American Convicts

Both Aust and America in their colonial experiences involved the transportation of convicts from the British Isles to these new continents, but only in the former case is there a significant acknowledgment that the roots of colonisation rest in the establishment of penal settlements. In the latter AFAIK there is a limited recognition of the role of indentured servitude, but not to the same extent as we in Aust recognising and celebrating Botany Bay, the 1st Fleet, Tasmania as a convict dumping ground, etc. What changes in circumstances would be required for the convict context to play a more prominent part in American colonial hist to the same extent as in Aust ?

What do you want? The Carolinas and Georgia are widely recognized and acknowledged as prison colonies and always have been. Perhaps Australia has a little too much emphasis on this aspect of her proud history. When I first started reading about it I was always a little surprised when they would mention non-convict colonization at all

The way I learned it, penal colonies and indentured servitude were different things. Penal colonists(?) had been convicted of a crime (rightly or wrongly). Indentured servants were too poor to pay their way to the new country. Therefore, a person already in the colony paid their way and the identired servant agreed to work for a certain amount of time to pay back the fare. Once the period of identured servitude was complete, the imigrant was a free man or woman.

Also, while convicts were certainly sent to the North American colonies, I don't think as many were sent (or certainly not as large a percentage) as were sent to Australia.

Democratic South post revolutionary war

The southern US states were still dominated by the upper class in a much greater way than the northern states. If the Newburgh Conspiracy had succeeded, and we had gone democratic as a response, the white South would have acknowledged it's indentured past, that it's ancestors had been auctioned on the wharfs where they were landed.

IIRC There was a Total of 50,000 Convicts sent to Georgia & the Carolinias 1700-1770. How many were sent to Austrialia, the numbers difference may be the reason.

DuQuense, I'm not exceedingly sure about exact nos., but the majority of British colonies in Aust, with the exception of SA, IIRC, were initially established as convict settlements, meaning that in the 1st few yrs the prison population greatly outnumbered the free settlers. Yeah, I accept your point re nos.

Victoria and specifically Melbourne

I thought Melbourne and Victoria state in general were specifically settled by nonconvicts?

Hmm, yeah actually that could've been the case... heck I ain't even so sure about my own national hist- what good am I as an Alternate Historian, huh ? But then again I'm just a Northern Territorian who don't seem to know all that much about down south (lol). Come to think of it, Victoria IIRC was settled by the 1830s, with such settlers as John Batman, an ex-convict who in 1836 actually tried to sign a treaty with the local Aboriginal tribes around Melbourne while acquiring their land- this land dealing was later invalidated by the Crown stating that private individuals didn't have the power to acquire land directly from the Aborigines.