THE PASTOR ALIST AND THE CONVICT 117 



made to the chaplains. On the other hand, the mar- 

 riage of male white natives with female convicts or 

 emancipists was rare ; the yomig fellows naturally looked 

 down on them.* 



It does not follow that they had no intercourse with 

 them. On the contrary, promiscuous interbreeding 

 was general. Illicit relationships were common, and 

 there are many references to them ; while the frequent 

 prohibitions for an unmarried settler to accept female 

 assigned servants tell their own tale. They were the mis- 

 tresses of the unmarried settlers. It could not have 

 been otherwise. Sexual relationships, whether legal 

 or illicit, could not have been hindered. Comparatively 

 few free unmarried women came to the Colony before 

 Governor Macquarie left it in 1821 ; the mass of the 

 emancipists therefore could have married few others. 



In later years we find frequent references to convict 

 menages. Even if it could not be proved that the 

 transported felons begot children, it remains a fact 

 that, there being few free women in the Colony for the 

 first thirty years of its existence, the mothers of a 

 large proportion of the first generation of Austrahan- 

 born children were, or had been, convicts. But of 

 course it can be proved that the male convicts had 

 offspring. The total absence of charges of infanticide 

 in early Australia would, negatively, suffice to prove 

 that the children who must have been born in large 

 numbers survived. 



A writer whose exhaustive researches clothe her 

 utterances with authority ascribes even the charac- 

 teristic Australian ethnical type to its convict origin. 

 The type of the " cornstalks " was created. In a 

 single generation they were already differentiated from 

 their parents not by the growth of new traits, but by 

 the reversion of the children of the convicts to the older 

 Anglo-Saxon strain that had disappeared in their 

 parents. Tall, loose-limbed, and fair, they were the 

 lathers and mothers of the " cornstalks " to be. Daring 

 * Bigqe's Fiest Beport, p. 105. 



