PAGE IV 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.

Sue Rosen, School of Cultural Histories & Futures, University of Western Sydney (smr@geko.net.au)
'That Den of Infamy': The No. 2 Stockade, Cox's River.

The site of the No. 2 Stockade, Cox's River, is now the most articulated convict work site in Australia (Dr Michael Pearson, co-author 'Study of World Heritage Values Convict Places' - commissioned by the World Heritage Unit of the Australian Department of the Environment, Sport and Recreation, 1998).
From 1826, in New South Wales, male convicts who re-offended could be banished to a road gang to work, in irons, at distant locations building roads and bridges. These roads were the major infrastructural developments of the period and were made necessary by the movement of colonists, from the Sydney Basin, north to the Hunter, west to Bathurst and South to Goulburn as they occupied the interior of NSW.

The construction of stockades to house these convict workers reflected an increasing concern with security and an intensification of the transportation debate in the colony and in Britain. The argument that transportation to New South Wales was more emigration than punishment, put forward by Commissioner Bigge c. 1820, became a common criticism in the 1830s. A further argument put forward by abolitionists was that, with few women associated with these institutions, homosexuality was rife. Thomas Cook's account of his period of servitude at the Cox's River stations is a classic in the convict victim genre. His account places the stockade, and the associated outstations, with Norfolk Island in his litany of the horrors of the convict transportation system. However, preliminary work on the Cox's River Court Records indicates that Cook was in at least one instance lying about his experiences before the Court, suggesting that a key witness in the debate (cited extensively by Robert Hughes in The Fatal Shore) is potentially unreliable.

Situated, quite literally, on the new road to Bathurst, some 12 miles beyond Mount Victoria, the Cox's River Stockade was established in 1832. It functioned across the remainder of the decade at a time when convict discipline and conditions were at their harshest. At its peak some 500 people were accommodated there. It served as an administrative, judicial and medical centre for a series of stockades and road gang sites involved in the construction of the road over the Blue Mountains to Bathurst. Other linked sites include the stockades at Bowen's Hollow, Hassan's Walls and Mt. Victoria, and road stations at Honeysuckle Flat and Meadow Flat.

Components of the documentation relevant to the site have been used by historians (for example Jim Kerr in Out of Site, Out of Mind and Grace Karskens in 'The Convict Road Station at Wiseman's Ferry: an historical and archaeological investigation', in Australian Journal of Historical Archaeology, 1984) to comment on the general convict experience, living conditions and transportation. Yet, to date academic authorities have been unaware of the No. 2 Stockade, Cox's River as an institution; as a physical place and have not appreciated the interconnectedness of the known evidence.

This paper draws on the broad range of sources pertaining to the site and its associated outstations (convict accounts, surveyor's accounts, plans, correspondence between the Colonial Secretary and the Surveyor General, court records and archaeological evidence). These accounts indicate that throughout the 1830s convicts were, in theory at least, protected from abuses by regulations that codified punishment and living and working conditions. However, isolation and the placement of immediate power in the hands of convict overseers meant that the methodology of the penal system could be subverted and instances of summary flogging ordered by the surveyor-magistrate are recorded. It appears that convicts at isolated sites of secondary punishment, such as the road parties linked with the No. 2 Stockade Cox's River and the Stockade itself, experienced an existence that fell outside that envisaged by authorities. While Cook embellished his own experience, overall the court transcripts suggest that life at Cox's River was capricious: the system being simultaneously more lax and more punitive than the regulations allowed, with brutality or the imminent threat of it, an integral component of the Cox's River experience.

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Gwenda Morgan & Peter Rushton, School of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Sunderland (Peter.Rushton@Sunderland.ac.uk; Gwenda.Morgan@Sunderland.ac.uk)
Criminal Connections: Criminal Transportation and the Place of the North in the Atlantic World of the Eighteenth Century

The concept of the Atlantic world is used rather too easily to describe the apparently effortless connections between the societies developing together in the eighteenth century. The part of the traffic in unfree humans within this world tends to be emphasized only with regard to African slavery rather than European migration. Yet, as recent debate has shown, the proportion of (particularly) British migrants to the American colonies who migrated under conditions of forced labour, whether freely entered into or through compulsion by the judicial system, was very high. The purpose here is to examine how that forced migration was effected, and the part it played, in the network of Atlantic relationships of the north of England before the American Revolution. The paper concentrates on three aspects of this migration - the process; the people; and the myths of successful return.

The process of transportation from the northern counties did not benefit from any government subsidy, and had to be fitted into the pre-existing or developing patterns of trade of towns such as Newcastle upon Tyne or Whitehaven. The western ports, with their growing tobacco trade, could use migrants (free or convict) as profitable ballast on the outward journey, while the authorities in the eastern counties had to rely on a very few shipowners, or resort to more indirect methods of transportation, such as the land route to London and thence across the sea.

The people transported reflected the great variations in prosecuted criminality in the northern region. These were in part the outcome of rural and urban contrasts, so that, for example, from counties such as Northumberland the reprieve of so many horse thieves led to their predominance among the assize transportees. But this had a strongly gendered dimension, for these were also predominantly men. The urban thieves, by contrast, stealing very different types of goods, were more likely to be female, and the high proportion of women among transportees is one of the features of the quarter-century before the American Revolution. The social geography of the transportees, the use of the sentence by local magistrates, and the refusal to release convicts from the sentence once passed, all affected who, and how many, were sent.

The myths of transportation in this period centre on the apparent ease of return, and the contempt with which the sentence was supposedly held. These ideas formed a consistent discourse in both the early criminological discussions of justices such as Henry Fielding, and in the local atmosphere of fear and alarm caused by newspaper reports of returned transportees. A handful of dramatic and probably unreliable pamphlet accounts reinforced this narrative of return, providing apparent confirmation that the punishment meant nothing to the determined criminal. The few proven accounts of return, however, together with the patterns of prosecution for escape and being at large, suggest a very different picture. It is the unusual collective organization and skillful use of gang networks which characterise these successful returnees. The ordinary convict, seemingly, stood little chance of emulating them. The more usual pattern of reportage, in contrast to the sensational news of return, was of routine transportation and indentured servitude. Most convicts were seen to leave, and were reported as arriving successfully, so that the local communities could be reassured that those reprieved were in fact still alive on the other side of the Atlantic.
Finally, the role of transportation in both the English penal system and the commercial and human traffic of the country needs careful re-evaluation. It may be that one aspect we still underestimate is how ordinary, and effective, this punishment was, so that it vanishes deceptively within the mesh of many interconnections within the Atlantic
world.

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Abby M. Schrader, Dept of History, Franklin and Marshall College (A_Schrader@acad.fandm.edu) Lawless Vagabonds and Civilizing Wives: The Official Cult of Domesticity and the Exile Problem in Early Nineteenth-Century Siberia

In the early nineteenth century, Russian officials attempted to restructure Siberia's administration. Russian conquest and colonization of Siberia, underway since the sixteenth century, gathered force by the middle of the eighteenth. During the reigns of Alexander I (1801-1825) and Nicholas I (1825-1855), officials began to deem this region, which was geographically contiguous to the Russian center, increasingly important. In part, this relative shift in conceptions of Siberia's relationship to the Russian center was motivated by fiscal concerns, including the need to stimulate greater agricultural productivity and desire to implement more effective policies in the spheres of mining and metallurgy. Policy modifications were also rooted in new geopolitical concerns: Russian officials were eager to increase their sphere of influence in Asia, particularly to compete with British imperial expansion. However, it is essential to note that policy makers and administrators refracted both considerations through a theoretical lens; the evolution of perceptions and practices of statecraft motivated Russian and Siberian officials to better order and govern Siberia.

Yet, in their attempts to reform and reconceptualize Siberia, officials had to grapple with their anxieties and ambivalences concerning Siberia and its populations. To some extent, officials considered Siberia a dumping ground for undesirable marginals, including convicted criminals and recalcitrant serfs, and a region inhabited by indigenous 'alien' pagan tribes. Yet, officials increasingly deemed Siberia central to the empire, perceiving that its centrality consisted not only of its rich natural resources but its capacity to bolster Russia's domestic and international status.

Officials in the center and Siberia played out these definitional conflicts in the laws they instituted from the 1820s through the 1860s regarding exiles. On the one hand, policy makers attempted to alienate Siberia's convict population by promulgating legislation that alienated those convicted of criminal offenses from upstanding Russians. They stripped exiles of the privileges and properties and declared them civilly dead when they banished them to hard labor in the mines and camps of Siberia. On the other hand, they simultaneously reintegrated these 'others' into Russian civil society by re-incorporating them into legally-sanctioned status and identity categories and by homesteading them on land in Siberia. Thus, after fulfilling a labor sentence, an exile could receive official sanction to join the state peasantry, the merchantry, and in some cases even local officialdom. This paradoxical attitude had both pragmatic and theoretical roots. Practically speaking, officials understood that mining Siberia's resources required the large-scale colonization of a region to which few Russian subjects were willing to relocate. Thus, administrators needed to find a way to use criminal and non-Slavic labor in the colonial process. Theoretically speaking, officials found it necessary to ascribe a particular legal status position (sostoianie) to all individuals in Russia, exiles included.

Yet, the reintegration of exiles into well-defined status positions and consequently into society itself, was fraught with difficulties. In an attempt to resolve these problems, officials promulgated a peculiar cult of domesticity in Siberia. A distinct gender imbalance existed in Siberia, and particularly among the exile population, where men outnumbered women by five to one on average. Operating under a certain set of assumptions concerning women's role in the civilizing process and in the promotion of settlement (osedlost'), authorities attempted to devise ways of exporting more women to Siberia and of promoting marriage among Siberian exiles. To this end, they re-wrote the laws concerning exile marriage in a way that treated men and women quite differently and that provided incentives for marrying (and for marrying off one's daughters) to exiled criminals). Like the reintegration of exiles into status positions, these gendered policies cut against the discourse of the exile as 'other'. Thus, one set of laws (those instituted to alienate and punish criminals) ultimately operated at cross purposes with another (those instituted to reintegrate them at all costs). Using legislation, material produced by the Siberian Commissions (Sibirskie Komitety), governors-generals' reports, and surveys by the Ministries of Internal Affairs, Finance, and State Domains, I will explore how gender was central to and helped condition and contribute to the paradoxical policies undertaken by officials who were ambivalent about Siberia and its inhabitants. In so doing, I will also explore the ways in which ambivalences concerning the exiled population colored official views of women in contemporary Russian society.


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Heather Shore, Department of Arts & Social Sciences, University College, Northampton (heather.shore@northampton.ac.uk)
From courthouse to convict-ship to colony: the Euraylus boys in the 1830s

This paper will examine the backgrounds and experiences of a small number of boys who were transported to Australia in the mid-1830s. These boys were interviewed on the juvenile convict hulk, the Euryalus, by the writer William Augustus Miles prior to their being transported. The evidence was assembled as research for Edwin Chadwick's Constabulary Committee of 1836-9. The paper will trace the boys previous convictions and conviction which brought them to be sentenced to transportation, through the courts and sentencing procedure, and hence to the penal colony at Port Arthur in Van Diemen's Land. At Port Arthur they are caught in various records including convict description lists, registers, appropriation lists and most importantly, the conduct registers initiated by Edward Cook, a transported law stationer, in 1827.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the experience of penal transportation for a certain group of juvenile offenders in the early nineteenth century. Whilst criminal records offer only a snapshot of a person's life, the various types of record can be combined in order to create a mosaic of lives which are generally thought largely inaccessible to the historian. Thus the stories constructed from the records of these boys lives tells stories of deprivation, poverty, hopelessness and violence, but also of resourcefulness, resistance and occasional humour. These were children accused repeatedly of petty crime, who were caught between a public gaze and criminal justice system which sought to 'rescue' and 'remove' them from both a real and imagined, 'life of crime'. For contemporary commentators and reformers these children were the genesis of tomorrow's criminal class. Thus the juvenile pickpocket would evolve into the adult burglar and the shoplifter into the adult street-robber. Penal transportation provided a solution, which pleased both traditionalists and reformers. On the one hand, for traditionalists, it punished criminals and removed them from society; on the other hand, the distance and difference of the colonies allowed reformers to construct transportation as a process of remodelling and reformation of the criminal. In this paper then, we will travel with the Euryalus boys, from the court-house, to the convict-ship, and ultimately to the colony of Van Diemen's Land, and in doing so, place them in a broader context of colonial expansion, disciplinary contexts, resistance and identity.


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Max Staples, Dept of Art History, Charles Sturt University, NSW (mstaples@csu.edu.au; maxstaples@yahoo.com)
Australian colonial art: is there a convict aesthetic?

Convict artists produced much of the visual art in the Australian colonies during the first fifty years of European settlement. This paper asks whether there can be said to be a commonality of practice and view which might constitute a convict aesthetic, on the basis of this art, in a similar way to enquiries about the existence of aesthetics based on gender or class which have been raised by scholars in other contexts. At issue are both the production and consumption of art by convicts, the variety of training and circumstances of artists, the case of an artist, once a convict, becoming liberated, and the effects of a convict aesthetic on the subsequent history of Australian art.


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Norma Townsend, Dept of Classics & History, University of New England (ntownse2@metz.une.edu.au)
An Alternative View of Female Convicts

In 1978 Marian Aveling (now Quartly) published a short and rather speculative article on an episode involving a female convict, Penelope Bourke, who had declared in 1832 that 'she only married to be free'. Aveling identified a number of aspects relating to marriage in general and convict marriage, in particular. The main one for this discussion was that consensual marriage was the most common form of cohabitation in the colony. It is a conclusion which she, herself, has subsequently modified. Notwithstanding the attention given to female convicts over the last 25 years, marriage, one of the central institutions of the lives of female convicts, has remained largely unexplored. A major study of the 1828 Census of New South Wales has demonstrated very clearly that legal marriage was the most common form of cohabitation. In fact two-thirds of female convicts married within four years of arrival and married men with some capital or skills. The real losers in convict society were the single, unskilled convict males who had almost no chance of marrying. Women were advantaged over men because of the great imbalance between the sexes and because measures allowing the assignment of a convict spouse to the free husband or wife favoured female convicts. Aveling's 1978 view of marriage has become a touchstone and an important part of the martyrology of female convicts. The article itself and the subsequent authority it has attained raise important historiographical questions, some of which will be addressed.


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Jim Walvin, Dept of History, University of York (jw26@york.ac.uk)
Atlantic Slavery and convict slavery: an area for comparison

This paper will discuss the parallel histories of Atlantic slavery and Australian convict transportation, between 1787 and the early 1860s. Both areas have spawned an abundance of research in recent years. Are they linked in any significant way? What can we learn by examining the comparative date from Atlantic slavery and oceanic convict labour destined for Australia? We have ample historical evidence; shipping, numbers involved, levels of mortality, illness and more. We can also measure the comparative British policies towards Atlantic slavery and transported convict labour. But what conclusions can we draw - save perhaps that, though chronologically parallel, they form two distinct historical phenomena? This paper will suggest closer, more intimate connections. It will also explore the possibilities revealed by such comparative work, for probing the British 'official mind'.


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Kerry Ward, Dept of History, University of Michigan (kward@umich.edu)
'Bandieten and Bannelingen': penal and political transportation in the Dutch East India Company's Indian Ocean empire, c.1655-1795

This paper explores the system of penal and political transportation developed by the Dutch East India Company (Vereenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie: VOC) in its Indian Ocean empire. It focuses specifically on the relationship between the Asian headquarters of the Company in Batavia and the 'outer' colonies under its control. The Dutch East India Company constructed a legal system in which transportation was one of the main forms of punishment under its criminal code. Banishment was meted out to several different categories of people who fell under company jurisdiction. Firstly, the Dutch East India Company's own servant; the common sailors, soldiers and artisans under contract outside Europe. Secondly, Asian slaves, owned by the Company or by private citizens, who had been convicted of crimes by the Company courts. Thirdly, Chinese traders and laborers in Batavia who were convicted of being unlawfully resident in Company territory. Fourthly, free Asians convicted of crimes serious enough to warrant trial in Company courts. Very occasionally, a high ranking official of the Company would be tried and found guilty of a serious breach of Company law, usually profiteering at the expense of Company monopolies, which would result in criminal transportation.

Transportation was also used by the Dutch East India Company in its relations with indigenous Southeast Asian polities. Banishment of indigenous nobility was a means through which the Company extended its political influence; particularly by supporting rival leaders to stage coups through the capture and imprisonment of existing rulers. this became one of the main tools of the Company in the Indies archipelago. Banished leaders from island kingdoms, for example Ternate, could be left to languish in places like the Cape of Good Hope on the tip of Africa, and then continue to be used as political leverage to ensure the cooperation of the new ruling elite.

This paper argues that the transportation system created by the Dutch East India Company was a crucial part of its strategy for maintaining and extending control within its empire. Moreover, Batavia exerted its own imperial power by sending convicts and political prisoners to the 'outer' colonies in the Company realm. The system was essentially an unequal one, with Batavia exerting its rule over the 'outer colonies'. Despite frequent protests, the Cape of Good Hope remained powerless to resist the influx of convicts and exiles sent from Batavia until the very end of Company rule.


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Emily Warner, Dept of English, University of Queensland (s000249@student.uq.edu.au)
Subjectivity and the Penal Colony: Convict Narratives and Foucault

Commenting on his special treatment and isolation from his fellow transportees on the voyage to Van Diemen's Land, John Mitchel states, "even as a felon (for they are bound to consider me a felon) the gentleman is not to be allowed to mix with the swinish multitude" (Mitchel, 54). In this paper I hope to foreground a discussion of penal subjectivity by analysing the paranoia which marked the colonial authorities' dealings with the Young Irelanders who were transported to Van Diemen's Land in 1848.
This paranoia - by making the usual networks through which the convict was rendered a subject of discipline either inoperative, or less effective - highlights two important aspects of the functioning of penal power. First, through the construction of the Young Irelander - in particular John Mitchel, William Smith O'Brien and Thomas Meagher - as paradoxically "other" than convicts, the technologies which ordered the construction of the subject of the penal colony are made visible. Secondly, the fear which measured the treatment of the Young Irelanders questions narratives of both control of the colony by brute force and control of the colony through a kind of ideology of paternalism or moral enlightenment. Models of repressive power operating from the top down fail to adequately explain the specificities of the treatment of the Young Irelanders. Instead I will deploy the conception of power described in the work of Michel Foucault as a means to inform an understanding of the penal colony and its "disciplined bodies".

My methodology for this paper is informed by current work within historical disciplines on convict history. Claiming a reading position which sees transportation as "forced labour migration" shifts analytical attention from the once predominant emphasis on the convict as criminal. In doing so the structures of transportation are called in to question. In addition, to both turn the gaze of knowledge and authority back the other way, and remedy what is still something of an under researched area of convict studies, my work has focused upon journals and autobiographical narratives written by convicts and emerges from the dual perspectives of textual and literary criticism and cultural studies.


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Stephen G. Wheatcroft, Dept of History, University of Melbourne (s.wheatcroft@history.unimelb.edu.au)
The Tsarist Prison System in the Perspective of the Stalinist and Other Prison Systems

The paper surveys the latest available data on the scale and nature of imprisonment in the Stalinist Prison and Penal System, and of mortality rates for the different parts of this system at different times, and compares them with data on the scale and nature of the Tsarist Prison and Penal system and mortality rates within them from the 1870s to the Revolution.

The materials on the Stalinist Prison and Penal System including mortality rates for the prison population, the labour camp population and the exile population are largely based on my previous writings on this subject (Europe & Asia Studies, 48, 8 (1996), pp. 1319-53). The materials for the Tsarist prison system come from the detailed annual reports of the Tsarist Chief Administration for Prisons. While the question of prison reform in Tsarist prisons has been much discussed recently, the question of the actual conditions within these prisons at different times has not been the object of much modern scholarship. It was of course a subject of great Western interest in the 1890s when George Kennan's analysis of the Russian Exile System provoked much interest, but subsequently the rather soft treatment that some notorious Russian Revolutionaries received (eg. Lenin and Trotsky) has generally led to the assumption that the Tsarist prison and penal system in later years was relatively mild.
The current paper notes the enormous significance of the transportation system prisons (peresylnykh) in the Tsarist Prison System, and the changes that came about as a result of the introduction of rail transport to Siberia in place of the lengthy torturous march into exile. Although mortality rates in the Stolypin carriages were high, the length of time spent in them was far less than in the pre-rail transportation days, and consequently mortality rates were lower. The mortality rates for the transportation system were always much higher than for the forced labour (katorga) or exile system, and were probably as high as some of the worse aspects of the Stalinist penal system.

Contrary to general impressions, the abolition of the exile system in 1906 and the success of the prison reformers in the first half of the first decade of the twentieth century, did not lead to an improvement in Russian Prison conditions. The repressions following the 1905 Revolution resulted in not just a high level of extra-judicial executions by field court martial under Stolypin, but also to a great upsurge in prison populations, to the extension of katorga, and to a notable deterioration in prison conditions. While the scale of these prison populations and their general level of mortality were low in comparison with the rates in Stalin's time, they were nevertheless very high and had risen appreciably since the early years of the twentieth century.

In several regards the Tsarist prison system and especially the developments after the 1905 revolution can be seen as significant stages in the expansion and growth of the Russian prison system which reached such terrible proportions in the 1930s.


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Anand A. Yang, Dept of History, University of Utah (Anand.Yang@m.cc.utah.edu)
Con(vict) Tales from Bengkulen: Convict/Laborer/Slave in Early Nineteenth Century South and Southeast Asia

This paper will examine the complex society and community Indian convicts who were banished to Southeast Asia developed in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Because of the conflicting interests of Indian and Southeast Asian colonial authorities, transportation never developed as the severe punishment it was intended to be for heinous crimes committed against the 'law and order' regime of the emerging colonial state in India.

For the local authorities in Southeast Asia, Indian convicts were a source of labor, men and a few women who were recruited to form the workforce needed to build the infrastructure of rule in the settlements of Bengkulen, Penang, and Singapore. Colonial labor imperatives defined and shaped convict experiences, as did convict initiatives in fashioning their own community within the larger local society made up of different occupational and ethnic groups.

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