David Malouf

There has been indentured labour here with the Canucks later, but by and large we escaped that awful business of slavery like the United States.

So it had to be convicts.

But the convicts could not be simply used as slave labor.

So they had to be paid.

But their pay was to be their board and lodging.

But if they were skilled laborers, they didn't have to do any labor at all.

They could do their skilled job of being bricklayers or whatever.

And they could actually employ someone to do labor.

the government worked for them.

And all of those people were regarded as free on the ground.

That is, from the moment they arrived, they were essentially free men.

This is the notion.

It didn't always work out that way.

And what they were sentenced to was transportation, not anything else.

So when the period of their transportation was over, they were free to go back.

but they didn't want them to go back.

So what they did is they gave them land.

The moment that they were done with their sentence, five or seven years or whatever it was, each man got 50 acres of land, his wife got 30 acres of land, and each child got 30 acres of land.

Now, these are people who had become criminals mostly because they had no economic power.

Economic power back where they came from was land.