nine cords of leather, each of which had a metal triangle embedded in the end. A convict was given between 10 and 50 lashes (in some case more), and within just a few lashes, the flesh would be ripped out, sometimes to the point where the bone was exposed.

Once they arrived in Australia, it was a different matter.

Australia was very strange for the convicts and settlers of the First Fleet. When the first European settlers arrived in Australia, they found a hot, humid country. The bushland was thick and unlike anything they had at home - instead of green, grassy hills and green trees, they found rocky terrain and strange, grey-green trees that smelled strong and sweet. There was an eerieness to the bushland, because it seemed all the same to their inexperienced eyes, and stories of the Aborigines were exaggerated to make the convicts fear stepping outside the camps. Any who did escape quickly became lost, and many convict bones lie scattered in the bush where they became hopelessly lost, and unable to fend for themselves. There were strange hopping animals - the 'kangaroo' - and strange, noisy birds such as the kookaburra and cockatoos.

The heat and humidity made it difficult to motivate the convicts to work, and English tools and implements were unusable in the tough Australian soil. very few of the convicts had any skill in farming, and as a result, in the early years the colony nearly starved. It took some time for Sydney Cove to become self-sufficient, and for the first few years, the colony relied entirely on the supplies of the second and third fleets.

Answer 6

Once the convicts reached Australia, they were fed much the same foods as they were given on the First Fleet. They still initially had access to salted beef and pork which had been brought from England, and stock animals which had been purchased from Cape Town could be bred for meat. There were grains such as flour and barley, which could be made into bread, and because there were dairy cows, this meant there was also access to cheese and butter.

Work quickly commenced on trying to grow food for the colony, but in the early years, crops struggled because of the unfamiliar climate and the fact that British seed either had not survived the voyage or just couldn't grow in Australia's harsher conditions. There were no further ships until the Second Fleet, which only brought enough for the convicts of the fleet, and a supply ship from South Africa was wrecked, meaning those much-needed supplies were lost. It was not until the Third Fleet in 1791 that extra supplies were brought, and by then the crops in Australia were also sufficiently established to start feeding the people (including the convicts) properly.