Abstracts

 
PAGE II of the abstracts
from the Colonial Places, Convict Spaces: penal transportation in global context, c. 1600-1940 Conference which was hosted by The Department of Economic & Social History, University of Leicester.

The abstracts are listed in alphabetical order on four separate pages to facilitate downloading.

Page I (A-G) (see below)

Chriss Addams & Mark M. Newell, The Dromedary Hulk, Bermuda

Clare Anderson, Fashioning Identity: the development of penal dress in the Indian convict settlements

Susan Ballyn, Hispanic and Lusophone Convicts in Australia: Research in Progress

James Bradley
, An Engine of Unlimited Power: Phrenology and the Individuation of Convicts in the 19th Century

Andrea Button, Commodities of the State: the trade in convict labour to the West Indies during the Interregnum

Timothy Coates, Exile as a Tool in Building and Maintaining the Early-Modern Portuguese Empire

Ian Duffield, Slave, Apprentice and 'Khoisan' Spaces in Colonial Places: Criminal Transportation from the Cape Colony to Australia as a Site of Contested Power Relations

Samantha Fabry, Convicts and Tobacco Consumption in Hyde Park Barracks

Lucy Frost, Constraining Foreign Tongues

Farley Grubb, The Trans-Atlantic Market for British Convict Labour (1767-1775)

Page II (H-Ma) (see below)

Bruce Hindmarsh, 'I'll be damned if I don't have some'; Convict Trangressive Consumption in Van Diemen's Land 1820-40

Erin Ihde, Edward Smith Hall: Colonial Paradox

Toni Johnson-Woods, 'The Hermit Convict'

Sara Joynes, The Australian Joint Copying Project and sources for Convict Studies

Patricia Kennedy, Exporting felons from British North America

Jan Kociumbas, Convict and Aboriginal Relations in Early Australia

Toomas Kotkas, The 19th Century Deportations of Finnish Convicts to Siberia

Ian McLean, Convict art and cultural capital: the case of Thomas Watling

Matthew P. Mauger, Criminal History Transported: The Literary Origins of the Convict Narratives

Hamish Maxwell-Stewart, Between the Lines: Murder and Convict Society at Macquarie Harbour Penal Station

Page III (Me-Re)

David Meredith, Tasmanian Convict Workers: Modelling the Convict Labour Market in Van Diemen's Land, 1848-60

Tim Millet, Leaden Hearts: convict love tokens

Gwenda Morgan & Peter Rushton, Criminal Connections: Criminal Transportation and the Place of the North in the Atlantic World of the Eighteenth Century

Mark M. Newell & Chriss Addams, The Dromedary Hulk, Bermuda

Tamsin O'Connor, Charting New Waters With Old Patterns: The Black Marketeers, Pirates and Those Who Just Dreamed of the Way Home. The Penal Station and Port of Newcastle, 1804-1824

Diana Paton, An "Injurious" Population: Race and Slavery in the Transportation of West Indian Convicts to Australia

Tina Picton-Phillipps, Frozen Identities: An Exploration, 1810-1830

Anoma Pieris, Productive illegalities in the Colonial Straits Settlements

Geraldo Pieroni, The Portuguese Inquisition and Banishment to Brazil

Cassandra Pybus, "By any available means": The case of the Canadian Political Prisoners

Kirsty Reid, Gender and convict culture in Van Diemen's Land

Page IV (Ro-Z)

Sue Rosen, 'That Den of Infamy': The No. 2 Stockade, Cox's River.

Peter Rushton & Gwenda Morgan, Criminal Connections: Criminal Transportation and the Place of the North in the Atlantic World of the Eighteenth Century

Abby M. Schrader, Lawless Vagabonds and Civilizing Wives: The Official Cult of Domesticity and the Exile Problem in Early Nineteenth-Century Siberia

Heather Shore, From courthouse to convict-ship to colony: the Euraylus boys in the 1830s

Max Staples, Australian colonial art: is there a convict aesthetic?

Norma Townsend, An Alternative View of Female Convicts

Jim Walvin, Atlantic Slavery and convict slavery: an area for comparison

Kerry Ward, 'Bandieten and Bannelingen': penal and political transportation in the Dutch East India Company's Indian Ocean empire, c.1655-1795

Emily Warner, Subjectivity and the Penal Colony: Convict Narratives and Foucault

Stephen G. Wheatcroft, The Tsarist Prison System in the Perspective of the Stalinist and Other Prison Systems

Anand A. Yang, Con(vict) Tales from Bengkulen: Convict/Laborer/Slave in Early Nineteenth Century South and Southeast Asia

Bruce Hindmarsh, Dept of History, University of Edinburgh (9238999@lewis.sms.ed.ac.uk)
'I'll be damned if I don't have some'; Convict Trangressive Consumption in Van Diemen's Land 1820-40

When convict James Murray was refused tea and sugar by his employer in June 1836 he refused to work, saying to his master, 'I'll be damned if I don't have some'. Despite a great deal of similar evidence to demonstrate the importance of consumption among transported prisoners in the Australian colonies, there has been relatively little attention paid to this area of convict life. Following the lead of the historiography on New World slavery, convict historians have ventured into nutritional analysis of official rations. In Convict Workers Stephen Nicholas concluded that the feeding of convicts in New South Wales was nutritionally sufficient, and indeed exceeded the nineteenth-century English working class diet. While such analysis is useful, it is problematic, and tends to discount a very large area of convict experience. Study of assigned convict labourers in Van Diemen's Land suggests that assignees like James Murray not only demanded the fullest possible extraction of their rations and indulgences from their employers, but also that they engaged in the illicit consumption of various food items, alcohol and tobacco. Similar patterns of consumption have been demonstrated among other unfree labour populations, and this discussion draws on this comparative material to suggest the importance of this illicit consumption among convicts. The consumption of forbidden, or non-standard items among prisoners was an important aspect of convict culture. The study of convict consumption, positing, as it were, a new 'oral history' of convicts, is then to reveal an important, yet largely overlooked, aspect of convict life and negotiation of the experience of transportation.
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Erin Ihde, School of Classics, History & Religion, University of New England (sihde@northnet.com.au)
Edward Smith Hall: Colonial Paradox

Edward Smith Hall is a fascinating case study in the history of transportation and convicts. On the one hand he fought for just treatment for convicts, and regarded them as human beings blessed with the rights of Englishmen, but on the other he fully supported the system which sent them across the globe and regarded them as vital to the survival of a colony. He was a man whose views were a curious mixture of old-fashioned paternalism and the new style laissez-faire individualism.

Hall emigrated to Australia in 1811, carrying recommendations from William Wilberforce and Robert Peel, among others. In 1826 he founded a newspaper, the Sydney Monitor, which he edited until 1840. Hall was regarded as a very influential figure in his time, campaigning ardently for trial by jury, a Legislative Council, and a House of Assembly for the fledgling colony of New South Wales. As well, he was a passionate supporter of transportation, yet also strongly advocated the upholding of convicts' rights. Convicts, and the transportation system itself, were vital for the economic prosperity of New South Wales, Hall believed. Settlers needed convicts to tend their farms or businesses. The low wages or rations needed to support them were the only way the free population could make a living, as free emigrants demanded too high wages. Indeed, Hall much preferred that convicts be sent to New South Wales than free emigrants. He believed that most free people came from the very lowest classes, and were full of vice and corruption, especially the women, who were, he said, mostly prostitutes. This is an interesting observation given that most people thought that female convicts were prostitutes. But Hall actually called for the transportation of more females, to address the chronic imbalance of the sexes in the colony, thus leading to a lowering of the levels of vice and other depravities practiced by the men. In addition, Hall believed that sending the poor convicts to Australia was beneficial to them, as they would be better fed, clothed and housed than in Britain. So for all these reasons, Hall campaigned strongly for the continuation of transportation whenever suggestions to discontinue it arose, and for its reintroduction when it was stopped.

But Hall never lost sight of the fact that the convicts were still men, and more than that, Englishmen. As such they were entitled to just and fair treatment, with no punishment beyond what was allowed by law to be inflicted. Hall campaigned unceasingly for better rations and supplies for the convicts, and was always ready to expose any injustices in his newspaper. Indeed, he openly called for convicts to write to him with any grievances, so that he might publicise them. He also believed that masters should be punished for mistreating their convicts. However, all this did not mean he believed the convicts should be mollycoddled. They should be treated with fairness, but still with sternness. Any punishments that were called for, and were not inhumane, should be inflicted. Hall still believed in scourging, as long as it was applied properly. He had convicts of his own, and was quite prepared to see them punished if they misbehaved.
Hall, then, is an ideal subject upon which to base an examination of the attitudes which underpinned transportation and the treatment of convicts in the colonies; a man who, to reverse the title of the conference, was concerned with the convicts place in their colonial space.

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Toni Johnson-Woods, Contemporary Studies Program, University of Queensland (entjohns@mailbox.uq.edu.au)
'The Hermit Convict'

On 28 January 1871, in the Brisbane Courier, appeared the first installment of 'The Hermit Convict' by the 'Rev. William Draper.' The Rev. Draper claims that this story is an authentic account of a convict transported to Moreton Bay (not to Sydney and then to Moreton Bay). If we can believe the author's assertions, then this must be one of the very few Queensland convict narratives. Given that the story appeared in the fiction section of the Brisbane Courier, I will examine the integrity of the text. Attention will concentrate not so much on the historical accuracy of the text, but on the text itself. There are three potentially disruptive zones: the text (plot), the narrative (mode and genre), and the appearance (its position within the newspaper). Was this a 'true' story? How did the Rev. Draper present this material? What was the impact of its appearance in the Brisbane Courier? These three powerful forces combine to form the 'accents', the potential readers' positions. I hope to recuperate this 'lost' narrative by presenting this paper in conjunction with an annotated (hypertexted) version of 'The Hermit Convict'.
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Sara Joynes, National Library of Australia, Australian High Commission, London (sjoynes@sas.ac.uk)
The Australian Joint Copying Project and sources for Convict Studies

The Australian Joint Copying Project (AJCP) was established in 1945 by the National Library of Australia and Mitchell Library, Sydney. By 1993, when the project ended, over 10,000 reels of microfilm had been produced. This included over 7000 reels of records from the Public Record Office (PRO), most of which were documents generated by the Colonial Office and Dominions Office, 1788-1960s. Over 3000 reels were produced in the Miscellaneous Series, which included material deposited in local record offices, museums, university and national libraries and specialist repositories. Over 100 collections of privately-owned papers were also filmed.

Records relating to convicts and transportation were extensively filmed. The PRO CO 201 New South Wales class, detailing the sending of the First Fleet and the settlement of the colony, was filmed in its entirety. The Home Office was responsible for law and order and all its records relating to the transportation of convicts have been filmed. Other records, including material from the Admiralty, Prison Commission, Privy Council and Treasury, have also been copied.

The AJCP Handbook 8 describes the collections filmed in the Miscellaneous Series. It lists over 100 collections on 'Convicts' and 'Transportation'. The records include letters and journals written by the convicts and it is here that the voices of the convicts can be heard. Also, filmed from Local Record Offices, are the gaol lists and Calendars of the Assizes, listing convicts and details of their offences. Numerous logs and journals kept by naval personnel on the transport ships have also been filmed, some are still in the hands of descendants. In 1988, the Republic of Ireland gave Australia film of the Irish transportation records: over 100 reels of film, with a computerised index.
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Patricia Kennedy, Manuscript Division, National Archives of Canada (pkennedy@archives.ca)
Exporting felons from British North America

Approaching the penal transportation of felons out of British North America from an administrative history perspective enhances understanding of the context for this alternative to capital punishment, and for the expression of clemency. This research blends the historian's interest how in civil and military judicial systems removed felons from the community with an archivist's interest in how the nature, extent and scattering of records, and chosen research methodologies may affect what information is found and how it is interpreted.

Research to date in federal and provincial archives, amongst public records and private papers, demonstrates that penal transportation was an imperial system administered with marked consistency in the application of certain policies but exhibiting distinct variations to meet local circumstances. While the processes of trial, sentencing and commutation varied between civil and military judicial systems, and between colonies, the convict experience after transportation followed the patterns established at specific penal stations.

Looking only at those who caught the boat gives distorted impressions, these felons not being entirely representative of the convict population. New perspectives on the transportees can be gained from a comprehensive analysis of capital cases and the clemency process in civil and military jurisdictions from which the convicts were exported. Alternatives to capital punishment included exile/banishment and forced military or naval service, until and even after penitentiaries were established.

Initially focused on Upper and Lower Canada, circa 1790-1840, this research soon expanded to include all colonies which transported felons out of North America, whether condemned by civil or by military tribunals, and to methods other than penal transportation proper to remove these convicts from the jurisdiction, from the 1760s to the 1860s. Examination of records from the post-transport experience took in convicts condemned by British military tribunals anywhere and by civil tribunals in all British foreign possessions, to provide a comparative sampling.

Except in unorganized territories or in periods of martial law, courts marital were restricted to the trial of military and naval personnel for contravening the Mutiny Acts and the Articles of War. Those accused of all other capital offences were sent to the civil authorities for trial in the colony's criminal courts. Convicts tried in the colonial Vice Admiralty Courts for piracy or murder on the high seas were more often executed than exported.

Throughout British North America, these alternatives to capital punishment were used frequently, but the choice of options differed [as the tables to be presented will demonstrate], reflecting population size, geographic situation and climate. Forced military service was most common in times of war. Proximity to the ocean favored the choice of naval service. Sex and race, age and health, or a reputation for violence, as much as geographic factors, conditioned the choice of banishment. Banishment cost little, justifying its short-term use. Forced military or naval service was equally-cost effective, its term left to the commander's discretion. For the civil authorities, the costs of penal transportation were justified only by Life terms. The armed forces, with easier access to transport, used terms of 7, 14 or 21 years, or Life.

Banishment was the preferred option for natives tried in the civil courts. Blacks were banished, transported or forced into military service along with whites -- but imprecise identification by race precludes assessment of the proportional numbers. Clemency for the mentally and physically impaired meant banishment, if not full pardon -- God having already punished them and they being unlikely to repay the cost of transport. No evidence of any female being sent out from British North America has yet been found. Women were banished. Few juveniles were transported; some were banished, others apprenticed to remote locations such as the Hudson's Bay Company posts.

Only banishment was commonly imposed as the immediate sentence of the court. A direct sentence to transportation, or a plea for it at sentencing, might be commuted to banishment or a penitentiary term. Not a few convicts, after literally missing the boat, received a second conditional pardon further reducing their punishment to mere banishment or time served. Commutation to forced military service meant posting to the West Indies, the Royal African Corps, or the New South Wales Corps -- or the next Royal Navy vessel entering port.

Some of the banished were allowed time to settle affairs and secure a passage; others the Sheriff escorted overland to the nearest border, or arranged that they work their passage on suitable vessels leaving nearby ports. Arrangements for penal transportation began in the colony of conviction, but the final destination -- service on the hulks of England, Bermuda or Gibraltar, or in the antipodean penal stations -- was determined by His Majesty in the person of the Superintendent of Convicts. Between 1825 and 1835, and for a short period in the 1840s, the civil and military authorities of British North America and the West Indies were authorized to send convicts directly to the hulks at Bermuda. After 1840, the Home Office refused to accept convicts from the civil courts, but military convicts continued to be sent to England and onward to the hulks at Bermuda and Gibraltar or the Australian penal stations, until those establishments were closed.

Once shipped out, the convict's experience was consistent with that of all felons in this imperial system. Little information is accessible to analyze the experience of the banished and those forced into the Army or Navy.
The broad outlines have been found through investigation of those who suffered penal transportation and those who missed the boat, escaped, died or were sent out of the jurisdiction by other methods. Current and future research will address the validity of presumed reasons for the evident patterns. Who actually controlled the exercise of clemency: did the governor work in concert with his technical experts (the Law Officers and the judges)? When & how did referral to Council become common practice? Did usage match legislation? How (a)typical was the treatment of the political prisoners of the 1837-1838 rebellions -whether sent to Bermuda or the Antipodes? Has focus on them perverted understanding of both the clemency process in general and the transportation system in particular? How do convict experiences accord with expectations? Men on the Bermuda hulks had much higher rate of survival rate, and of release for good behavior, than historians have acknowledged, perhaps through reliance on overly-biased sources.
Last but not least, this work allows me to construct diagrams [one may be presented] to illustrate processes and through them to explain how the records created or accumulated at specific stages may enlighten or obscure our understanding of both individual cases and the general picture.
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Jan Kociumbas, Dept of History, University of Sydney (jan.kociumbas@history.usyd.edu.au)
Convict and Aboriginal Relations in Early Australia

This paper will examine friendships between male convict escapees and Aboriginal people in early New South Wales and Van Diemen's Land, including the role played by Aboriginal women. Raising issues of convict identity and penal control, it will argue that strategies adopted by the authorities to disrupt the perceived threat of these alliances were on the whole successful. Convict animosity to Aboriginal people was engendered by the officials' routine use of Aboriginal tracking skills to locate escapees while the policy of placing male convict workers on the most dangerous margins of the settlements meant that it they who bore the brunt of Aboriginal hostilities and reprisals. Nevertheless fears of friendships between convict and Aboriginal people were endemic throughout the penal era in eastern Australia and contributed to the demonisation of both groups, in some cases extending to the children born of these liaisons.
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Toomas Kotkas, Dept of Legal History, University of Helsinki (toomas.kotkas@helsinki.fi)
The 19th Century Deportations of Finnish Convicts to Siberia

From the year 1826 onwards, Finnish convicts were deported to Siberia, Russia. At that time, Finland was under Russian rule as an autonomous grand-duchy. The initiative in deportations came from the Finnish side, as early as in 1809. There were many reasons for the initiative. Under the influence of the Enlightenment, some members of the parliament wanted to get rid of capital punishment. Deportation would give the convicts a chance to start a new life. Secondly, and more importantly, prison conditions in Finland were very poor. Escaping was easy, and there weren't enough places for the convicts.
One of the things that worried the Finnish politicians was the legality of the whole enterprise. After all, Finnish criminal law did not recognize deportation as a punishment. Would the enterprise require a new law or could it be done in a form of an ordinance from the emperor? The question about the legality was eventually solved quite easily. The deportations could be carried out using the royal prerogative of pardon. The emperor would automatically pardon all the criminals who were convicted to capital punishment. This way no law was needed.

After some political changes, among them the fact that Nicholas I had become the emperor in 1825, also the Russian officials got interested in the Finnish initiative. Deportation to Siberia was not a new thing for the Russians, after all, it had been used for the Russian convicts at least since the 16th century. In addition to this, two new Russian statutes concerning deportations had been recently given in 1822. The statutes were a part of a larger enterprise to secure the colonialization of Siberia.

So, in 1826, after 15 years of preliminary work, the first Finns were deported to Siberia. As said earlier, the 1826 statute concerned only men who were convicted to capital punishment. In 1848 the range of deportations was extended to women. And finally, from 1856 onwards, also criminals who were convicted for long-term prison sentences and vagrants were being deported to Siberia.
However, already at the beginning of 1860's proposals were made to end the deportation of Finnish convicts. Some politicians still doubted the legality of the whole enterprise. Certain officials were concerned about the living conditions in Siberia. The Russian side, for its part, was concerned about the increasing criminality and vagrancy in Siberia. But, it was only during the years 1887 and 1888, when deportation ended. The Finnish prison reformation of 1880's and the drafting of the Finnish 1889 penal code had a huge influence in its end.

So, as a summary, from the Finnish perspective the deportation of convicts can be seen as an attempt to solve the problem caused by the insufficient prison conditions in Finland. The enterprise suited also the Russian side due to the settlement politics of the emperor. Despite the difficulties and special features caused by two separate legal orders, the deportation of Finnish convicts to Siberia followed a European trend.
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Ian McLean, School of Architecture and Fine Arts, University of Western Australia (imcl@arts.uwa.edu.au)
Convict art and cultural capital: the case of Thomas Watling

Conventionally, the first artists to represent Australia accurately are held to be the impressionists. They, it is claimed, first depicted its light and open spaces. Why did it take 100 years, until the 1890s, to accomplish this simple feat? I have suggested (in White Aborigines, 1998) that the light and open spaces of impressionist paintings was more metaphorical than literal: it depicted a whitewashed Australia; free of both its Aboriginal and convict origins.

There were, of course, plenty of artists working in Australia before the impressionists. Bernard Smith, who repeats the impressionist myth, pointed out that one early colonial artist, John Glover, did a fairly good job at depicting the gum trees and light of Tasmania in the 1830s. He also prefigured them in the art of whitewashing. Glover was a free and wealthy immigrant, and one of the first professional artists to settle permanently in Australia. He depicted two types of Tasmanian scenes which befitted his position and romantic disposition: paintings of his estate which showed a glorious cultivated landscape, the picturesque achieved in the Antipodes, and depictions of a precolonial Tasmania showing Aborigines enjoying what he considered their primitive and colourful pastimes. He was sorry for their fate, but in his paintings they added cultural capital to his property and enterprise. They were his own local version of the Greek Arcadia which nurtured his and his fellow Englishmen's sense of civilisation and destiny.

Glover was assigned convict labourers, and it has been argued, they are depicted in his painting My Harvest Home. He certainly depicts them, but very rarely, in his sketchbooks - he prefers to draw Aborigines. Further, in his sketchbooks and paintings there are no obvious visual clues that he is depicting convicts. They have been assimilated into his family and his triumphant celebration of a colonial redemption - and thus their convictdom has been rendered invisible. This is not surprising given Glover's class and position in Tasmania. He, more than any other, provided the cultural capital (in Bourdieu's sense) for the young colony, and for this reason now enjoys a reputation as Australia's greatest colonial painter.

But Glover was not the first colonial artist, and nor was he the first to paint such a cheery vision of the place. Ironically, the first artists to depict this place without convictdom were convicts. In the 1830s Glover was a special case. Most colonial artists - or at least those employed to provide the cultural capital of the colony - were convicts. 'The convicts', writes Jocelyn Hackforth-Jones, in a brief and only study of Australian convict artists, 'were the only coherent group of artists to record the appearance, growth and progress of the two colonies' 'during the first half century of settlement.' One reason why their art is not widely known, she suggested, 'may be that "convict" and "art" are not usually viewed as co-existent terms' (The Convict Artists, 1977, p. 10). Cultural capital, Bourdieu showed, is class specific.

Why did the convicts paint themselves out of the picture? Maybe the subaltern can not speak. Or maybe their resistances are not obvious in these pictures which were made for others. If the convicts made the art, it was, pace Bourdieu, for the consumption and legitimation of a ruling class. Or were the convicts, whom we know did not like calling themselves convicts, keen to erase signs of their punishment, to transform their condemnation into redemption? Or were the convict artists a special class of convict, well educated artisans convicted of forgery, and more ideologically attuned to the values of their masters than their fellow convicts?

This paper will address some of these questions through a discussion of the first known convict artist, Thomas Watling. Charged with forging notes in 1788, he arrived in Sydney in 1792 - having spent some time at liberty after escaping en-route in Africa. By 1797 he was free, having received an absolute pardon for his diligent work as an artist. During those few years in the mid-1790s he was the principle artist of the colony, making hundreds of drawings for the surgeon-general, John White. There is no doubt that this Scottish artist hated his English masters. In a series of letters to his Aunt he condemned his master, the Surgeon-General, and the colony. Yet there is a remarkable consistency between the tropes used by Watling in his letters and art, and those used by his masters of a regime that he condemned. With then he shared an ideological commitment to the romantic precepts of the picturesque.
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Matthew P. Mauger, Dept of English, University of Queensland (mpmauger@hotmail.com)
Criminal History Transported: The Literary Origins of the Convict Narratives

From the foundation of New South Wales as a penal colony in 1787, through to 1868 when transportation to all Australian colonies ended, nearly sixty autobiographical narratives purportedly written by convicts were published. Most are in the form of short pamphlets, though there are also broadsides and other much longer works. Some engage in political debate, others have clearly didactic motivations.

As a group of texts, however, the convict narratives exhibit striking similarities which may be extended to produce a flexible model for their narrative structure. This paper will approach this generic identity through a consideration of the narratives' literary antecedents. In the various works popularly ascribed to George Barrington, among some of the earliest texts to which the label 'convict narrative' may be applied in this context, the formative moments of a new genre are captured. These works take as their two main subjects the criminal history of their supposed author, and the description of his travels around the world to the penal colonies of New South Wales and Van Diemen's Land. The fluctuating emphasis placed on these two subjects in successive editions of the Barrington narratives demonstrates their hybrid nature as a somewhat crude combining of two earlier literary traditions: travel writing and criminal history, both with their attendant requirements for journalistic reportage.

The description of voyages to exotic lands had been one of the most enduring of literary subjects due to the boundless possibilities it created for writers. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, however, as much of the world came to be reliably charted and documented, travel writing's popularity was maintained through the publication of the voyages of explorers such as Cook. The exotic opportunities suggested by travel also formed excellent subjects for early novelists such as Defoe and Swift in the fantastic journeys related in Gulliver's Travels. This paper will demonstrate how this tradition of travel writing continues through the convict narratives' emphases on travel and exploration.

Though the lives and actions of notorious criminals have excited readers and audiences from the earliest recorded literature (see Joseph Marshburn and Alan Velie, Blood and Knavery, Rutherford: Fairleigh Dickinson UP, 1973), the tradition with which the criminal portraits contained within the convict narratives is most clearly linked developed with the increasing popularity of the pamphlet in the mid-sixteenth century. This paper will examine, through consideration of such publications as The Newgate Calendar (in its various eighteenth and nineteenth century incarnations), features of the convict narratives which developed from these criminal histories.

This paper will argue that the origins of the convict narratives lie in these two pre-existing literary forms. Through an examination of the motifs of these earlier genres, this paper will seek to establish a model for the typical convict narrative. Such a formulation could form the basis for a more elaborate appreciation of the narratives as forming a distinct genre, which would facilitate their inclusion within wider discussion of early Australian literature.
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Hamish Maxwell-Stewart, Port Arthur Fellow, University of Tasmania (hamish.maxwellstewart@utas.edu.au)
Between the Lines: Murder and Convict Society at Macquarie Harbour Penal Station

In 1824 a young convict named John Knight was retransported from New South Wales to Macquarie Harbour penal station, Van Diemen's Land. Shortly after his arrival Knight was subpoenaed to act as a witness in a murder case. The evidence that he gave at the subsequent trial had far reaching ramifications for both himself and his friends. This is a paper about Knight's attempts to negotiate a trouble free passage through the ensuing chaos and the light that this throws on the nature of power within penal societies.

Continue with abstracts:

Page I (A-G)

 

Page II (H-Ma)

Each page lists all abstract authors alphabetically.

Page III (Me-Re)

 

Page IV (Ro-Z)

 

 

 

 



 

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