The Currency Generation
The first
native‑born children of New South Wales, the so‑called “currency lads and
lasses,” emerged into a world unlike any other in the British Empire. Their
parents had been transported across the world in chains or had followed the
convict system as soldiers, officials, or free settlers, but the children
themselves belonged wholly to the new land. The term “currency,” borrowed from
the inferior local money that circulated alongside sterling, was originally
meant to mark them as lesser, as colonial imitations of the real thing. Yet the
native‑born embraced the label, turning it into a signifier of belonging, a
quiet assertion that they were not merely transplanted Britons but people
shaped by the river flats, the bush tracks, the heat, the soil, and the social
improvisations of a penal settlement becoming a society. They were the first
generation to know no other home, the first to grow up with the rhythms of the
Australian environment as their earliest memories, and the first to form peer
networks independent of the convict system that had brought their parents here.
They were
born into what Grace Karskens has called the
“convicts’ colony,” the world of the Macquarie years, when the colony was still
overwhelmingly defined by the convict system but was also beginning to imagine
itself as something more. Governor Lachlan Macquarie’s administration-built
roads, bridges, churches, and towns, and treated the colony not simply as a
prison but as a community with a future. For the Currency children, this meant
growing up in households where convicts, emancipists, free settlers, soldiers,
and Aboriginal people all moved through the same spaces. It meant learning to
read the land from childhood, absorbing the rhythms of the river and the bush,
and developing a sense of social possibility that was far more fluid than the
rigid hierarchies of Britain. They were the first generation for whom the
colony was not an exile but a home, and their sense of identity reflected that
difference. They were confident, pragmatic, and often irreverent, shaped by a
world in which competence mattered more than pedigree and where survival
depended on adaptability rather than inherited status.
The Bigge Commission of 1819–1822 disrupted this world. Bigge’s reports criticised Macquarie’s leniency, advocated
harsher treatment of convicts, and sought to re‑impose British class
distinctions on a society that had begun to loosen them. Emancipists were
pushed aside, opportunities were restricted, and the native‑born found
themselves treated as socially suspect, their parents’ pasts used to diminish
their futures. For the Currency Generation, this was not an abstract policy
shift but a direct challenge to the world they had grown up in. It sharpened
their sense of themselves as a distinct group—colonial, pragmatic, egalitarian,
and increasingly conscious that their interests did not always align with those
of the imperial administration. The Bigge reforms
attempted to freeze the colony into a rigid hierarchy at the very moment when
the native‑born were beginning to assert their own place within it.
Their
childhoods were marked by daily proximity to Aboriginal people. On the
Hawkesbury, the Nepean, and across the Cumberland Plain, Indigenous families
continued to live, work, trade, and interact with settlers in complex ways.
Many Currency children learned local geography, seasonal knowledge, and
practical bushcraft from Aboriginal neighbours. They developed forms of
communication and cooperation that were often more amicable than those of their
parents’ generation. This intercultural familiarity contributed to the
distinctive pragmatism and environmental awareness that later observers would
identify as hallmarks of “Australian character.” The Currency Generation grew
up in a world where Aboriginal people were not abstract figures in a distant
frontier conflict but part of the social fabric of daily life. This early
entanglement shaped their understanding of the land and their place within it.
As they
grew, the Currency Generation became the colony’s “old hands”—the first to
possess local expertise rather than imported assumptions. They knew how to farm
the river flats, manage livestock, navigate bush tracks, and adapt to scarcity.
Their skills made them indispensable as the colony expanded inland. They were
the stockmen, shepherds, overseers, and smallholders who pushed north, west and
south from the Cumberland Plain into the regions. They were the pioneers of
frontier expansion not because they were heroic adventurers, but because they
were the only ones who truly understood the land they were entering. Their
mobility created the demographic pathways through which the colony grew, and
their presence shaped the social character of each new district.
Their
movements coincided with, and helped drive, the transformation of the colonial
economy. During their lifetimes, New South Wales shifted from a government‑run
penal outpost to a wool‑exporting powerhouse. The Currency Generation were at
the centre of this shift. They supplied the labour, the knowledge, and the
adaptability that pastoral expansion required. They were the ones who turned
inland districts into productive grazing country, who established the first
homesteads, and who carried the colony’s emerging culture with them as they
moved. Their work underpinned the economic transformation that would eventually
make Australia one of the world’s major wool producers. They were not merely
participants in this transformation; they were its driving force.
Among the
cultural forms they carried was language. It was the Currency Generation
children living along the Hawkesbury River, north west of Sydney, who created
the Australian accent prior to 1810. The system under which the accent evolved is
named pediogenic, a general term for
child-originated systems. The Hawkesbury case demonstrates pediogenisation
within a linguistic setting, but the underlying mechanism is not specific to
language. At its core, pediogeny refers to
situations in which children, operating under conditions of heterogeneous,
incomplete, or weakly modelled input, become the primary agents of system
formation.
A full
description of the overarching model developed to explain the Australian accent
emergence called—The Hawkesbury Child-Driven Convergence Model—is presented
in the attached report titled ‘Voices of the Currency Generation:
Reconstructing the Emergence and Spread of the Australian Accent.’
The
Australian accent spread as families migrated inland driven by the wool-boom
and climatic events, transmitting the accent to each new settlement. Each
district received the accent while its earliest locally born children were
still within their acquisition window, and each then became a transmitter once
its own native‑born cohort matured. The accent spread not through abstract
cultural diffusion but through the concrete demographic movements of this
generation. To speak Australian English today is, in part, to inherit the
cultural world of the Currency Generation—their humour, their pragmatism, their
egalitarian instincts, and their linguistic creativity. The modern accent is
not a late‑nineteenth‑century invention but a living remnant of the social
world of the early colony.
By the time
responsible government was introduced in the 1850s, many members of the
Currency Generation were still alive, some in their forties, fifties, and
sixties. The Charter Demands—universal male suffrage, the secret ballot,
payment of members, equal electoral districts, and annual parliaments—were
widely popular among the general population. Given the Currency Generation’s
experiences, particularly the class‑based discrimination imposed after the Bigge Commission, it is highly plausible that they
supported these democratic reforms. They had grown up in a world where
competence mattered more than pedigree, where social mobility was possible, and
where British class distinctions felt alien. Their political instincts aligned
naturally with the democratic ethos that was taking shape across the colonies.
They were not radicals in the European sense, but they were deeply committed to
the idea that the colony should be governed by people who understood it, who
belonged to it, and who recognised the value of its native‑born population.
Yet despite
their foundational role in shaping the cultural, linguistic, economic, and
political trajectory of Australia, the Currency Generation remain strangely
absent from mainstream narratives. Their story has been overshadowed by the
drama of transportation, the mythology of the bushranger, and the nationalist
movements of the gold‑rush era. This absence creates a cultural vacancy—a sense
that Australian identity emerged from nowhere, or that it can be projected onto
more recent symbols without reference to its deeper origins. Without
recognising the Currency Generation, contemporary Australians risk
misunderstanding the roots of their own cultural inheritance.
Re‑situating
the Currency Generation in their original context fills that vacancy. It
reveals that the modern Australian accent is not an abstract national emblem
but the product of a specific historical cohort. It shows that the cultural
sensibilities associated with “Australianness” emerged from the lived
experiences of the native‑born children of a penal colony. It restores
continuity between past and present, reminding us that the voices of modern
Australians still carry the imprint of those first children born on the banks
of the Hawkesbury, whose lives, struggles, and movements shaped the nation in
ways that remain audible today. Their story is not merely a historical
curiosity; it is the foundation upon which much of modern Australian identity
rests.