William Hutchinson (superintendent)

William Hutchinson (1772 – 26 July 1846) was a British convict who was transported to the Australian colonies, ultimately to become a successful public servant and businessman.

Hutchinson was by trade a butcher in England. In June 1796, Hutchinson was convicted at the Old Bailey of stealing £ 40 worth of goods, and was sentenced to death, though this was later commuted to transportation for seven years. After spending three years in London on board the prison hulk Newgate, Hutchinson was transported to Australia on the Hillsborough, sometimes referred to as the "Fever Ship" since some ninety-five of the three hundred convicts aboard died from typhoid fever brought aboard from the prison hulks. Reaching Sydney in 1799, Hutchinson was again convicted of theft after stealing from the government stores in Sydney, and was transported to the penal settlement on Norfolk Island.

Hutchinson soon gained employ in the administration of the settlement, becoming an overseer of government livestock. In June 1801, he married his first wife Mary Cooper (also known as Mary Chapman), a convict who had been transported from Surrey, arriving on Norfolk Island in 1798; together they would have eight children, six of them born on Norfolk Island. In June 1803 he was appointed an acting superintendent of convicts on the island, and in 1805 he officially became an emancipist. By 1809 he was made a superintendent proper. Hutchinson acquired significant land holdings on the island, and did a handsome trade selling pork to the government.

After 1803, there was a push for the settlement on Norfolk Island to be disbanded, mainly on the part of the then Secretary of State for War and the Colonies Lord Hobart; the military presence there was ultimately withdrawn in 1813, and Hutchinson, along with the boat-builder Thomas Ransom, was among the last of the settlers to leave the island in February 1814.

Most of the Norfolk settlers were relocated to the recently founded Hobart Town, in the colony of Tasmania. However, Hutchinson had been recommended to the Governor of New South Wales, Lachlan Macquarie, by the former Lieutenant-Governor of Norfolk Island, Joseph Foveaux, and so Hutchinson instead returned to Sydney, where Macquarie appointed him the superintendent of convicts and public works, to succeed Isaac Nichols from April 1814. Hutchinson gained much influence in this position, however after John Bigge's reports into the transportation system in the Australian colonies, Hutchinson was replaced as superintendent by Frederick Hely in 1823. Hutchinson was to have been appointed chief wharfinger in Sydney in 1817, though this appointment was never formally recognised by the British authorities.

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