how colonial vagrancy laws punished the poor

Image from Punch magazine, London, promoting emigration as a solution to vagrancy, July 8, 1848. Alexander Turnbull Library.

Who were the vagrants?

Vagrancy^[8] emerged as a habit of life in the aftermath of convict transportation, as the colonies were being transformed by waves of migration from the 1850s, reaching a high point in the 1870s. Many immigrants lacked extended family support networks. Movement between the colonies was common.

Vagrants were everywhere in the colonial world. Women and men, young^[9] and old, from many different backgrounds, could be arrested as vagrants. They endured poverty and life on the streets until they attracted police attention. Sentences of one week or up to three months in prison gave them shelter and food for short periods of time.

They were women like Margaret Kegan from New Zealand’s North Island, who had “no home to go to, and no means of living”. In 1902, she pleaded guilty to vagrancy and asked to be “locked up”.

Some people charged with vagrancy wanted to keep moving, cheerfully pledging to “clear out” from places where they had been identified as a threat.

The policing and prosecution of vagrants was increasingly used as a means to maintain social order. Vagrancy was viewed as a social problem of the “criminal and pauper classes”. Thousands of people were charged and convicted as vagrants over the second half of the 19th century. Many of them were charged more than once.

In the regular Police Gazettes of each colony, vagrants were listed as “discharged prisoners”. These reports were crafted to aid police in their work, and the physical descriptions bear witness to the harsh realities of a life of vagrancy. Men and women arrested for vagrancy bore tattoos, their mouths were missing teeth, their limbs were scarred, notably deformed or burned. Some were blind or one-eyed.

Sundowner postcard, 1904. Wikimedia Commons.

Most of those charged were Europeans. Indigenous people – from many displaced Aboriginal clans and Māori iwi – were subjected to other, more severe interventions: mostly violence, dislocation and segregation, as well as specific and harsh legal controls over time under the guise of “protection”.

In the late-19th century, economic depression across the colonies created itinerant populations of men looking for seasonal work in rural areas, and there were growing numbers of impoverished families and single people in Sydney, Melbourne, Hobart and Auckland. By the first two decades of the 20th century, vagrancy had become a familiar part of the landscape. Cultural meanings came to be attached to be attached to the vagrant, who was mostly viewed as masculine, even though, in reality, many vagrants were women. Despite the sentimental depictions of the adventures of men “on the swag” found in poetry and fiction, there was little about the hardship^[10] of mobility that could be said to be romantic.

Read more: Hidden women of history: 'the Buzzwinker' Ellen Miles, child convict, goldfields pickpocket and vagrant^[11]

How can we find out more about the lives of vagrants?

In histories of crime and punishment, lives can be glimpsed in shadowy portraits. Some people stare at us from old prison photographs^[12]. Archives, libraries and repositories have started to showcase 19th and 20th century police mugshots^[13] in accessible online collections. The digitisation of records, including criminal records, expands our visual sense of the past.

It is more difficult to find out how people lived as vagrants. How can we find out more about their precarious existences: the experiences of endless walking, hunger, thirst, rough sleeping, and encounters with people along the way?

Street life^[14] in the emerging cities of Australia and New Zealand was often smelly, dirty, dangerous and noisy. In the urban environment, there were conflicts over footpaths, litter, drainage and the wafts of noxious trades. People who were making their way or seeking shelter in the lanes, alleys, alcoves and public parks experienced all of these.

Emily Reynolds. https://vagrantsandmurderesses.com/

Vagrants could be annoying and threatening to other people. They may also have been the easy targets of complainants who could tackle the politics of space by blaming vagrants for vandalism or taking up in places where they were not wanted.

The recorded complaints against vagrants read as familiar documents of dispute over social spaces and places; they are opportunistic in their portrayal of vagrants as aggressive and destructive. But they also tell us something about the people behind the label of “vagrant”.

In June of 1863, John Ferguson, who owned a business in George Street, wrote to the Mayor of Sydney^[15] to ask for repairs to his window that was broken by a vagrant named John Hendon, drawing attention to the problem of casual damage by vagrants in the city.

In September 1877, the Australian Jockey Club complained^[16] to the Sydney Municipal Council about damage to the fence separating the racecourse from the water reserve caused by a fire lit by vagrants. In October 1879, Sydney vagrants were again singled out^[17] for their lack of regard for others by William McDonald, who suggested they would “rendezvous” and dump rubbish if he was forced to remove a fence on his property at Lombard Place, west of George Street.

In each of these cases, “vagrants” were named as a group, blamed for unsociable behaviour, and characterised as an annoyance or worse by the complainant. Borders, such as fences, were important to keep vagrants out and away from “civilised” spaces, but also to prevent them from occupying empty ones.

Read more: Hidden women of history: Kate Cocks, the pioneering policewoman who fought crime and ran a home for babies – but was no saint^[18]

‘The Cockroach’

For women, the streets were dangerous places. Being a heavy user of alcohol and living as a vagrant made some women vulnerable to violence enacted by men.

The cases of women raped, murdered or left to die on the streets in colonial cities are shocking in their casual brutality and in what they reveal about attitudes to women. These include Catherine Owen, a woman of 50 who was “outraged to death” by a group of young men at Waterloo in Sydney in January of 1884.

But women could be resilient too. One of the many women who appear in the New South Wales Police Gazette, Sarah Jones, became notorious for her various encounters with the police in the 1870s and 1880s. She continued to offend after that time, showing up in court and prison entries in the State Archives of New South Wales.

According to the details taken at each of her arrests, Sarah was likely born in Ireland sometime in the 1840s, though she often gave dates in the late 1830s to those who inquired. She had dark hair and her eyes were recorded as being brown or grey. She did not seem to have attracted attention for her appearance, making her more elusive for the historian than other offenders in the record, whose distinguishing physical characteristics, such as scars, made them more visible.

Jones used a range of aliases. This fact – along with discrepancies in the record – means that our ability to tell a historical story about her is compromised. Yet because of her notoriety we know that Sarah managed to survive the challenges presented by life on the streets.

The common alias noted for Sarah in the Police Gazette is unflattering: “the Cockroach”. The term was popularised in police and court reports in the newspapers^[19], taking hold as shorthand for her in the official notations about her crimes. The moniker suggests that the police saw her as a nuisance they could not eradicate, but perhaps it also highlights her ability to thrive in the grime and grit of the growing city.

One important role for the historian of vagrancy is to bring humanity to the lives and stories of vagrants who appear in the historical record. Over the past few years, the number of people who live on the streets and seek charitable assistance in Australia has grown, with “homelessness” recognised as a significant social problem.

When thinking about our responsibilities towards people who find themselves living on the streets of our present-day cities and in our communities, we might reflect on the difficult balance between social responsibility and making spaces safe for all citizens. It helps to better understand the historical figure of the vagrant in a social, economic and cultural context.

Read more https://theconversation.com/no-home-to-go-to-and-no-means-of-living-how-colonial-vagrancy-laws-punished-the-poor-197412

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