Hj Maxwell-Stewart

Research note: The founders and survivors project

This paper describes the multidisciplinary project Founders and Survivors: Australian Life Courses in Historical Context. Individual life courses, families and generations through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries are being reconstituted from a wide range of data including convict records; birth, death and marriage registrations; and World War I service records. The project will result in a longitudinal study of Australian settlement, the long-run effects of forced labour and emigration on health and survival, family formation, intergenerational morbidity and mortality, and social and geographic mobility.

The State, Convicts and Longitudinal Analysis

In 2006 the Records of the Tasmanian Convict Department were inscribed on the UNESCO Memory of the World Register. This extraordinarily intact collection of records document the lives of 73,000 male and female prisoners transported to Van Diemen’s Land. This article examines ways in which this information can be used to explore the impact of forced labour migration on the lives of convicts. It focuses in particular on the assembly of cradle-to-grave datasets. Such longitudinal approaches to the past can be powerful, especially where they involve the analysis of multiple life course events for a large number of individuals. The first part of the article explores ways in which quantitative approaches can be used to reconstruct the circumstances that shaped the creation of record groups. The second part examines the way in which longitudinal analysis can be used to analyse the impact of state action on the lives of convicts.

Prison and the history of the family

Prisons are not family-friendly. After Edward Kennedy was sentenced to seven years’ transportation by the Dumfries Court of Justiciary in April 1831, he marked the occasion with a memorial to his wife. By the time he arrived in the British penal colony of Van Diemen’s Land, his arm was tattooed with the words: ‘Catherine my dear you are my own, my heart lies in your breast, although there’s many a mile of distant love and strong seas between us Ever Constant & true I will prove, for now & forever more’. The ‘strong seas’ that lay between convicts transported to Australia and their families were for all intents and purposes insurmountable barriers. The cost of a steerage passage home was £20–30, approximately half of a skilled workingman’s annual wage (Breton, 1835). The sentence passed upon Kennedy and other felons lagged overseas may as well have been for life. He had been condemned to a social death. While those incarcerated locally were not separated from their family on a permanent basis, life inside the institution was markedly different from that of the household. Most prisoners were – and still are – unmarried men. Even when multiple family members were convicted for the same offence, it was unusual for them to be incarcerated within the same institution. This was especially true for those of different sexes. Almost all prisons developed from the early nineteenth century on were segregated by sex. Many took this process further, isolating offenders from each other, enforcing silence, and masking identities through the use of cowls or hoods and the substitution of numbers for family names. Such separate treatment was designed to atomise prisoners, breaking connections with their past by preventing ‘the inevitable evils of association’ (Mayhew & Binny, 1862, p. 102). Visits by outsiders were strictly regulated. At Coldbath Fields house of correction in London, prisoners were permitted to see up to two relations or ‘respectable friends’ for 15 minutes once every three months. An hourglass fixed to the wall counted down the time and no physical contact was permitted – a corridor patrolled by a warder separated prisoner and visitor, ensuring that there was no opportunity for private conversation (Mayhew & Binny, 1862, pp. 296–298). There were reasons why institutions sought to break ties between offenders and their kin. It was commonly believed that dysfunctional families were the main source of offending, whereas strong parenting was seen as the moral safeguard of society. The notion that crime was hereditary – that criminals begat criminal families – became

Mutiny at Deloraine: Ganging and Convict Resistance in 1840s Van Diemen's Land

An incident of alleged animal maiming occurred in October 1845. In this article we attempt firstly to explain why and how it happened. Secondly, we try to discover the conflicting meanings that various contemporaries gave to this occurrence. We believe that the explanation of the event lies in the nature of ganged labour employed at Deloraine and the complex relationships that existed in 1845 between this ganged labour and the convict administration. Equally important to this complex social interaction are the various meanings given to this episode. The most available representations are of those of middle-class moralists. More difficult to reveal is the oppositional significance attributed to this event by the convicts themselves as they attempted to resist both the practices of the convict administration and the moral justifications for these practices.

Landscapes of Production and Punishment: Convict labour in the Australian context:

This paper presents an interdisciplinary project that uses archaeological and historical sources to explore the formation of a penal landscape in the Australian colonial context. The project focuses on the convict-period legacy of the Tasman Peninsula (Tasmania, Australia), in particular the former penal station of Port Arthur (1830–1877). The research utilises three exceptional data series to examine the impact of convict labour on landscape and the convict body: the archaeological record of the Tasman Peninsula, the life course data of the convicts and the administrative record generated by decades of convict labour management. Through these, the research seeks to demonstrate how changing ideologies affected the processes and outcomes of convict labour and its products, as well as how the landscapes we see today were formed and developed in response to a complex interplay of multi-scalar penological and economic influences. Areas of inquiry: Australian convict archaeology and history. The archaeology and history of Australian convict labour management. The archaeology and history of the Tasman Peninsula.

Cannibalism amongst penitentiary escapees from Sarah Island in nineteenth century Van Diemen’s Land

Alexander Pearce was an Irish convict incarcerated on Sarah Island on the west coast of Van Diemen’s Land (modern day Tasmania, Australia) in 1822, following his transportation to the colony from the United Kingdom for seven years in 1819. On two occasions he escaped from the island, in September 1822 and again in November 1823, and was only able to survive the harsh conditions by killing and consuming his fellow escapees. Given that Pearce utilized the only sustenance that was at hand (i.e. his five companions), and that there was a temporal separation between the two episodes, this may represent a separate category of anthropophagy, that of serial opportunistic cannibalism.

Landscapes of production and punishment: convict labour management on the Tasman Peninsula 1830–1877

The ‘Landscapes of Production and Punishment’ project aims to examine how convict labour from 1830–1877 affected the built and natural landscapes of the Tasman Peninsula, as well as the lives of the convicts themselves.

Big Data and Australian History

Big History is a term that has particular resonance for historians of Australia – a continent with a 60,000-year record of human occupation and a geological history that extends a further 3,070 million years. Recently historians have also begun to engage with the concept of big data. It is not surprising that these two terms are often linked. Any attempt to unite natural and human history in ‘a single, grand and intelligible narrative’ will necessarily result in the engagement with a lot of data. While few historians have access to sources of information that are so large and complex that they defy traditional means of processing and handling, much research that engages with what might genuinely be described as big data has a historical dimension. Climate science, analysis of criminal justice statistics and life course and intergenerational health research are all good examples. This forum in Australian Historical Studies on big data is thus most timely. It explores some of the ways that the increased availability of digital data is impacting on Australian historical research and focuses on digital research that connects Australia’s history to wider international and transnational developments.

Prison and the colonial family

Between 1865 and 1924, descriptions of 39,000 discharged prisoners were circulated via the pages of the Tasmanian Police Gazette. This article examines ways in which these detailed records can be used to shed light on childhood experience in this former British penal colony. The authors compare height measurements for Tasmanian-born prisoners with those for British and Irish migrants in order to explore the social and environmental circumstances that helped to shape metropolitan and colonial nineteenth-century family life. The article also examines the extent to which convict transportation advantaged or disadvantaged the growth trajectories of colonially born children. In order to examine this in greater depth, the authors link discharged prison records to birth certificates, enabling them to assess the extent to which the occupation of fathers and the district of birth within the colony impacted on height. The authors also examine the extent to which children with one or more convict parent were disadvantaged compared to those for whom no evidence of convict ancestry could be found.

''Those Lads Contrived a Plan'': attempts at mutiny on Australia-bound convict vessels

ABSTRACT: Between 1787 and 1868 a total of 830 convict vessels left the British Isles bound for the Australian penal colonies. While only one of these was seized by mutineers, many convicts were punished for plotting to take the ship that carried them to the Antipodes. This article will explore the circumstances that shaped those mutiny attempts and the impact that they had on convict management strategies.