Australian colonial and convict history

Despite Australia being one of the most robust and progressive film industries during the early years of moving pictures, it experienced a significant decline in film production from 1915. Whether this decline was a direct result of poor government policy is something that the Royal Commission on the motion picture industry in Australia 1926–1928 investigated. Marking a significant, yet terribly neglected moment of Australian film history, the Commission surveyed a variety of issues which had stunted the development of the national Australian cinema. By surveying the early period of the Australian cinema, in this article I will discuss how the Royal Commission’s recommendations pushed for the national industry to become more active within the Hollywood world cinema model.

Despite Australia being one of the most robust and progressive film industries during the early years of moving pictures, it experienced a significant decline in film production from 1915. Whether this decline was a direct result of poor government policy is something that the Royal Commission on the motion picture industry in Australia 1926–1928 investigated. Marking a significant, yet terribly neglected moment of Australian film history, the Commission surveyed a variety of issues which had stunted the development of the national Australian cinema. By surveying the early period of the Australian cinema, in this article I will discuss how the Royal Commission’s recommendations pushed for the national industry to become more active within the Hollywood world cinema model.

This article looks at one of the earliest farmers in the area south of Sydney, David Duncombe. Together with his convict servants he raised cattle and produce on what is now a forgotten but fertile area between the Georges and Woronora Rivers.

Nicolas Battis, a man of colour, and a Private in the band of the 13th Light Dragoons, lived a life that included service at the battle of Waterloo and transportation to Australia as a convict.
In May 2023 Nicolas Batise’s (sic) place of enlistment was identified: According to the Edinburgh, Scotland, Army Attestation Registers, 1796-1857 on ancestry.co.uk Nicolas Batise, a labourer born in Guadeloupe enlisted in the ‘Loyal Macleod Fencibles’ at Edinburgh in November 1798. On enlistment he had a black complexion, very dark eyes, black hair, was 20 years of age and 5/7” tall.

Between 1847 and 1853, Charles Brentani was a noticeable character around Melbourne. Today, few have heard of him. There are occasional references, usually in relation to an 1849 gold discovery, or to silverware supplied by his retail jewellery business, but none gives comprehensive details of his life. He was one of those extraordinary ‘ordinary men’ whose story is lost in a history that tends to concentrate on ‘big people’. In telling Brentani’s story, this article supports the vision of the Royal Historical Society of Victoria that ‘knowing the individual stories of past inhabitants gives present and future generations, links with local place and local community, bolstering a sense of identity and belonging, and enriching our cultural heritage’.

'The fighting Gunditjmara' tells the story of the Gunditjmara people from western Victoria, who have fought for country and for nation, from frontier wars to world wars. The article looks at how Aboriginal servicemen and servicewomen serving in the Australian military forces have often spoke of being part of a long-standing, continuous warrior tradition that embodies deep respect for their forebears who fought for their traditional lands. Such sentiments were encapsulated by Captain Reg Saunders, a Gunditjmara man,  "I would have fought the war my forefathers fought because I think we were right. We were fighting for survival." One of the most famous Australian soldiers of the Second World War, Saunders was the first identifiable Aboriginal to be commissioned as an officer in the Australian Army. He is from a long line of Gunditjmara men and women - who have earned the reputation 'the fighting Gunditjmara' - who have served in the Australian military.

On 15 March 1817 the convict ship the Chapman departed from Cork with 200 male prisoners on board. When it dropped anchor off Sydney Cove four months later, its prison doors opened to reveal 160 gaunt and brutalised men. Twelve were dead and twenty-eight lay wounded in the hospital below deck. As officials pieced together the horrors of the voyage many questions arose. Why did Michael Collins claim that his fellow convicts conspired to take the ship? Why was Captain Drake unable to rein in the violent and sadistic Third Mate Baxter? Was there really an attempted mutiny on the Chapman? Or was this cold-blooded murder? Using daily journals from the crew, detailed testimony from several convicts and official colonial government correspondence, this book unravels what happened during those four months at sea. Tarnished by intrigue, suspicion and mutual hatred, this is the story of one of the darkest episodes in the history of penal transportation between Ireland and Australia.

The squatter Charles Franks and his shepherd were brutally killed by Aboriginal people in 1836 in the Port Phillip District. Free settlers memorialised Franks as a gentleman and innocent victim of violence. The shepherd, however, was barely remembered by free settlers at all. Examining the aftermath of the killings in free settler correspondence, this article considers free settler portrayals of convicts, as well as notions free settlers held about themselves. The reactions of Port Phillip’s free settlers to the deaths conformed to prevailing practices and tropes deployed in establishing the settlement’s social order.

An historical review of the construction of jetties at selected convict probation stations on Tasman Peninsula, Tasmania, by convicts during the colonial penal era. The paper traces the evolution of the jetties from their penal origin and into the late-19th and early-20th century free-settlement period.

The story of the convict ship Hashemy arriving at Sydney in June 1849 after being turned away from Melbourne has been repeated by many professional, amateur and popular historians. The arrival of the Hashemy, and subsequent anti-convict protest meetings in Sydney, not only became a turning point in the anti-transportation movement in Australia, but also added to an already existing antagonism on the part of Sydney towards its colonial rival, Port Phillip, or Melbourne.

This presentation will demonstrate that the story of the Hashemy being turned away from Port Phillip is based upon a fallacy; investigates how that fallacy developed and was perpetuated over a period of 160 years; and demonstrates that politicians and historians encouraged this false interpretation of history, effectively extending the Intercolonial discontent that began in the 1840s, into the 20th century and beyond.

This article offers a preliminary investigation of illegal movement by British convicts on one of the remote, frontier pastoral districts of New South Wales (Australia) in the 1820s. Principally I am concerned here with some broader questions concerning the redistribution and demographic movement of the NSW convict population during this important period of expansion and reorganisation. What were the frequency and the nature of illegal movement on the remote Bathurst frontier? To what extent was the forced relocation of the convict population countered by their returning illegally? Did they, by clandestinely leaving their employment situations, succeed in improving their situation? Did they find a genuine 'change of place'?

This electronic book is a result of a small research project bearing the same title, funded by the University of Barcelona and carried out by this University’s Australian Studies Centre (Centre d’Estudis Australians CEA) in 2010. The collection of essays in English and Spanish presented here is the research group members’ reflection on the theme of migration from a variety of fields within the Humanities, so as to create as broad and objective a theoretical base as possible to look at its contemporary manifestations. It makes for a study that takes into account the socio-historical, cultural, political and geographic factors involved in migration, which attempts to offer a framework for analysing the current migratory situation in Catalonia, Spain and Europe at large. As this project’s proposal came from the University of Barcelona Australian Studies Centre, the paradigmatic point of departure for our approach is the Australian experience, a settler nation with a long experience and history of cross-cultural contact within the nation-space through colonisation, migration, assimilation, integration, multiculturalism and so on. We therefore believe that the Australian experience offers relevant insights for our European context, to which the intercultural nature of the nation-state is relatively new; in establishing this intercontinental link, we would also like to highlight the global character of migratory phenomena and the resulting need that the issues raised by migration be dealt with from such a global perspective, beyond the socio-political comfort the traditional nation-state provides for the people who inhabit its discursive limits.

Brief biographies of twenty-one convict women from places on the edges of the British Empire, who were transported to Van Diemens Land and New South Wales during the 19th Century.
Research notes in preparation of an online Dictionary of Biography launched in May 2016.
Please note that subsequent research may have added new details and corrected some errors in these biographies.

For the European colonists of NSW, bread remained an essential staple of their diets and a link to home as they struggled with life in a new place.  While successful grain production took several years to establish, developing processes which efficiently and economically milled local and imported wheat and oats into flour remained a problem for far longer.  The adaptation of European technologies to the alien Australian environment, a limited pool of skilled labour, as well as the peculiarities of a largely unfree convict workforce, added to the complications and in many cases attempts to engage in milling proved unsuccessful.
This thesis explores the efforts of one colonial entrepreneur, John Lucas, to establish two watermills on the Georges and Woronora Rivers south of Sydney during the 1820s. Although the broad pattern of the history of Lucas and his mills is known, there has not been a detailed study of this colonial enterprise or the operations of these industrial sites. This study aims to understand how the two mills, separated by a considerable distance, functioned as a single economic unit integrating with Lucas' broader mercantile interests.  It will consider the issues of technological transfer and environmental adaptation, as well the role and efficiency of a predominantly convict industrial labour force.  It will also consider the environmental, technological and commercial reasons for the decline and collapse of the milling operations.
Lucas’ Brisbane and Woronora Mills were recently located by the author in the Georges River basin, south of Sydney. Their archaeological study allows us to answer some important questions about how these mills operated as early industrial sites using convict labour.

It is more than 225 years since HMS Sirius wrecked on the reef at the newly settled and isolated colony of Norfolk Island, stranding more than 320 persons – convicts, free settlers, marines and children – pushing the fledging settlement to near starvation. Among those forced to suffer an eleven-month stay in 1790-1791 was midshipman and prolific amateur watercolourist George Raper (1769-96), who against all odds saved his paint-box and paper. He produced a number of pivotal works, including the loss of the Sirius, detailed images of the settlement, agricultural areas, and flora and fauna that were to be the salvation of the tiny British outpost in the Pacific.

This article covers possibly the last convict road gang in NSW which constructed Mitchells New Line of Road to the Illawarra in 1843-5. Recent studies of the letters from Assistant Surveyors Roderick Mitchell and William Darke to the Surveyor General have brought to light details of these convicts. Several other articles, by the authors, describing this road are contained on this Academia site.

The records of NSW convicts were destroyed, possibly around 1880, but much of these records can be reconstructed from other sources such as shipping indents, surviving tickets of leave, UK court records and letters to the Colonial Secretary. This data below contains the reconstructed records for three groups of NSW convicts. The records are not complete with varying amounts of data missing for some of the convicts said to included. Possibly some convicts are omitted entirely from the lists of convicts obtained from census data and letters to and from the colonial Secretary and the Surveyor General.

Metaphors move--and displace--people. This paper starts from this premise, focusing on how elites have deployed metaphors of water and waste to form a rhetorical consensus around the displacement of non-elite citizens in ancient Roman contexts, with reference to similar discourses in the contemporary Global North and Brazil. The notion of 'domestic displacement'-the forced movement of citizens within their own sovereign territory-elucidates how these metaphors were used by elite citizens, such as Cicero, to mark out non-elite citizens for removal from the city of Rome through colonisation programmes. In the elite discourse of the late Republican and early Augustan periods, physical proximity to and figurative equation with the refuse of the city repeatedly signals the low social and legal status of potential colonists, while a corresponding metaphor of 'draining' expresses the elite desire to displace these groups to colonial sites. The material outcome of these metaphors emerges in the non-elite demographic texture of Julius Caesar's colonists, many of whom were drawn from the plebs urbana and freedmen. An elite rationale, detectable in the writings of Cicero, Livy, Dionysius of Halicarnassus, and others, underpins the notion of Roman colonisation as a mechanism of displacement. On this view, the colony served to alleviate the founding city-Rome-of its surplus population, politically volatile elements, and socially marginalised citizens, and in so doing, populate the margins of its empire too. Romulus' asylum, read anew as an Alban colony, serves as one prototype for this model of colonisation and offers a contrast to recent readings that have deployed the asylum as an ethical example for contemporary immigration and asylum seeker policy. The invocation of Romulus' asylum in 19th century debates about the Australian penal colonies further illustrates the dangers of appropriating the asylum towards an ethics of virtue. At its core, this paper drills down into the question of Roman colonists' volition, considering the evidence for their voluntary and involuntary movement to a colonial site and challenging the current understanding of this movement as a straightforward, series of voluntary 'mass migrations'. In recognising the agency wielded by non-elite citizens as prospective colonists, this paper contends that Roman colonisation, when understood as a form of domestic displacement, opens up another avenue for coming to grips with the dynamics of 'popular' politics in the Republican period.

Between 1824 and 1848 convicts at Sarah Island and then Port Arthur built ships supervised by various boat builders but principally by John Watson and David Hoy. Anecdotally the convict-built ships built at Port Arthur were of excellent quality The Britannia and Trades’ Advocate (Hobart) on the 19 October 1848 in describing the 109-ton Lucy stated:
“For the goodness of the material and the highly seasoned qualities of the timbers, &c. she is not surpassed by any craft no matter by whom built.”
This paper looks at the longevity of the convict-built ships as a measure of their build quality and compares them to other Australian built ships and overseas built ships in Australasian waters in the same periods. Longevity is not a perfect measure of build quality, the best built ship can be undone by a poor crew, a reckless master, an unseasonal storm or an uncharted reef. However, lacking archaeological evidence or plans and scanting’s of the ships involved longevity is the only measure of the build quality of the Sarah Island and Port Arthur built ships available.

Dyarubbin, the Hawkesbury–Nepean River, is where the two early Australias—ancient and modern—first collided. People of the River journeys into the lost worlds of the Aboriginal people and the settlers of Dyarubbin, both complex worlds with ancient roots.

The settlers who took land on the river from the mid-1790s were there because of an extraordinary experiment devised half a world away. Modern Australia was not founded as a gaol, as we usually suppose, but as a colony. Britain’s felons, transported to the other side of the world, were meant to become settlers in the new colony. They made history on the river: it was the first successful white farming frontier, it nurtured the earliest expressions of patriotism, and it became the last bastion of eighteenth-century ways of life.

The Aboriginal people of the river had occupied Dyarubbin for at least 50,000 years, a people whose history, culture and spirituality were inseparable from their river Country. Colonisation kicked off a slow and cumulative process of violence, theft of Aboriginal children and ongoing annexation of the river lands. Yet despite that sorry history, Dyarubbin’s Aboriginal people managed to remain on their Country, and they still live on the river today. 

The Hawkesbury–Nepean was the seedbed for settler expansion and invasion of Aboriginal lands to the north, south and west. It was the crucible of the colony, and the nation that followed.

The 1833 convict revolt at Castle Forbes in the Hunter Valley of New South Wales was a sharp reminder of the fragility of law and order in the colony's remote farming and pastoral districts. It was followed by a government inquiry into the management of the estate and the practices of local magistrates at Patricks Plains (Singleton) which exposed the largely hidden world of relations between masters, magistrates and servants on the margins of the colony. While much has been said about the extraordinary political fallout of the revolt, this article takes a closer look inside the Castle Forbes estate to gleam some picture of both the broader atmosphere and immediate circumstances preceding the tragedy. The analysis includes new evidence of an extraordinary punishment regime in the lead up to the revolt. I demonstrate that while the revolt was the product of decayed labour and interpersonal relations, it also revealed structural and regulatory problems in the administration of the convict assignment system, particularly as arose from the role of local magistrates in arbitrating workplace disputes. Ultimately, the Castle Forbes revolt represented a rare and tragic malfunction in local governance.

The history of John Lucas’ watermills in the Georges River Basin Sydney has been well covered in previous articles by the authors. These 2 watermills, built on Williams Creek in 1822 and the Woronora River in 1825 had a linage going back to the first fleet with John Lucas’ father; convict Nathaniel Lucas, building a watermill and then a windmill on Norfolk Island in 1795, becoming the colonies first miller.

This report presents the findings of archaeological test excavations completed at the site of the first Military Barracks completed in Oatlands, Tasmania, c1827. The same building served as convict barracks, a probation station and later the Oatlands State School.
Archaeological excavations were completed as part of the Southern Midlands Council's 2012 Summer Archaeology Program.

The received view in Australian historiography is that although the local environment provided a wealth of foods that had sustained Indigenous Australians for thousands of years, 'in complete ignorance of this, the first European settlers lived through famine as they tried to survive on ship's rations'. Had they shown more respect for the Eora people, and their ways, the colonists would not have been threatened with 'extinction from starvation'. This article challenges this notion by presenting evidence that the newcomers actively utilised native foods.
The early colonists did seek to find out about Eora food sources and practices, and rather than clinging to English foodways in ignorance of indigenous resources, there was much experimentation and consumption of local produce. Until introduced foods were successfully produced and in good supply in the colony, indigenous foods played an important role in the diets of many individuals, and were used by the authorities to supplement official rations when salt provisions were in short supply.

Of the many ships that must have been associated with moving wheat and flour between John Lucas’ watermills in the Georges River basin and market there is only 2 for which we have a name. The Olivia, a schooner of 60 tons, owned by the Lucas family was used to take wheat from the family farms in Van Diemen’s Land to his mill’s and the Alligator, a schooner of 198 tons stranded in the entrance of the Georges River when trying to deliver wheat to Lucas’ mills. The newspapers of the day reported their tonnage and the sailing rig but nothing else is known about them as records of ships registered prior to 1840 are incomplete. This article discusses what we can learn about the size of these ships.

There are three rivers between Sydney and the Illawarra, the Cooks, Georges and Woronora. Mitchell's Illawarra road was made possible by the damming of the Cooks River between 1839 and 1841 using convict labour. This article describes the section of Mitchell's Illawarra Road from the Georges River crossing to the Woronora River

While the performance of industrial convicts working for the government has been well documented (e.g. Tuffin 2015) the convicts and ex-convicts employed by early industrialists has not been studied in any detail. This paper looks at the workforces of miller John Lucas and industrialist Simeon Lord. Starting from humble beginnings these industrialists used assigned convicts and former convicts almost exclusively to staff their various enterprises. 
While Tasmanian convict records are well preserved in NSW few individual convict records have survived. It was reported by Walsh (2007 p11) that most of the records of the office of the Principal Superintendent of Convicts (NSW) were destroyed in 1882. Thus, landmark studies of Australian convicts, such as those of Walsh, were based largely on generic records for NSW convicts such as shipping indents, Ticket of Leave records, musters, census and various aggregated returns on secondary punishment. These same record sources have been used to firstly identify the convicts of industrialists John Lucas and Simeon Lord and then to compare their characteristics and behaviour.

This report summarises the results of archaeological test excavations at the site of the Oatlands Guard House, constructed in 1828. Archaeological excavations were undertaken as part of the 2013 Summer Archaeological Program run by the Southern Midlands Council in Tasmania.