Chinese Travellers
Convict Rebellion and Escape
In the Penal Colony of New South Wales the fantasy of escape to China was one of the more obsessive images in the convict mind, especially in the early days of transportation. Yellow girls and tea, opium and silk, queer-looking blue bridges and willows just like the ones on plates; and refuge from the hoe, the cat, the leg-iron, the blazing sun and the dumb ache of hunger.
For this, not a few of the convicts died of fatigue, thirst or the spears of blacks. Their crow-pecked remains would be found in the bush between Parramatta and Pittwater.
The first large group of "Chinese travellers," as they came to be derisively known, took off from Rose Hill in November 1791, twenty men and one woman, Irish convicts off the Queen. They separated, blundered about in the bush for days, and in their starving bewilderment were easily recaptured. Three of them were so sure they had nearly reached China that they soon ran away again, and died.
In 1798 the convicts were still running away to China, as many as sixty people at a time. Since none of them had a compass (and few possessed any idea of how to use it even if they had had one), they went out armed with a magical facsimile consisting of a circle crudely sketched on paper or bark with the cardinal points but no needle.
In 1803, King reported that fifteen "infatuated" Irish had made a run to China from Castle Hill; they were out for four days "committing every possible enormity except Murder" (one blew half a constable's face away with a musket, but he lived). The court sentenced them all to death, but King hung only two.
He set the punishment for bolting at five hundred lashes, plus double chains for the remainder of the sentence. He expressed the hope that "the Convicts at large will be assured that their ridiculous plans of leaving public labour to go into the Mountains, to China, &c., can only end in their immediate detection and punishment."
In time, the China myth was joined by another fancy, reported by Collins with his usual disapproval of the croppies who held it: "In addition to their natural vicious propensities, they conceived an opinion that there was a colony of white people, which had been discovered in this country, situated to the SW of the settlement, from which it was distant between three and four hundred miles." This other Shangri-La, where no work ever needed to be done, sustained some hope a time.