There can be no doubt that penal servitude in New South Wales was coercive and brutal. Convicts were torn away from their families, dumped at the end of the world and forced into backbreaking labour on State projects, without a wage, for a period of four to twelve years. Arbitrary punishment was meted out that could scar them for life. Yet for all its harshness, penal servitude was nothing like chattel slavery. Little distinguished the convicts from those who guarded them. Many of the marines at Sydney Cove, like the seamen on the transport ships, had been impressed into service and they too faced excessively brutal punishment for minor misdemeanours and were lucky if they were ever paid. Everyone, convict or free, had to labour on State projects in the first decade of settlement in order to create a place to live, just as everyone had to scrabble for subsistence in the face of famine. From the lowliest convict to the governor, everyone had the same allowance of food, even when the government rations were cut to a quarter.  
Most significant for the African cohort was that children born in the penal colony had the same status and privilege of any freeborn British subject. Among the very first generation of Australian-born there were more than a dozen with African fathers. Among the first generation of freeborn settlers in Australia there were at least four with African fathers: Lydia Randall born in 1791, Mary Anne Poore born in 1792, Mary Randall born in 1793, and John Randall Jr.  
born in 1797. In 1812, Mary Randall married another African, John Martin, and their marriage produced 13 children and 52 grandchildren. Descendants of that union are now said to number 25,000. For John Randall and John Martin, both probably born into slavery, to see their children with the privilege of the freeborn, guaranteed by custom and law, was a significant achievement, probably worth all the bitter tribulations that had brought them to this strange place at the very end of the world.