Revealing the forgotten stories of Aboriginal convicts, this book describes how they lived, labored, were punished, and died. Profiling several of the 130 Aboriginal convicts who were transported to and within the Australian penal colonies, this collection features the journeys of Aboriginal warriors Bulldog and Musquito, Maori warrior Hohepa Te Umuroa, and Khoisan soldier Booy Piet.
This "volume arises out of a conference in Canberra on Indigenous Participation in Australian Economies at the National Museum of Australia on 9–10 November 2009, which attracted more than thirty presenters."
Between 1415, when the Portuguese first used convicts for colonization purposes in the North African enclave of Ceuta, to the 1960s and the dissolution of Stalin's gulags, global powers including the Spanish, Dutch, Portuguese, British, Russians, Chinese and Japanese transported millions of convicts to forts, penal settlements and penal colonies all over the world. A Global History of Convicts and Penal Colonies builds on specific regional archives and literatures to write the first global history of penal transportation. The essays explore the idea of penal transportation as an engine of global change, in which political repression and forced labour combined to produce long-term impacts on economy, society and identity. They investigate the varied and interconnected routes convicts took to penal sites across the world, and the relationship of these convict flows to other forms of punishment, unfree labour, military service and indigenous incarceration. They also explore the lived worlds of convicts, including work, culture, religion and intimacy, and convict experience and agency.
The story of Australia’s Black convicts has been all but erased from our history. In this deeply researched and illuminating book, Santilla Chingaipe offers a fresh understanding of this fatal shore, showing how empire, slavery, race and memory have shaped this nation. On the First Fleet of 1788, at least 15 convicts were of African descent. By 1840 the number of Black transportees had risen to over 500. Among them were John Caesar, who became Australia’s first bushranger, and Billy Blue – the stylishly dressed ferryman who gave his name to Sydney’s Blues Point. There was also David Stuurman, a revered South African chief transported for anti-colonial insurrection, and William Cuffay – a prominent London Chartist who led the development of Australia’s labour movement. Two of the youngest were cousins from Mauritius – girls aged just 9 and 12 – sentenced over a failed attempt to poison their mistress. But although some of these lives were documented and their likenesses depicted (including in the National Portrait Gallery and a sketch of those acquitted of treason after the Eureka stockade), their stories have been erased from history: even their descendants are often unaware of their ancestry. In these stories spanning Africa, the Americas and Europe, Black Convicts also uncovers Australia’s hidden links to slavery, which both powered the British Empire and inspired the convict system itself. Situating European settlement in its global context, Chingaipe shows the injustice of dispossession was powered by the engine of labour exploitation. By uncovering lives whitewashed out of our story, Black Convicts will change the way we think about who we are.
Clare Anderson provides a radical new reading of histories of empire and nation, showing that the history of punishment is not connected solely to the emergence of prisons and penitentiaries, but to histories of governance, occupation, and global connections across the world. Exploring punitive mobility to islands, colonies, and remote inland and border regions over a period of five centuries, she proposes a close and enduring connection between punishment, governance, repression, and nation and empire building, and reveals how states, imperial powers, and trading companies used convicts to satisfy various geo-political and social ambitions. Punitive mobility became intertwined with other forms of labour bondage, including enslavement, with convicts a key source of unfree labour that could be used to occupy territories. Far from passive subjects, however, convicts manifested their agency in various forms, including the extension of political ideology and cultural transfer, and vital contributions to contemporary knowledge production.
Prisoner enfranchisement remains one of the few contested electoral issues in twenty-first-century democracies. It is at the intersection of punishment and representative government. Many jurisdictions remain divided on whether or not prisoners should be allowed access to the franchise. This book investigates the experience of prisoner enfranchisement in the Republic of Ireland. It examines the issue in a comparative context, beginning by locating prisoner enfranchisement in a theoretical framework, exploring the arguments for and against allowing prisoners to vote. Drawing on global developments in jurisprudence and penal policy, it examines the background to, and wider significance of, this change in the law. Using the Irish experience to examine the issue in a wider context, this book argues that the legal position concerning the voting rights of the imprisoned reveals wider historical, political and social influences in the treatment of those confined in penal institutions.
This is the first historical study of indigenous Australian masculinity. Using the reactions of eighteenth-century western explorers to Aboriginal men, Konishi argues that these encounters were not as negative as has been thought.
Over a period of almost 100 years, at least 3,670 Aboriginal men went to the prison on the cold and dreary island of Rottnest, off the coast of Western Australia. An historical account of the prison is followed by alphabetically arranged entries for all of the Aborigines detained. Entries include biographical information on where the prisoners lived before sentencing, the charges against them, and the dates when they were admitted and dismissed. The tenth volume of the Dictionary of Western Australians. Distributed by ISBS. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR
The Australian Convict Sites is the name of the nominated property and comprises 11 sites across the continent of Australia. The sites are representative of the global phenomenon of convictism and its association with global developments in the punishment of crime in the modern era. The 11 sites are the pre-eminent examples of Australia's rich convict history with more than 3,000 convict sites remaining around Australia.
This volume traces the complex reasons behind the disturbing discrepancy between the health and well-being of children in mainstream Australia and those in remote Indigenous communities. Invaluably informed by Boulton’s close working knowledge of Aboriginal communities, the book addresses growth faltering as a crisis of Aboriginal parenting and a continued problem for the Australian nation. The high rate and root causes of ill-health amongst Aboriginal children are explored through a unique synthesis of historical, anthropological, biological and medical analyses. Through this fresh approach, which includes the insights of specialists from a range of disciplines, Aboriginal Children, History and Health provides a thoughtful and innovative framework for considering Indigenous health.
