ABSTRACT
The serious attempt to correct the sexual imbalance in Australia came in 1831, when the Colonial Office accepted the principle of government assistance for free emigrants financed out of the sale of colonial lands. This simple principle was to provide the basis for innumerable colonial immigration schemes, later run by the colonists themselves, up to the First World War. But the immediate result was to make the Colonial Office itself responsible for organising a system of mass assisted emigration, mostly of unmarried working-class women, to New South Wales and Van Diemens Land. Emigrants for the first two ships were thus selected by a number of charitable institutions, and the later ones by a group of men known as the London Emigration Committee in collaboration with a shipowner-contractor, John Marshall. Politicians like William Molesworth had their own reasons for insisting that the scheme had caused Australian free emigrants to outstrip in vice and obscenity the convict population.
