Australian Convict Research Articles

Rough Excision: a poetic response to Great Expectations (1861) and Jack Maggs (1997)

ABSTRACT Read together or as stand-alone pieces, the thirteen poems offered below are conceived as a creative-critical response to two novels, a Victorian one, Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations (1861), and its neo-Victorian counterpart, Peter Carey’s Jack Maggs (1997). Rather than simply inspired by these novels, the poems are the result of a critical reading of both Carey’s reimagining of Dickens’s great English novel and the source text itself. As such they implicitly engage with Carey’s critics, who have almost unanimously analysed Jack Maggs from a postcolonial perspective, thereby largely ignoring the rewriting of the women characters. Scholars have systematically pointed out how Dickens’s orphan Pip is rewritten by Carey as Henry Phipps, the Australian convict Abel Magwitch as Jack Maggs and Dickens himself as the great Victorian author Tobias Oates. Together with the annotations in part II, the poems offer a creative contribution to the critical engagement with Carey’s novel, by arguing that Carey’s Mercy, servant and mistress of would-be gentleman Percy Buckle in Jack Maggs, can be fruitfully read as a re-imagining of Dickens’s Molly, biological mother of Estella and housekeeper of unscrupulous lawyer Jaggers in Great Expectations. The poems raise questions concerning neo-Victorianism, patriarchal discourse and trauma theory from a feminist perspective.

The Lure of the Lash: Spectacular Violence and White Ethnonationalism at an Australian Convict Site

The Lure of the Lash: Spectacular Violence and White Ethnonationalism at an Australian Convict Site

Transported to Botany Bay: Class, National Identity, and the Literary Figure of the Australian Convict by Dorice Williams Elliott, and: Familial Feeling: Entangled Tonalities in Early Black Atlantic Writing and the Rise of the British Novel by Elahe Haschemi Yekani, and: Literature in a Time of Migration: British Fiction and the Movement of People, 1815–1876 by Josephine McDonagh, and: Settler

Transported to Botany Bay: Class, National Identity, and the Literary Figure of the Australian Convict by Dorice Williams Elliott, and: Familial Feeling: Entangled Tonalities in Early Black Atlantic Writing and the Rise of the British Novel by Elahe Haschemi Yekani, and: Literature in a Time of Migration: British Fiction and the Movement of People, 1815–1876 by Josephine McDonagh, and: Settler

Dorice Williams Elliott, Transported to Botany Bay: Class, National Identity and the Literary Figure of the Australian Convict

Dorice Williams Elliott, <i>Transported to Botany Bay: Class, National Identity and the Literary Figure of the Australian Convict</i>

A bottom-up method for remixing narratives for virtual heritage experiences

Considering the impacts COVID-19 has had on travel and many economies, developing virtual experiences that are well-received by different publics has become even more prominent. This paper shows how a multimodal discourse analysis can be used to as a bottom-up approach to identifying narrative themes that can be used in virtual experiences for cultural heritage sites. A case study on 11 UNESCO World Heritage Australian Convict Sites shows how diverse sources of user-generated content, tourism marketing materials and historical information can be analysed and then remixed into a virtual tour of the sites in the form of an interactive web documentary (iDoc). Although this case study involved a total of seven narrative development phases, this paper focuses on two phases, namely how the user model and content model were determined. These models were later used to develop the resulting iDoc prototype. The user model focused on the prospective audience of cultural heritage tourists, and a content model of narrative themes for the iDoc was developed through a multimodal discourse analysis. This bottom-up approach of analysing existing cultural data allows for the discovery of the prospective audiences’ interests as well as narrative themes that can be included in virtual heritage experiences. It also provides a new creative methodology that can prevent issues that may arise with top-down narratives that focus too heavily on one institutional perspective or national narrative and lack direct engagement with or understanding of today’s publics.

‘Mr Wakefield’s Speaking Trumpets’: Abolishing Slavery and Colonising Systematically

ABSTRACT This essay examines the significance of Edward Gibbon Wakefield’s theory of ‘systematic colonisation’ within the transition from Caribbean slavery to settler colonisation to reveal the sequential relationship of these two imperial systems. In the context of industrialisation and social unrest, the anti-slavery movement performed an important purpose for Britain’s ruling classes by simultaneously accruing moral authority and sanctioning oppressive new forms of disciplined labour, including the treatment of Australian convicts as slaves. During the ‘ameliorative’ 1820s phase of the anti-slavery movement, experimental colonial schemes combined both abolitionist principles and pro-slavery interests, particularly visible in the form of arguments against free labour and the advocacy of racial, as well as class, labour hierarchies. Wakefield’s theory embodied principles of labour discipline drawn from the plantation, allied to new techniques of land commoditization, offering a solution to the looming problem of abolition. These principles were invoked in debating the emancipation bill introduced in May 1833, as all sides agreed on the need for freed slaves to work for wages; they were subsequently applied in the Caribbean after emancipation by planters attempting to maintain productivity during and beyond the apprenticeship period. After 1833, the abolitionists’ zeal could be turned to other causes, and reformers seeking to end transportation and develop the settler colonies deployed an entwined discourse of anti-slavery and systematic colonisation.

Transported to Botany Bay: Class, National Identity, and the Literary Figure of the Australian Convict, by Dorice Williams Elliott

Reviewed by: Transported to Botany Bay: Class, National Identity, and the Literary Figure of the Australian Convict by Dorice Williams Elliott Jan-Melissa Schramm (bio) Transported to Botany Bay: Class, National Identity, and the Literary Figure of the Australian Convict, by Dorice Williams Elliott; pp. xii + 289. Athens: Ohio University Press, $80.00. The figure of Magwitch is crucial to Dorice Williams Elliott's Transported to Botany Bay: Class, National Identity, and the Literary Figure of the Australian Convict, a lively study of Australian convict culture in nineteenth-century literary texts. Charles Dickens's compelling portrait of the sacrificial outcast—named Abel, in contrast to the many villainous Cains of London's underworld—asks crucial questions about the ethics of transportation in Victorian penal policy while also probing the dynamics of narrative expulsion. In his moving first-person account of his descent into crime, Magwitch complains that he was treated by the state as a chattel—of no more account than a "silver tea-kettle" (Great Expectations [Penguin, 1985], 364)—and while Dickens does not launch a full-scale attack on a legal system that vilified poverty, he nevertheless recognizes the interdependence of the wealthy and those who labor for others: in Magwitch's words to Pip, "I lived rough, that you should live smooth" (343). Historians recently have described eighteenth-century criminal law as a form of class war: during the early years of the Industrial Revolution, almost 250 offenses against property were made capital under the terms of the Bloody Code, and as Elliott describes here, another 160,000 men, women, and children were punished with shipment to the ports of New South Wales and Van Diemen's Land (now Tasmania) between 1787 and 1867. Many died on the way out, in prison, or in exile, but [End Page 279] others found prosperity and a chance of social redemption. Elliott is alert to the ways in which Britain's attempts to slough off its surplus of working class criminals became the foundational narrative of a new nation, and how that process of identity formation had to negotiate the original sin and social stain of convict transportation. Elliott situates Magwitch's plight alongside articles in Household Words (1850–59) that illuminate Dickens's wider exposure to, and attitudes toward, nineteenth-century penal policy. She notes, rightly, that narrative treatment of the convict serves as a test case for nineteenth-century practices of sympathy: on the one hand, convicts deserve compassion for their sufferings (especially if sentenced to the centers of secondary correction, such as the dreaded Port Arthur, where flogging was inflicted regularly); on the other hand, the judgment of the law could not be questioned—hence the oft-repeated plot device in which convicts could only be treated as fully human if they were the innocent victims of wrongful accusation, as in Marcus Clarke's For the Term of His Natural Life (serialized from 1870 to 1872). Elliott brings Dickens's work into conversation with broadsheets and ballads that also addressed crime against property and the aptness of punishment, concluding that "most of the extant English transportation broadsides uphold the notion of a just and ideal nation." Crimes and punishments "are portrayed as aberrations that actually reinforce the justice provided by the English state, an important function in incorporating the working classes into the notion of a national subject" (71). Much of the novelty of Elliott's study lies in her careful illumination of lesser-known texts by convicts: James Hardy Vaux's Memoirs (1819), for example, as well as the only two known novels published by convict authors, Henry Savery's Quintus Servinton (1831) and James Tucker's The Adventures of Ralph Rashleigh (1844–45). She also considers Victorian novels depicting convicts—Charles Reade's It Is Never too Late to Mend (1856) and Richard Cobbold's The History of Margaret Catchpole, a Suffolk Girl (1845)—by placing them in dialogue with canonical works by Anthony Trollope and George Eliot. Hetty in Adam Bede (1859) is a female Magwitch, sacrificed that others may learn "there's a sort of wrong that can never be made up for" (George Eliot, Adam Bede [Penguin, 1994], 507). Elliott describes the...

Multidisciplinary engagements with Port Arthur’s landscapes of in/justice

The serial property, Australian Convict Sites, was recognised as ‘world heritage’ by UNESCO in 2010 and consists of eleven penal sites connected to Australia’s convict past. One of those eleven sit...

Bubbles

Bubbles

Fictions of Migration in Contemporary Britain and Ireland by Carmen Zamorano Llena

Reviewed by: Fictions of Migration in Contemporary Britain and Ireland by Carmen Zamorano Llena Rita Sakr Fictions of Migration in Contemporary Britain and Ireland, by Carmen Zamorano Llena (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020, 220 p., hardcover, €75) A broad range of scholarship explores literary representations of the Irish migrant experience across the world and, more recently, the experience of migration to an increasingly multicultural Ireland (Pilar Villar-Argaiz, 2017; Ailbhe McDaid, 2017; Anne Mulhall, 2020, among others). There is an even larger body of criticism on the dynamics of migration, diaspora, and asylum-seeking in British literature (Agnes Woolley, 2014; Matthew Chambers, 2015; Deirdre Osborne, 2016, among others). Given the intertwined histories and geographies of the two islands, constructing a coherently productive methodological [End Page 154] approach to the literatures of migration in the two countries in the same study is both a convincing as well as a challenging intellectual feat, especially from the perspectives of postcolonial theory and globalization studies. Yet Carmen Zamorano Llena's Fictions of Migration in Contemporary Britain and Ireland achieves precisely this. Zamorano Llena's monograph focuses on fiction published since the 1990s. While the pairing of Ireland–Britain in the title could suggest a duality of national literatures, the book's significant scholarly contribution is its exploration of a vast network of transnational dimensions, including the contributions of non-migrant writers on this topic. The introduction offers an overview of relevant fields, including comparative literature and world literature, as well as the multifaceted concept of cosmopolitanism. It may not necessarily be clear at the start in what ways and how successfully the study will map "the connection between present fictions of migration and earlier migration literature, as well as postcolonial writing and new forms of cosmopolitan writing, with special attention to their role in redefining national literature and literary traditions." However, the case studies in the six main chapters deliver on the promise, in some instances with astonishing rigor and originality. The succinct discussion of "new cosmopolitan theory" in terms of redefining the interrelationship of postcolonialism and globalization at the start of Chapter 2 is more impressive than the relatively brief close readings of the disruption of nationalist "home" imaginaries in Caryl Phillips's A Distant Shore and Foreigners. Chapter 3 cleverly addresses "the democratising effects" of Colum McCann's Let the Great World Spin as a literary rendering of Ulrich Beck's concept of "inclusive differentiation" in terms of its narration of both the experience of 9/11 as well as of exile. Engaging Global North–Global South relations in Abdulrazak Gurnah's By the Sea and Gravel Heart, Chapter 4 incisively sets up Achille Mbembe's reconceptualized "Afropolitanism" as a groundwork to discover "new possible worldviews." Chapter 5 takes Jacques Rancière's work, particularly The Politics of Literature (2011), as well as Martha Nussbaum's and Sara Ahmed's writings on emotions, as a starting point to analyze Elif Shafak's Honour as "a fictional narrative that counters the simplifying narratives of the Muslim other." Chapter 6, on Rose Tremain's The Colour and The Gustav Sonata, is a standout in many respects, not least in its ambitious triangulation of Hannah Arendt's thinking on solidarity and "enlarged mentality" with Giorgio Agamben's concept of "bare life" and Michael Rothberg's notion of "noeuds de mémoire" in order to engage historical fiction in the context of what it correctly identifies as the fruitful "synergetic combination of migration studies and memory studies." The treatment of transcultural memories, particularly through Rothberg's "multidirectional memory," continues in Chapter 7 as a foundation to examine "the interconnections between Irish Famine diasporic [End Page 155] memory, transatlantic slavery past and Australian convict narratives" in Evelyn Conlon's Not the Same Sky. One of the study's strongest elements is the close analysis of formal techniques in the selected works of fiction. Zamorano Llena deftly addresses the often innovative narrative methods and motifs that approximate the sociohistorical shifts that are engendered and the ethico-political turns that are triggered by the "timespaces" of migration. This ranges from McCann's use of the metaphor of the tightrope walker signifying the migrant's "acrobatic mobility"; Gurnah's spatiotemporal "dialogism...

‘Within the protection of law’: debating the Australian convict-as-slave narrative

During the anti-transportation movement of the 1830s–1840s, Australian convicts were often compared to slaves. While these rhetorical arguments were borrowed from the abolition movement in full swing at the time, they also had a basis in the legal status of the convicts who had been sent to British North America between 1611 and the American Revolution. This article brings the status of Australian convicts into comparison with the earlier American convicts.

Prison Versus Western Australia: Which Worked Best, the Australian Penal Colony or the English Convict Prison System?

Abstract Between 1850 and 1868, a natural experiment in punishment took place. Men convicted of similar crimes could serve their sentence of penal servitude either in Britain or in Australia. For historians and social scientists, this offers the prospect of addressing a key question posed over 200 years ago by the philosopher, penal theorist and reformer Jeremy Bentham when he authored a lengthy letter entitled ‘Panopticon versus New South Wales: Or, the Panopticon Penitentiary System, and the Penal Colonization System, Compared’. This article answers the underlying tenet of Bentham’s question, ‘Which was best prison or transportation?’ by applying two efficiency tests. The first tests whether UK convicts or Australian convicts had higher rates of reconviction, and the second explores the speed to reconviction.

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

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.

Landscapes of Production and Punishment: Convict labour in the Australian context

This paper presents an interdisciplinary project that uses archaeological and historical sources to explore the formation of a penal landscape in the Australian colonial context. The project focuses on the convict-period legacy of the Tasman Peninsula (Tasmania, Australia), in particular the former penal station of Port Arthur (1830–1877). The research utilises three exceptional data series to examine the impact of convict labour on landscape and the convict body: the archaeological record of the Tasman Peninsula, the life course data of the convicts and the administrative record generated by decades of convict labour management. Through these, the research seeks to demonstrate how changing ideologies affected the processes and outcomes of convict labour and its products, as well as how the landscapes we see today were formed and developed in response to a complex interplay of multi-scalar penological and economic influences. Areas of inquiry: Australian convict archaeology and history. The archaeology and history of Australian convict labour management. The archaeology and history of the Tasman Peninsula.

Memorandoms by James Martin: An astonishing escape from early New South Wales ed. by Tim Causer

Reviewed by: Memorandoms by James Martin: An astonishing escape from early New South Wales ed. by Tim Causer Katherine Roscoe Memorandoms by James Martin: An astonishing escape from early New South Wales Edited by Tim Causer. London: UCL Press, 2017. This edited account of Memorandoms by James Martin tells the story of the most famous convict escape from the penal colony of Australia. On the night of 29 March 1791, William Bryant, his wife Mary, their two children, as well as James Martin and six other male convicts stole the government cutter and sailed out of Sydney Harbour. Over the next 69 days the group journeyed over 5,000 kilometres along the eastern and northern coasts of the Australian continent, across the Gulf of Carpentaria in the Pacific Ocean, reaching Kupang in Timor on 9 June. All nine absconders survived squalls and storms, diminishing supplies of food and water, and hostile encounters with Indigenous peoples. After two months, the Dutch authorities discovered the group were not shipwreck survivors, as they claimed to be, but were actually escaped convicts. They were imprisoned and shipped back to England to face trial for returning from transportation, though not all survived the journey home. While imprisoned in Newgate Gaol, the survivors wrote a narrative of their escape from the new penal colony. Memorandoms is a narrative mostly likely written not only by the titular James Martin, but several of his fellow convicts. It is the first Australian convict narrative, and the only first-hand account of the most famous escape from the penal colony. It originated from the collection of manuscripts held by philosopher Jeremy Bentham, who probably collected the material as part of his anti-transportation writings to lobby the government to support his own "Panopticon" penitentiary. Three previous editions of Memorandoms have been published: by Charles Blount, in 1937, who first discovered the narrative, by Victor Crittenden in 1991, and by Tim Causer as part of the Bentham Project website in 2011.1 This new edition by Causer supercedes these earlier ones, benefitting from a superb scholarly introduction, detailed annotations, and full-colour reproductions of each page of the narrative, with transcription on the adjacent page. Being able to see the archival material so clearly brings to life the dangers the absconders faced on their voyage, whilst Causer's annotations are particularly helpful to pinpoint the exact location and nautical references made within the narrative. As an open access publication, it would be a particularly useful teaching tool for students on courses relating to maritime voyaging, European-Indigenous encounters and convict escapes. Causer's impressive introduction contextualises the Bryants' escape—though extraordinary in some respects—within a broader timeline of convict resistance to colonial authorities. He builds on existing historiography, to show that absconding into the bush or escaping in a boat was a logical and not uncommon form of resistance in early New South Wales.2 Though the Bryant party were by no means unusual in attempting to escape, particularly during the midst of severe food shortages in the early 1790s, Causer identifies two factors that account for their success in navigating a 5,000-kilometre journey without any fatalities. These were: first, the degree of preparation, including stockpiling provisions under the Bryants' hut and the purchase of navigational tools; and second that the assemblage of skills amongst the convicts—with five convicts having varying degrees of skill in sailing, and two craftsmen to repair the ship—which enabled them to successfully navigate a long distance with no fatalities. Causer's account is refreshingly transparent about exactly what evidence is available and what can be reasonably assumed, which serves as an important counterbalance to much "unevidenced embroidering and embellishment of the historical record" (20) in the past about the escape. This technique is also used to explain—rather than just call out—the many inaccuracies that have arisen about the Byrant party in the historical record. Causer's meticulous tracing of the convict absconders through the archives, from their conviction to their release from Newgate, is a great strength of this edition. He corrects a number of misidentifications of the convicts, demonstrating for example that it was a different Samuel Broom...

Convict Transportation to New South Wales, 1787–1849: Mortality Rates Reconsidered

Previous research into Australian convict transportation has concluded that a significant downturn in mortality rates occurred with the appointment of naval surgeons as superintendents in 1815. Statistical analysis of convict ships sent to New South Wales between 1787 and 1849 shows a more significant downturn occurred in 1800, following the introduction of closer supervision of ships' surgeons. The contracting system established by the Navy Board in 1786 for the transportation of convicts to New South Wales could be made to work as long as government maintained an effective system of inspection and supervision.

Commissioning Human Services: Lessons from Australian Convict Contracting

AbstractThe transportation of convicts to the British penal colony at New South Wales in the late 18th and early 19th centuries was largely undertaken by private merchants under contract to government. In the early years, the outcomes of this system, as measured by mortality rates, were mixed, but by the turn of the century, public officials had refined its operation, resulting in a significant decline in convict deaths. Close study of the evolution of this system reveals that government officials were grappling with many of the same issues encountered by public service commissioners today – trade‐offs between price and quality, the use of transactional versus relational contracting forms, and heavy reliance on financial incentives as opposed to intrinsic motivation. Government's success in reducing mortality on the convict ships highlights the importance of system design, effective monitoring and management when public services are delivered under contract.

Managing a Global Enterprise in the Eighteenth Century: Anthony Calvert of The Crescent, London, 1777–1808

Camden, Calvert & King, a major London shipping firm of the late eighteenth century, was one of the first medium-sized enterprises in Britain to operate on a global scale. They are well known to historians of the African slave trade and Australian convict transportation, but they also sent vessels to the Continent and the Americas, to the East Indies and the Pacific, as well as contracting vessels to government and investing in privateering. This article documents the career of Anthony Calvert, who was managing partner of this and three related firms over more than thirty years. None of Calvert's own records have survived, and the article reconstructs his business affairs from a wide variety of sources, looking at his personal life and his management style, the rise and decline of his business concerns, the diversity of his interests, and the extent of the personal and financial risk faced by him, his partners and their employees

Prison Without Walls: The Tasmanian Bush in Australian Convict Novels

POSTCOLONIAL LITERARY CRITICISM IN AUSTRALIA HAS WRITTEN about the bush for more than four decades, employing the term in the simplifying sense that it enjoys in colloquial Australian usage, where it refers to pretty well all Australia except for the towns (Kirkpatrick 72). Since Shaffer, readings of the bush as the other against which the bushman-as-hero is constructed (Shaffer 52) have become the norm. In such readings, the feminization of Australian space becomes the reason for the bush's representation as a of fear, a place that will, dentata-like, consume you (Kinsella 35). In this, Australian criticism knows itself in agreement with the larger critical consensus of the androcentric rhetoric of empire (cf. David; compare Woollacott 314), in which any native landscape-defined as feminine other and often virginalentities explorers and settler societies-defined as masculine-to give full reign to their paranoid aggression of colonization (McCann 77). Global as the British Empire's reach once was, this feature of imperialism can only have global ramifications and eventually unites historical perceptions of, for example, landscapes in the US with those of Australia (such as in Head 28)-across the hemispheres and in bold defiance of existing ecologies.At this point, the level of generalization should have raised critical hackles and yet, it appears, how such theorizing has moved away from actually analyzing the response to Australian spaces is little considered. A distinctly spatial, local experience rather than a globally applicable theoretical outlook has always been part and parcel of fiction about the Australian bush. Despite the undifferentiated colloquial usage of the term, which criticism so far seems to endorse, the bush of Winton's Dirt Music (2002) has very little in common with the environment of Astley's It's Raining in Mango (1987) or Flanagan's Death of a River Guide (1994). It is currently the diligence of Australian historiography that provides an awareness of the extent to which perceptions of highly specific Australian spaces are part of historical representations (as opposed to a more contemporary literary output). Yet every now and then an attentive close reading notes dissonances to the postcolonial critical consensus mentioned above. Kinsella's analysis of Barbara Baynton's short story The Chosen Vessel ( 1896) is such an example:In terms of prospect and refuge, the bush or landscape might be seen to allow him to see and yet not to see him. [. . .) As perpetrator, he makes use of the creek to hide, in a sense becoming one with the landscape, and reaches out of it to capture when she runs from the house with baby. When he murders her, the curlews take up cry of murder-not so much in sympathy as in mimicry. (Kinsella 46)Notwithstanding this nuanced approach, Kinsella eventually re-establishes the global critical consensus over his own local analysis by a frail rhetorical strategy: He would rather see the swagman as (ab)using the landscape than concede that the bush might conspir[e] with him against her (Kinsella 46). As his analysis shows, there is fertile ground to be expected for those willing to risk a closer look at the representations of specific Australian spaces in literary texts without the blinds of generalized preconceptions.Following Boyce's historiographic differentiations of Van Diemen's Land (2009), I will focus on representations of the Tasmanian bush; the panorama will be one of colonial and postcolonial authors, and consider literary, historical, and pictorial representations in turn. Convict novels set in Tasmania would supply a thematic congruence as well as a suitably stable representational focus that can be expected to echo historically established topoi of the Tasmanian bush yet add contemporary shifts and fractures. Yet there is more to my choice of genre:Popular images of Van Diemen's Land today largely reflect fiction, or more accurately, a single work of fiction. …

Australian Convict Sites and the Heritage of Adaptation: The Case of Newcastle's Coal River Heritage Precinct

The Australian Government's successful nomination of eleven ‘convict sites’ for World Heritage listing has again highlighted complex relationships between history and heritage. This article considers one convict site excluded from the nomination—the Coal River Heritage Precinct in the heart of Newcastle (NSW). While the site falls short of fulfilling conventional heritage criteria, the material remains having been so seriously eroded, its historical significance is nonetheless considerable. In fact, its significance lies in what has been destroyed, as much as in what has survived, because the site evidences a process of adaptation and transformation over time. This theme of adaptation, we argue, is an instructive reflection of the legacies of Australia's convict past, but is not so well embodied by the successfully-nominated convict sites. Drawing on the lessons from this particular case study, we suggest that more progressive and adventurous approaches may be needed to adequately reflect the historical significance of Australia's convict inheritance.