Australia’s First Police Were Well-Behaved Convicts

One of the strangest things about early Australian history is the way it reverses our usual idea of order. In a normal story, a society has law, then police, and then police manage criminals. Early New South Wales was not that tidy. In 1789, Governor Arthur Phillip established the Night Watch in Sydney to guard the town at night, and the men were drawn from the better-behaved convicts.

At first, this sounds like a joke. A penal colony, full of transported convicts, created its first police force by choosing convicts to police other convicts. But in the context of 1789, it makes sense. The colony had few resources, a distorted population structure, limited military capacity and very few free settlers. If order had to be maintained, it had to be maintained by the people already there.

This was not idealistic constitutional design. It was hard realism. The colony did not possess clean materials with which to build a society. It had to build with what was at hand. Convicts were not simply an abstract criminal class. They were labourers, residents, skilled workers, future emancipists and sometimes the only available administrative material.

The deeper absurdity is that order does not always come from purity. It often grows out of compromise, pressure, shortage and improvisation. Convicts acting as police sounds unserious, but it may be closer to the real origin of institutions than many grand theories of government. Societies are not built by saints. They are assembled by flawed people under constraint.

This also helps explain a certain Australian suspicion of authority. Australians are not anti-institutional in a simple sense. The country has strong legal and administrative structures. But its historical imagination does not easily support sacred authority. Police, government, property, courts and money did not descend from heaven. They were gradually assembled in a penal colony.

As an Australian oddity, this story is not valuable because it mocks the past. It is valuable because it shows what institutions are made of. Modern people like to imagine order as clean and principled. Early Australian history suggests that order often begins with dirty hands, provisional roles and deeply undignified arrangements.

For more in this line of “institutions growing out of absurdity,” read Australia’s Only Military Coup Was Called the Rum Rebellion. For another colonial solution built out of practical improvisation, read Australia’s First Coin Had a Hole in the Middle.

Sources: NSW Police Force; NSW Police Force Significant Dates.