Linking to a past Trope Repair Shop thread that dealt with this page: Unclear Description
, started by Khrunwahl02 on Sep 11th 2018 at 4:38:36 AM
No one has written about the Robot Chicken short Baby Want More
Edited by Yitsul
I really have to challenge this one:
- In olden days a common punishment for serious crimes in Great Britain was transportation to Australia. Yes, many people experienced this as a punishment, but a lot of the convicted ended up doing very well in Australia. Often when a sentence would expire and a convicted criminal had the right to return to Britain, they would decide instead to stay in Australia. Many modern day Australians are descended from these convicts, and they seem perfectly happy to live in the land their ancestors were sent to as punishment.
Because it seems like someone badly needs a history lesson. Convicts weren't just sent to Australia because the authorities thought they needed a nice holiday and hoped they'd end up doing well; yeah, it seems like an Unishment now that Australia is an affluent first-world nation with a tourist industry to die for, but from the point of view of an eighteenth century convict, being sent halfway across the world from everything and everyone you'd ever loved or known with little chance of ever returning (or even surviving the trip there — it was a sea voyage. Lots of ships sank) to a baking hot country that even today is considered the nearest thing to a Death World where everything is trying to kill you for some pretty good reasons and being expected to build a society essentially from nothing was a lot less fun. Most of them also stayed less because they'd fallen in love with the country and more because it was an equally arduous journey that they were unlikely to survive back home.
So yeah, I'm seriously skeptical that this can in any serious way be considered an 'Unishment' except by someone who never went through it.
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It's also worth considering that having convict ancestors had been, until very recently, grounds for stigmatization. It was only since the 1980s-90s (if I remember my latest visit to the Hyde Park Barracks in Sydney correctly) that the convict past started to be fully embraced. Not only did the convicts were marginalized from the people who ran the colonial government, but this marginalization continued between their childrens too. For example, William Wentworth (1790-1872, politician, had convict parents) had his relationship/engagement broken with Elizabeth Mac Arthur, because her father John (1767-1834, landowner, free settler, army officer) did not allow marriages into a family with convict heritage.
Edited by henrymidfields
Can someone add 'Punishment Backfire' as an alternative name for this trope?
promoting the soriku agenda since 2010