Australia started out as a penal colony, does that mean that the majority of Australians have criminal decent?

Question

Basically what I mean is:
Many current day Australians are of English decent, right? ...and Australia started out as a penal colony so does that mean that the majority of Australians with english decent have criminal ancestors?

Answer 1

No, most Australians are descended from colonists who arrived later, most since WWI.

From wiki:
Most of the estimated 21 million Australians are descended from colonial-era settlers and post-Federation immigrants from Europe, with around 90% of Australia's population being of European descent. For generations, the vast majority of both colonial-era settlers and post-Federation immigrants came almost exclusively from the British Isles.

Australia's population has quadrupled since the end of World War I,[39] spurred by an ambitious immigration programme. Following World War II and through to 2000, almost 5.9 million of the total population settled in the country as new immigrants, meaning that nearly two out of every seven Australians were born overseas

Answer 2

People were transported to Australia because the English Lords who owned farms there needed cheap labour. People were criminalized and transported for drunkenness, petty theft, creating a disturbance aswell as the more serious crimes like prostitution, soliciting, murder etc. This happened because the British almost wipe out the Aboriginals who were indidgenous to Australia in order to maintain superiority, this is why there are only a handful of native Australians left and will never be a threat. We should rathe r build prisons in the Kalahari and make these hardened criminals work at desert reclaimation and grow crops there, like the Israelis are doing in their deserts. Imagine the waste produced from 10,000 criminals being used to fertilize the desert everyday how long do you think that it will be before the Kalahari is like a rain forest?

Answer 3

Even the early penal colony settlers weren't all criminals. There were the administrators and prison guards and their families. You could generally notice that some people have an 'English' English accent and others have the accent derived from London cockney. This has been buried in the later immigration Jim P wrote about above.
There is also a sizable Dutch community in both Australia and NZ.

Answer 4

Just to add to that, many of the criminals they shipped off were people who stole food or someone's coat, or someone who couldn't pay their debts. There were all kinds, but it didn't take much to get exiled, especially with the overcrowding of the prison system.

Answer 5

It's entirely possible. England shipped a bunch of it's criminals there to keep them on the island so they wouldn't come back to England to cause trouble.