Criminal Deportation and Transportation of Migrant and Locally Born Peoples to Van Diemen’s Land (Tasmania), Australia,1830-1853: Lessons for Today

• In Event: EHC-WG Panel 4: Colonialism and Empire in Historical Criminology

Abstract

During the early to mid-19th century, the Australian penal colonies received not only convicts tried and convicted in England and Ireland but also people from all corners of the world. Opportunities to start new lives in the drove people not only from the British Isles and Ireland but from around Europe and the Americas to migrate. Britain’s colonisation of large swathes of the Global South led to the employment and dislocation of millions of peoples, many of whom ended up in the Australian colonies as migrants, others as prisoners of the Empire. What is lesser known is that migrants as well as people born in the colonies (including Indigenous Australians) also became caught up in a convict system that was often dehumanising and traumatising. Deportation and transportation were a key facet of this.

Using the World Heritage Listed CON-16 dataset that contains the personal records of several thousand people transported from other colonies to Van Diemen’s Land (VDL)/Tasmania until 1853, this presentation focuses on people who arrived to, or were born in, the Australian colonies between 1830 and 1853 yet ended up deported from their hometowns to VDL to serve their sentences.

Not everyone who was convicted of a crime was deported from other colonies; prisons for punishment as well as other convict settlements existed in situ around the mainland Australian continent. Several hundred men, women, and children were relocated to, or even within, VDL as prisoners. This presentation examines their cases to discover what choices were made by authorities to deport migrants and locally born people who had fallen foul of the law, how these choices influenced later border control policies, and how Australian criminal deportation is utilised today. As we demonstrate, Australia’s convict system casts a long shadow that is still very difficult to shift.

Authors

• Vicky Nagy, University of Tasmania

• Kristyn Harman, University of Tasmania