It doesn't. Australia, I mean. But this is because the theory doesn't wash up.
First, it is, on the whole, reasonable to claim that the post-revolutionary USA was more "forward-thinking" than Europe at that time. But it is difficult to make very much out of this even so: consider revolutionary France -
far more "forward-thinking" than the USA.
It's probably also reasonable to claim that the the western USA was more "forward-thinking" than the eastern USA, (and possibly still is).
But the mechanism you suggest simply ain't so. Before I turn to that, however, let's take care of a rather gross misconception about Australia's population history. As a proportion of the Australian population, the children's children of convicts account for a vanishingly small percentage. Let's do the sums:
- There were about 160,000 convicts transported in total, starting in 1788 and ending in .. er ... 1852 for the eastern states, 1868 for Western Australia. (After they found huge gold deposits in Victoria, sending convicts to the place everybody wanted to go started to seem like a really bad idea.) Life was short in those days, so a reasonable guess at the total convict and ex-convict population at any given time would be something like 30 to 50,000.
- From 1788 to about 1820 or so, convicts and soldiers to guard them were in the majority.
- I'm not sure of the exact date above (1820? 1830?), but from 1851 on, the number of free immigrants soared. The reason: gold. The gold rush brought countless thousands of British, American, Italian and Chinese immigrants, and many more from other countries. Indeed, the population would have swollen even faster except for the transport problem: the moment you docked your clipper in Melbourne or Geelong or Adelaide, all the crew jumped overboard and swam ashore to try their fortunes, so your ship swung at anchor for anything up to six months while you tried to beg, borrow, or steal enough men to man her for the voyage home.
- In addition to the immigrants - not just diggers, many more came after them to be shopkeepers or farmers or whatever - people bred like flies in those contraceptive-free days. Despite the massive immigration in the second half of the 19th Century (i.e., the long build-up after the gold rush through the 1860s, '70s, '80s and '90s), by the time of federation (Jan 1st, 1901), the population had reached 3,788,123 and 75% of all Australians were native-born. For Australia, 1901 is the equivalent date to 1788 in the USA. Even on that first day of the new nation, native-born and free-settlers between them would have made up somewhere between 95 and 99% of the population.
- Since that time, immigration has continued apace, not starting to slow down until late in the 20th Century. The population is now over 20 million.
- In the period from 1788 to about 1930, the Aborginal Australian population dropped from about 500,000 to about 50,000. A few were killed, many were driven off their land and effectively starved to death; most fell victim to European diseases such as chicken pox and measles.
In short, the "convict theory" of Australia, in its primary form, is about as stupid and as ignorant a theory as it's possible to dream up.
It is, however, possible to argue that the convicts were a major influence on other Australians. No-one has managed to suggest any sensible mechanism for this purported transfusion of cultural values from a small, poor, low-status group (convicts) to a large, better-off, higher-status group (free settlers), but some people seem to believe that it occurred. I have no idea why, as cultural values nearly always go in the opposite direction - from high-status groups to low-status groups. Nor has anyone managed to suggest a sensible reason for the supposed importance of convicts as nation-builders, as opposed to other groups - notably the soldiers who were sent to guard the convicts, the diggers, the drovers, the businessmen, and so on.
80% of Australians alive today have no convict blood in their veins at all. They are the children of the children of the people who came here of their own free will between (roughly) 1850 and 1980. The biggest single group (by my rough and ready guess) is the one containing the children of the people who arrived here in the 1880s and 1890s, mostly from the United Kingdom. Next largest (again by my guesswork) wuld be the children of the post-war immigration boom from 1946 to about 1970 or so.
20% of Australians have some convict blood - usually a tiny admixture from a parent of a parent of a parent of a parent of a parent - but enough to claim some sort of pride of place as one of the Second Australians. (Very few of us can number ourselves among the First Australians - as I mentioned above, most of them died during the 19th Century.)
I have always firmly believed that it does not matter a damn which boat your ultimate ancestors came out on. You are who you are, and it is your own achievements in life that make you worthy or unworthy. I don't give a damn if your father came out on assisted passage from Scotland in 1952, or was a POW who stayed on in 1945, or paid his own fare in 1891, or jumped ship in 1851, or arrived by jumbo jet in 1985. We are all the same. It makes no difference.
Most of my g-g-g-parents arrived in the 1880s and 1890s, middle-class English people come to seek opportunity in a new land.
Who cares?
But a funny thing. Just last year, I happened to discover that one of my ancestors (a 64th or a 256th of my bloodline - I forget already) was transported to Tasmania for stealing a handkerchief in the 1830s or 1840s. And, to my own great surpise, I found myself feeling an intense satisfaction.
Real convict blood! Bloody ripper!
I still feel the same way.
(I should be considerably more delighted to discover a trace of Aboriginal blood, but that seems most unlikely. No matter. At least
some of me came here unwilling. I can look around me at the wholesale devestation that we Europeans have brought to this astonishingly beautiful continent and say "It ain't my fault! One-64th of me didn't ask to be sent here to do this!)
