'Convict chic' loses appeal with elite

Having a convict ancestor, it seems, has come full circle - having once seen it as a terrible stigma, then embraced it with pride, Australians now view their criminal origins with embarrassment again.

For decades, a convict heritage was a stain on the family name. From the 1980s, however, it became fashionable for Australians to uncover a convict ancestor, particularly one who had arrived with the First Fleet in 1788.

But upper-class Australians now find the whole thing rather vulgar, according to research by University of Tasmania sociologist Bruce Tranter, who presented his findings to a meeting of the Australian Sociological Association in Sydney at the weekend.

In his analysis of nearly 3,500 responses to a 1999 survey, Dr Tranter found that older, more educated and more affluent Australians were less likely to claim convict ancestry than in past years because it had become much more commonplace among ordinary people.

'Convict chic', he says, is now only fashionable among blue-collar, working-class Australians.

'Whether their claim to convict ancestry is real or shows a desire to tap into a particular aspect of Australian identity, we're not sure,' Dr Tranter says.