Flogging Parsons? Australian Anglican Clergymen,the Magistracy,and Convicts, 1788–1850

In colonial Australian history the entanglement of clergymen, colony, and empire has made the Anglican clergyman one of the colonies' more controversial figures. Historical and popular understanding of this encounter has been overshadowed by the “flogging parson” and “moral policeman” traditions in Australian historiography. Centring on prominent parson‐magistrates such as the Reverend Samuel Marsden, prevailing interpretations have emphasized individual clergymen's efforts to inculcate convict discipline and deference. Examined collectively, however, a less negative and impressionistic picture of colonial clergymen emerges. In contrast with established views, this article demonstrates that parson‐magistrates consistently provided pastoral care and advocacy at the parish level, while as writers and activists they worked for the structural reform and eventual abolition of the convict system itself. Their collective efforts are the focus of this article, which in turn offers a fresh assessment of the encounter between clergymen and convicts in Australia before 1850.     

From convicts to colonists: the health of prisoners and the voyage to Australia, 1823-53

From 1815, naval surgeons accompanied all convict voyages from Britain and Ireland to the Australian colonies. As their authority grew, naval surgeons on convict ships increasingly used their medical observations about the health of convicts to make pointed and sustained criticisms of British penal reforms. Beyond their authority at sea, surgeons' journals and correspondence brought debates about penal reform in Britain into direct conversation with debates about colonial transportation. In the 1830s, naval surgeons' claims brought them into conflict with their medical colleagues on land, as well as with the colonial governor, George Arthur. As the surgeons continued their attempts to combat scurvy, their rhetoric changed. By the late 1840s, as convicts' bodies betrayed the disturbing effects of separate confinement as they boarded the convict ships, surgeons could argue convincingly that the voyage itself was a space that could medically, physically and spiritually reform convicts. By the mid-1840s, surgeons took the role of key arbiters of convicts' potential contribution to the Australian colonies.     

‘The Scum of France’: Australian Anxieties towards French Convicts in the Nineteenth Century

Between the 1860s and the early decades of the twentieth century, escaped and liberated French convicts from the penal colony in New Caledonia arrived on Australian shores, raising concerns about physical as well as moral contamination. This article combines Australian sources with French consular and ministerial archives to examine the impact this little-known episode of trans-imperial history had on the early Australian federal process. The arrival of the convicts and former convicts played on at least two levels. It highlighted the colonial authorities’ weak powers in asserting their territorial sovereignty and policies and pitted them against both Great Britain and the French. Further, the constant nudging of these unwelcome neighbours disrupted the ongoing disavowal of the colonies’ convict past.     

LIKE A FISH GASPING FOR WATER: THE LETTERS OF A TEMPORARY SPOUSE FROM BENGKULU

The article introduces six Malay letters from 1784 and 1785 which were sent by Ence' Lena of Bengkulu to John Marsden, the elder brother of William Marsden. The letters express in moving words the personal loss and dislocation of a local woman, whose spouse of many years has left her to return to Europe, taking with him two of their three children. The documents are important for several reasons: they give a personal voice to a late 18th-century Muslim female individual from West Sumatra; they contribute to our knowledge of the Malay epistolary in general and provide a historical context to the nature and uses of the Malay language in particular; they throw light on an aspect of British and Asian relations for which we lack contemporary accounts in European languages; they bring the day-to-day life of British settlements around the Bay of Bengal in the late 18th century into focus; and, last but not least, they raise challenging questions about the lives of John and William Marsden.     

Indentured servitude and convict labour in the Danish-Norwegian West Indies, 1671–1755

The article explores how indentured servitude and the use of convict labour began and evolved in the Danish-Norwegian West Indies in the period 1671–1755. It examines the intentions and realities behind indentured servitude and convict labour on the islands, and compares these with the workings and use of indentured servants in the British West Indies.

Similar to conditions in the British West Indies, the lowest social strata of white society in the Danish-Norwegian West Indies consisted of a small population of convicts and indentured servants. The use of these groups as part of the labour force took place from the onset of colonisation in 1672 until 1755, the period in which the islands were governed by the West Indian and Guinean Company, WIGC (Vestindisk-Guineisk Kompagni). The analysis reveals that the importation and deployment of indentured servants and convicts can be divided into two distinct periods. Until 1700, the objective of the WIGC was to provide cheap labour for the colony. After 1700, however, the aim was to recruit qualified personnel and to secure the planters against slave rebellion by increasing the white Danish population. As convicts provided neither qualifications nor security, convict transportations to the Danish-Norwegian West Indies ceased after 1700. After 1755, when the Danish-Norwegian Crown purchased the colonies from the WIGC, Danish convict labour and indentured servants were no longer imported to the colony. By contrast, in the British West Indies, imports of indentured servants and convicts continued to play a significant role.

The article explores the physical and legal conditions of the indentured servants and convicts, who constituted the lowest social group in white colonial society and were in some respects considered slaves.     

The State,Convicts and Longitudinal Analysis

In 2006 the Records of the Tasmanian Convict Department were inscribed on the UNESCO Memory of the World Register. This extraordinarily intact collection of records document the lives of 73,000 male and female prisoners transported to Van Diemen’s Land. This article examines ways in which this information can be used to explore the impact of forced labour migration on the lives of convicts. It focuses in particular on the assembly of cradle-to-grave datasets. Such longitudinal approaches to the past can be powerful, especially where they involve the analysis of multiple life course events for a large number of individuals. The first part of the article explores ways in which quantitative approaches can be used to reconstruct the circumstances that shaped the creation of record groups. The second part examines the way in which longitudinal analysis can be used to analyse the impact of state action on the lives of convicts.     

Lucien Basch: Ancient wrecks and the archaeology of ships A comment

The material we have today indicates that shell building was known and practised in the Mediterranean in classical antiquity. Comparative material shows that the‘intermediate stages’between shell and skeleton shipbuilding are in most, or all, cases shell building with some skeleton influence. The date when‘the skeleton idea’first struck a boatbuilder is not established. There are indications that this happened in the Mediterranean. No definite proof of skeleton work is found in the Mediterranean earlier than the Yassi Ada wreck, where a bottom shell may have been equipped with a skeleton on which topsides were built. The shell-skeleton division is a working tool for research on shipbuilding history, and should be used critically. The wrecks from Blackfriars I and New Guy's House indicate a kind of skeleton approach to shipbuilding in northern Europe (Marsden, 1967). If the 'skeleton idea’existed in the Mediterranean in classical antiquity, especially in warships, proof will turn up sooner or later. In the meantime, publishers of shipwrecks should take into consideration that we know very little, and that all details count. Field work on the existing tradition in the Mediterranean should be pursued. The lesson learned in Scandinavia is that the archaeologist may theorize as much as he wants, but the boat-builders will be able to give definite answers, if he takes the trouble to ask them, and watch them at work.     

A Patina of Age: Elizabeth Macquarie (née) Campbell and the Influence of the Buildings and Landscape of Argyll,Scotland, in Colonial New South Wales

Elizabeth Macquarie, a daughter of Campbell of Airds, was the wife of Lachlan Macquarie, the fifth governor of New South Wales (1810–21). The buildings of Argyll, Scotland, strongly influenced choices made by Elizabeth in the buildings erected during her husband’s 12-year administration of the colony. By examining these Scottish influences, through theories of landscape and the transfer of traditional, even “old-fashioned,” architectural styles to this far-flung colony, new layers of meaning embedded within the landscape of Sydney Cove are disentangled to reveal a deeper understanding of how British cultural identity was recreated on the far side of the world.     

London versus Sydney, 1815–1823: the politics of colonial architecture

This paper investigates the architecture designed by transported convict, Francis Greenway, and erected under the reforming Governorship of General Lachlan Macquarie in Sydney from 1815 onwards. It analyses how that architecture articulated Macquarie's ideas on how the planning and fabric of the city could facilitate the policies of reformation that he was implementing, and shows how this could have been perceived as oppositional to British Government policy after 1815. It affects this principally through considering the report of Commissioner of Inquiry, John Thomas Bigge, who arrived in Sydney in 1819, other literary sources, and the urban fabric of Sydney itself. In addition, it considers contemporary thinking on the built environment and social control, particularly as manifested in Scotland. It closes with more general observations on the ways in which Sydney contrasted with London, which city was perceived as falling short of what was expected of a great metropolis, and how its early nineteenth-century evolution into a new type of city itself affected the way in which Sydney was perceived.     

The Hyde Park Rally of 9 March 1890: a British response to Russian atrocities

In December 1889 The Times carried a report detailing the killing of a group of Russian political exiles in Yakutsk, Siberia. Public outrage at this atrocity was compounded two months later with news of the flogging and suicide of female political prisoners in another Siberian penal colony. These events sparked a series of international protests, and the British reaction culminated in a march and rally in Hyde Park. This article examines the causes and timing of this outburst of militancy and draws attention to the wide range of organisations and individuals who were responsible for the growth of support within Britain for the cause of the Russian ant-tsarist opposition. Drawing on Russian and British archival documents and contemporary press reports, it throws fresh light on the Siberian events themselves as well as on the convergence in London of a range of disparate political groupings determined to show a unified front in support of their Russian brethren.     

Ghosts of Sorrow,Sin and Crime: Dark Tourism and Convict Heritage in Van Diemen’s Land,Australia

Established as a British imperial penal colony, Van Diemen’s Land received approximately 75,000 convicts before cessation of convict transportation in 1853. A vast network of penal stations and institutions were created to accommodate, employ, administer, and discipline these exiled felons. Popular interpretations of Australia’s convict past highlight dynamics of shame, avoidance and active obliteration that characterized Australia’s relationship to its recent convict past. Yet, closer examination of these colonial institutions suggests a far more ambivalent relationship with this “dark heritage,” evidenced by continuous tourism and visitation to these places of pain and shame from the mid-nineteenth century to the present.     

Landscapes of Redemption: Tracing the Path of a Convict Miner in Western Australia

This paper presents alternative readings of the archaeology of a series of nineteenth-century industrial and convict sites in the midwest region of Western Australia. In particular it employs the biography of Joseph Horrocks a former convict turned mine manager, to reinterpret the relationship between these places, considering the agency of the individual and suggesting how his experiences at some sites may have influenced him to attempt to create an idealised industrial settlement aimed at assisting with the reform of convicts.     

Destitute Women and Smoking at the Hyde Park Barracks,Sydney, Australia

The Hyde Park Barracks in Sydney, Australia, was established in 1819 to accommodate male convicts, but in later years the building served as a depot for immigrant women (1848–86) and as an asylum for destitute women (1862–86). The occupation of the latter group in particular resulted in the loss of large numbers of clay tobacco pipes under the floorboards. The quantity and distribution of the pipes is used here to examine smoking behavior among the destitute female inmates, and to assess their relationships with each other and the institution in which they were confined.     

Geographic contributions to institutional curriculum reform in Australia: the challenge of embedding field-based learning

Abstract

In the context of continuing pressures from managerialist and neoliberal drivers of university reform in Australia, Macquarie University’s recent undergraduate curriculum innovation, based on “People,” “Planet,” and “Participation,” has resulted in the embedding and integration of experiential learning in its curriculum and institutional framework. Such an approach challenges academic and administrative staff, students, and partners in industry, the community and public sector settings, to engage and collaborate across significant boundaries. This article outlines the scope and nature of the curriculum reform, then considers the way geographers have both shaped and responded to the opportunities it created. In so doing, it proposes a number of challenges and recommendations for geographers who might seek to extend their longstanding commitment to field-based learning through similar reforms. In this regard, the discipline of geography and its tendency to engage with the “field” can offer much in fostering deeply transformative learning.     

Convict ancestry: a neglected aspect of Australian identity

Abstract Claiming descent from convicts who were sent to Australia during the early period of British settlement is more than just about blood ties, it is also an aspect of national identity for many Australians. Analyses of nationally representative survey data show that younger, left‐leaning, working class Australians are most likely to identify as convict descendants, while older, high income, educated, city dwellers are least likely to identify. Our findings also suggest that the ‘hated stain’ of convict ancestry is senescent, and will diminish with intergenerational replacement. Yet claims to convict descent remain divided along status lines. Interest in convicts and claims of convict heritage may comprise an element of ‘popular taste’, but as a consequence of this popularity, ‘convict chic’ is rejected by educated elites. Embraced by ‘middle Australia’, but shunned by cosmopolitan elites, convict ancestry is a neglected aspect of Australian identity. Whether claims of convict ancestry are ‘real’ or ‘imaginary’, the power of foundation myths to provide shared memories is evident in the salience of convict connections in Australia.     

In the Valley of the Sweet Mother: Gendered metaphors,domestic lives and reproduction under a Brazilian state mining company

Metaphors have been studied by feminist geographers as examples of both power over and empowerment by women. In this article, the author takes three gendered metaphors used by people in the Brazilian mining town of Itabira as starting points to enlarge a discussion of the mining economy's effects on women's lives. One, the 'sweet mother,' describes the company's reskilling and cultural education of male workers from the 1940s to the early 1980s. Second, women react to these strategies with a contending image of the company as 'the rival.' Finally, the phase of company downsizing has created a new metaphor: 'the stepmother.' These metaphors elucidate ways that public and private spaces become intertwined in three moments of the state mining company's life: its arrival in the region in the mid-1940s; its expansion from the 1960s to the 1980s; and its restructuring in the last 10 years. The author suggests that women's ironic rewriting of the foundational metaphor of 'sweet mother' is central to their reconceptualization of economic change under the company. The alternative metaphors also reflect women's changing views on motherhood, sexuality and family partnership.     

The darkness and claustrophobia of the city: Victor Hugo and the myth of Paris

Dark, mysterious, and dangerous: The representation of Paris in 19thcentury French literature contrasts sharply with the ideals and expectations of a society that dreamt of progress and modernity. Through his symbolism, Victor Hugo recaptures the dark side of Balzac's Paris, and turns the capital into a gigantic spider's web that symbolises the power of Fate upon individuals, and underlines the carceral oppression of the city. In this article, a reading is proposed of some of Hugo's major prose (Notre-Dame de Paris , Les Misérables) illustrating his claustrophobia: Paris, the capital of 'materiality', is represented metaphorically in Hugo's writings as a huge prison, and ultimately as a dreadful monster, swallowing and literally digesting its prey. This image of Paris connects Hugo's work to that of several other major 19th-century French writers, notably Balzac, Zola and-less obviously-Baudelaire.     

Of Other Spaces: Women's colleges at the turn of the nineteenth century in the UK

This article explores the first British university-associated women's colleges at the turn of the nineteenth century. Drawing on Foucault, the article looks into the dualistic opposition between private and public, as well as women's attempts to transcend this dichotomy. In theorising women's colleges as Foucauldian heterotopias, spaces in the interstices of power relations and dominant social structures, the author focuses on the interplay of contradicting discourses and strong power relations within these women's colleges. In this light, the author considers the ways women resisted, negotiated, but also compromised in their attempt to shape their lives and invent new ways of being in the world.     

Norman Gash and the Making of Mr Secretary Peel

In May 1961, the firm of Longmans published the first volume of Norman Gash's monumental life of Sir Robert Peel. Mr Secretary Peel: The Life of Sir Robert Peel before 1830 was hailed at the time as a landmark and has proved surprisingly durable as an interpretation of Peel's early life and formation. This essay is concerned with locating Gash's work within its political, biographical, and historiographical context. It begins by considering the reaction of Peel family members to Gash's biography, before tracing the antecedents of his historical preoccupations and intellectual development in the years leading up to the publication of Mr Secretary Peel. It presents a wide range of new evidence relating to Gash's life and emergence as a political and parliamentary historian, drawing upon sources which have come to light in the decade since his death in May 2009.