Early Port Arthur: Convict Colonization and the Formation of a Penal Station in Van Diemen’s Land 1830–35

Abstract

Between 1788 and 1868 some 165,000 men and women were transported from throughout the British Empire to the Australian colonies. For many, this act of enforced removal was to be their only experience of social displacement. For others, often condemned as the recidivist elements of the convict population, a secondary form of transportation occurred, sequestered by the system’s administrators in isolated, secure, and controllable pockets of the colonies. Prevalent from the 1820s, these penal stations have today come to embody the more brutal aspects of the Australian convict experience. This paper presents the results of recent suite of research being undertaken as part of a multi-disciplinary project “Landscapes of Production and Punishment.” As part of this research we have sought to challenge preconceived perceptions about Australia’s convict system, examining the archaeological and historical residues of the convict past in terms of the convict as worker and the administrator as manager. In this paper we examine the formative years of the Port Arthur penal station, located in Van Diemen’s Land (Tasmania), applying prevailing colonization models to understand how the station evolved in response to multi-scalar influences.