The small sandstone island of Cockatoo Island in Sydney Harbour is best known as a convict stockade which held the ‘worst’ of the convict system: former Norfolk Islanders and bushrangers are its most famous inhabitants. However, from the 1850s onwards Cockatoo Island acted primarily as a local prison for those Continue Reading
Genealogies of Enslavement and Convictism in the British Empire
In a former blog, I wrote about the enslaved girl Constance Couronne, who in 1834 with her cousin Elizabeth Verloppe was transported from the Indian Ocean island of Mauritius to the penal colony of New South Wales. The two children had been convicted of attempting to poison their mistress. Constance lived Continue Reading
Constance Couronne: from enslaved child in Mauritius to emancipated convict grandmother in New South Wales
On 23 August 2022, I was hugely honoured to be invited to present findings from our Leverhulme Trust funded project at the “International Day for the Remembrance of the Slave Trade and its Abolition”, held at the Nelson Mandela Centre for African Culture on the island of Mauritius, in the Continue Reading
Shifting The Gaze on Histories of Penal Transportation
In some of our recent writing (available freely here and here) and in some of our recent talks we have been arguing in favour of approaches to the history of convict transportation that started in the receiving destinations: the penal colonies. Our ambition was to move the focus of our Continue Reading
Histories and legacies of intra-colonial transportation: an introduction
What would post-colonial and multi-ethnic histories and societies look like if they were written from the perspective of the descendants of non-European convict transportees? This question is the starting point for this new project, funded by the Leverhulme Trust. It focuses on six case studies in the former empires of Continue Reading