ABSTRACT
In many respects Australia, among all the English-speaking new societies, is the hardest case for discovering the influence of a covenantal tradition. 1 First settled in the 1780s by convicts from Britain who were given the choice of being hanged or being deported to the very ends of the earth, Australia’s beginnings were very inauspicious for any kind of civil society, not to speak of a covenantal one. Yet within two generations Australia became an attraction in and of itself for free people who came to seek their fortunes down under. Even the convicts should not be dismissed out of hand as bearers of nothing more than criminal records. The social conditions in late eighteenth-and early nineteenth-century Britain being what they were, often people with energy and talent who happened to be born into the wrong class were the ones who turned to what today would be considered petty crime but then were considered hanging offenses. 2
