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The Collective Cultural Sadism of I’m a Celebrity
Between 1787 and 1868 around 162,000 Brits were forcibly transported to Australia, having been accused and convicted of petty crimes. Around 80% had been convicted of theft but protestors were also among those sent on that hazardous eight-month journey to Botany Bay.
When I was growing up it seemed like that era was so far back in time that it was another world. Partly because Australia by then had become the land of Kylie and Jason, Summer Bay and Erinsborough. But also because it seemed so medievally vindictive to the petty criminal and their forcibly estranged family.
It was one of those bizarre things that belonged to a distant age, like plague, from before we had democracy, a fair and rational justice system or an understanding of the drivers of petty crime. The colonial system was largely dead, slavery was apparently over and we lived in an enlightened age. An age of home computers, fancy cars and giant mobile phones. Society had evolved and would never return to the dark old days, where the people with power were sadistic and ordinary people had no ability or inclination to curtail their cruelty. We were a wholly different sort of people to those in the ignorant olden days.
Or so it might have seemed!
