Aborigines excepting, most Australians have, within relatively few generations, a family history replete with migrants of one sort or another. But while the story of the post-World War Two waves of immigrants is fairly well known there tends to be no parallel familiarity with the historical experiences of the many earlier waves of migrants. We all know about that first group of ‘assisted’ migrants, the convicts, though the numbers have the power to confuse us: 125,000 male and 25,000 female convicts to eastern Australia between 1788 and 1853 and a further 10,000 men to Western Australia between 1850 and 1868. In the first instance these seem to be huge numbers to be exiled from Britain to the furthest ends of the earth. Yet at the same time they seem to be terribly few to build a new world on a foreign continent; and the women so many fewer to form a goodly portion of Australia’s founding mothers. So it was to prove.

Very early in Australia’s history it was acknowledged by both the imperial and the colonial authorities that while it was fairly easy to attract reasonably well-to-do settlers, particularly with land grants and business opportunities, it was much harder to attract the labouring classes. It was they who, it was expected, would do the necessary physical work, be settled, raise families and of whom the more successful would eventually save enough money to buy their own smallholdings and become part of that traditional but widely mythologised group: the sturdy British yeoman.

By the 1830s it was obvious to the authorities that if this vision was to be even partly fulfilled it would be necessary to put in place some form of assisted migration. To give an idea of the importance of assisted immigration to the development of the Australian colonies, the numbers alone tell a substantial part of the story. While the convict system brought a mere 160,000 people to these shores, government-assisted migrants during the latter seven decades of the nineteenth century numbered around three quarters of a million: four and a half times as many. Critically for the future, the assisted migrants had a much more balanced gender mix. It is little known just how well planned, appropriately organised and successful this great transfer of people from one side of the world to the other really was – and it is the story that historian Robin Haines has to tell. Most people tend to hold the view that long distance sea voyages in the sailing ship age was a form of torture not far removed from the pains of hell, with an endless succession of stricken passengers dying and being consigned to the deep. And such voyages did happen, but rarely. The voyage for migrants to Australia in the latter half of the nineteenth century eventually became as safe, in terms of likelihood of untimely death, as staying at home in Britain, and was much safer than the migrant passage across the Atlantic to North America, in spite of the considerably shorter route to Boston and New York.

Even more interesting is how the circumstance of such safe voyages came about. Many early convict voyages were disasters. In spite of the First Fleet to Sydney in 1788 being relatively safe and well organised, the Second and Third Fleets arriving two and three years later were catastrophes. Day after day the ships arrived at Sydney Cove loaded with dead, dying and violently sick male and female convicts. These fleets had suffered from the lack of strong leadership, medical attention and sound planning. The ships were of poor quality, were grossly overcrowded, and their captains and officers stole or refused to appropriately distribute the convicts' rations and medical supplies. On the Second Fleet, more than a quarter of the convicts died at sea and up to three quarters of the survivors were extremely sick, many to die in the weeks after docking. All were indescribably filthy, covered in sores, human waste and lice. Many could not walk and most were painfully emaciated. Similar disasters, though never quite as bad, occurred over the next two decades or so and again in 1814. Governor Macquarie instituted an inquiry by Surgeon Redfern. The most important recommendation was that surgeons, preferably naval surgeons, be appointed to each convict ship as Surgeon-superintendents, not just as medical men but with complete charge and responsibility for discipline, care, supplies, morality and punishment of the convicts. The imperial authorities agree to these recommendations. Furthermore, since the Napoleonic Wars had been won, most naval surgeons were retired on half-pay and many were willing to again enter fulltime service.

This became the key to organising safe, long sea voyages and was to prove just as effective in later years safeguarding free immigrants who travelled on the same ships as convicts.

This is an excellent book: good history, good social science, and very well written. The source material includes many interesting, indeed at times fascinating first-hand accounts of the trials and tribulations of the migration process. Safe though the later voyages may have been, details of the conditions on board the early sailing ships are a powerful reminder of how awful those voyages were. Haines's success is to get us to empathise with the migrants and to vicariously live those conditions: three or four months packed into holds with barely enough room to sleep, let alone eat, dress, wash and care for their children. There was no room or place for privacy, quiet or even a moment or two of silence. In the short but satisfying concluding chapter Haines includes vignettes dealing with the twentieth century passage up to 1950, when it was still possible for migrants families to find themselves separated into cabins by gender, lumped in with strangers without the authorities deeming it noteworthy to warn them beforehand.

Robin Haines has an academic background at Flinders University in Adelaide but is now a freelance writer specialising in immigration issues and also in matters relating to the great Irish Famine.

TONY RAYNER is a historian and writer who specialises in convict Hobart and colonial history. His most recent book is female factory, female convicts (Esperance Press, 2005).