Aboriginal Convicts

When most of us imagine an Australian convict we see an Englishman or an Irish lass transported for stealing a loaf of bread or a scrap of cloth. Contrary to this popular image, however, Australian penal settlements were actually far more ethnically diverse, comprising individuals transported from British colonies throughout the world.

As Kristyn Harman shows in Aboriginal Convicts, there were also a surprising number of indigenous convicts transported from different British settlements, including ninety Aboriginal convicts from all over Australia, thirty-four Khoisan from the Cape Colony (South Africa) and six Maori from New Zealand.

These men and women were taken prisoner in the context of the frontier wars over their lands, and shipped to penal colonies in Norfolk Island, Cockatoo Island and Van Diemen’s Land. Through painstaking original research this book uncovers their life stories, which have often been overlooked by or erased from the grand narratives of British and Australian colonial history.

Their often-tragic stories not only shed light on the experience of native peoples on the frontier, but on the specific experiences of Indigenous defendants within the British legal system and on the incidence of aboriginal deaths in custody in nineteenth century.

Importantly, the book shows the Australian penal colonies in their global political context: as places constantly being reshaped by changing forces of the British Empire as well a ready influx of new people, goods and ideas. It finally puts to rest the notion that there were no Aboriginal convicts.