What is the difference between a penal and a free settler colony

However, the six contributions provide a glimpse of the diverse ways in which Bentham's penal theories and his Panopticon were incorporated in a unique Australian model where a hybrid penal system blended transportation, incarceration and open-air goals. Llewellyn focuses on the influence of Bentham and his followers on the building of Australia from the 19 th century onwards, and in doing so he brings to light a connection overlooked by Bentham scholars and academics.

In an attempt to increase the migration of free settlers, rather than convicts, Edward Gibbon Wakefield suggested to concentrate population thanks to applying a high price for land, thus ensuring higher wages and profits. Thus Bentham can be credited by some historian with being one of the founders of the colony. It was not just in London that Benthamites were at work. While in Victoria in , Henry Chapman, wrote the legislation implementing the secret ballot there.

In South Australia, the legislation was written by George Kingston, who was an early member of the South Australia Society in London and was among the first who migrated to the new colony in Discussing another paper by a major Bentham scholar, L. Hume on ' Foundations of Populism and Pluralism: Australian Writings on Politics to ' , Llewellyn concludes that post-convict Australia was effectively born from the coupling of an active state with individual and economic freedoms.

In a well-documented paper, Ford starts with an overview of the penal system in 18 th c. Britain, before looking into how the work of reformers influenced the development of prisons in the US, in the UK and in the British Empire. Ford then moves on to explain the specificities of crime management in the newly-created state of Victoria. The gold rush — with the large increase of population and wealth that followed in its wake — created considerable social imbalance conducive to a rise in crime.

Victoria found itself in need of its own penitentiary structure as it could not rely exclusively on neighbouring New South Wales. Pentridge remains a tribute to the capacity for Victoria to embark on large public projects early in its history. Ford then devotes a large part of his paper to describe his archeological methodology, work and findings. Indeed, the excavations were substantial, and came with their own logistical issues in a now densely-build suburb of Melbourne.

However, the archeology itself was simple, as very few artefacts were found and as the buildings were used for decades with a single occupation and single function. Unusually so for archeological work, much was known about the building before excavation: almost all aspects of the building form, function including internal spaces and chronology.

The paper provides many of the plans and photographs which help document this archaeological investigation. Notwithstanding this prior knowledge, the excavation made it possible to identify markedly different construction techniques of the three panopticon airing yards. In a highly documented study, Lanman looks into the architecture and the regulations of both penitentiaries. She points to the colonial environment to explain the difference in capacity.

Indeed, lack of financial resources, difficult access to building material and skills, and crime rates congruent with the size of a new colony could explain the difference. She then moves on to study the regulations that structured the jails operations, examining more particularly the and rules.

It is in these regulations that the panoptic legacy in the Fremantle Gaol is most evident. She argues that any differences between the two penitentiaries originate in how far apart British institutions in the motherland stood from that of a budding colony in the Antipodes. The main difference, she points out, refers to the hierarchies of power in the prison. However, other operations of the Fremantle Gaol are strikingly close to the panopticon scheme: labour is central to the reforming of prisoners, and there is a similar stress on the physical health, moral and religious character of the inmates.

However, Causer shows that Maconochie shared with Bentham the belief that the sensibility of offenders could be altered and that the production of reformed and industrious individuals could be effected by a penal discipline envisaged as a science. Both believed that existing modes of punishment at their times were inadequate.

However, his positions contributed to reforming prison discipline into a more humane system. Whether its model is the American Pennsylvanian system, the silent system as implemented in Auburn Prison, or Bentham's Panopticon, it is most likely that the Tasmanian building is a mix of the latest penal architecture and management theories at the time.

Architecture academic, Rachel Hurst chose rather to focus on the restoration of this world heritage. The project was overseen by T onkin Zulaikha Greer architects TZG and beautifully illustrated with photographs by architectural photographer Brett Boardman. The opening quote from Richard Flanagan's Gould Book of Fish illustrates aptly the contradictions of site and the difficult task of the restoration brief in the opposition between the 'Commandant's dream' and the 'convict's nightmare'.

The natural beauty of the place and the exquisite restoration of the buildings are set in sharp contrast with the dramatic reconstruction of convict lives in small cells drilled by terrible routines, thus creating a tourist experience of the 'terrifying normal' invented by penal bureaucrats.

Stasiuk describes the elements of the Aboriginal-built prison, called the Quod, and compares it to the Fremantle goal or Round House on the mainland. However, notwithstanding the recurrent comparisons with the Panopticon in Rottnest historiography, the living conditions were a far-cry from Bentham's humane penal reforms. To understand the extent of the harm done to Aboriginals in detention, Stasiuk explains the Noongar tribes' spirituality and highlights how foreign — thus terrifying — incarceration was in their culture.

When the first white free settlers arrived in the Swan River colony, they removed Aboriginals from their lands, exploited them as cheap or free labour and took their children away. As this legal, social and cultural dispossession was met with resistance, 59 settlers built the Rottnest Island prison to deal with it. The Aboriginal Panopticon was the logical outcome of settler colonization of Western Australia.

In a paper which is both a research piece and a politically-motivated plea, Stasiuk confronts the past of indigenous detention on the island in order to advocate for reconciliation between the Aboriginal communities and white settlers. From — the New South Wales colony is officially a penal colony. The population consists of mostly convicts, marines and their wives. Convict Era: Timeline.

However, the hulks which transported the convicts were not solely filled with murderers. On the contrary, the majority of convicts were being penalized for much smaller crimes. Three popular types of crimes that were punishable by transportation consisted of theft primarily by city dwellers, rebellion towards the King by Irish and Scottish immigrants, and other violent crimes such as rape, robbery, kidnapping, and murder The Convict 3.

The convicts of the First Fleet were compiled of individuals from various walks of life. Twenty four, 12 percent, were unemployed. Eighty four men, 44 percent, were laborers Hughes Convicts of the First Fleet. In addition to individual convicts who have become well-known in Australian history, there were many groups of convicts who were sentenced simultaneously and punished by transportation to Australia.

These groups are unique because they participated in political crimes, as opposed to smaller felonies. The Naval Mutineers were a group of British sailors who rebelled against their poor food, pay, and living conditions and were transported to Australia in Prisoners that were not hung were sent to New South Wales in The Machine Breakers were a group of farmers who disagreed with the use of machines in farming.

They rioted and attempted to break the machines because they felt that the machines caused a loss of jobs. The Fenians were a part of the Irish Revolution and were transported to Western Australia aboard the last convict fleet, the Hougoumont. British officials feared that there would be attempts made to free the convicts and thus, great measures were taken to protect the ship including the addition of a man-of-war ship which followed the fleet throughout their journey.

He later established himself in America as a well-known journalist. Other Fenians were able to escape to New Zealand, where they were turned away, and later ended their journey aboard a steamship with a destination in California. Political Prisoners. Over the course of 81 years, beginning in with the First Fleet and ending in with the sailing of the Hougoumont England sailed shiploads of prisoners averaging approximately convicts per load Hughes Conditions for prisoners on board gradually improved over the years, but sailing the open seas at this time was never easy whether you were a convict or not.

People regularly became ill and died during voyages. The First Fleet was the only transportation of convicts completed by the government.

Every ship thereafter was a private contractor. The highest amount of traffic sailed between and when ships transported 26, convicts to Australia Hughes At this peak time, slightly more than one percent died from illness.

The death rate was much higher in the s and began to decrease after when naval surgeons were placed on board to monitor conditions and the shipping contractors were given monetary incentives to deliver the convicts alive. The Second Fleet went down in history as having the largest death rate of all British convict transports.

Out of a total of prisoners, died at sea and another perished on arrival Hughes At this time many of the ships were former slave transports equipped with slave shackles, iron bars placed between the ankles, rather than chains and ankle irons. This arrangement disallowed even the slightest range of movement. Sea water often entered the bowels of the ships soaking all that lay below decks. The convict Thomas Milburn wrote the following home to his parents. William Redfern , a transported convict is largely responsible for improvement of conditions for prisoners on ship.

An accomplished doctor, who served Governor Macquarie , himself a reformer of the system, suggested various improvements that would increase the well being of the convicts. Increased cleanliness as a whole, ventilation and exercise raised the survival rate considerably. From to an average of 1 in 31 prisoners died. The sailing time dropped considerably over the years as well. While it took days for the First Fleet to reach Botany Bay, by the s the average sail time had dropped to days Hughes Berths for the convicts usually consisted of two rows of double height against the hull housing four convicts in a six feet square space.

The hatchways that supplied the only air circulation were usually kept closed with thick heavily padlocked grilles. Not many prisoners complained about the food provisions. Theirs is Deep History. Habitation of the continent stretches back at least 40, years, the world's oldest outside Africa.

Without war or treaty the great continent of Eastern Australia was claimed for Britain in by Captain James Cook, with unending ramifications. The European evaluation that the land could be put to better economic use was justification enough in contemporary British politico-legal thought. Native title was not recognised in law until the Mabo Judgement of British imperial expansion meant invasion to the indigenous peoples in Australia.

The invaders brought with them deadly diseases, especially smallpox — accidentally or possibly deliberately; individual renegades — bushrangers and sealers — guilty of violence, abduction and sexual slavery; cloven footed animals that would support economic growth but deplete the environment and disrupt traditional food supplies; and a voracious appetite for Aboriginal land.

What accommodation had been reached between some of the Aboriginal First Nations and the Europeans in the early years was shattered when the penal settlements transformed into pastoral capitalist economies from the s swallowing vast tracks of land.

Karskens; Boyce. The role of convicts in dispossession is complex. Some convict absconders integrated into Aboriginal society, while bands of convict bushrangers are known to have formed working alliances. Sexual relations sometimes meant local women exploiting new options; at other times more frequently? Infamously, in VDL Aboriginal women were either forcibly taken by sealers or exchanged as part of negotiations with Aboriginal groups and were subjected to sexual slavery.

The perceived threat of miscegenation later created the opportunity of assimilation, becoming formal policy in the 20th century. Convict attitudes to locals readily turned negative. In New South Wales Aboriginal peoples were rewarded for returning runaway convicts. When a party of Tasmanian Aborigines were temporarily housed in the bottom level of the convict barracks at Macquarie Harbour the convicts urinated through the floorboards on them.

When Aboriginal hunters took sheep that replaced kangaroos, convict shepherds anticipated the punishment their loss of flock entailed. Violence erupted. Much colonial conflict was between Aboriginal Australians and convict and former convict stockmen operating beyond the frontiers of settlement in lands illegally occupied by the Squattocracy, the richest and most powerful political group in the country McMichael, This was the eviction by various means of long-term inhabitants, of people who used land in a very different way, and it was rarely accomplished in a single act.

What was created was a venue for violence. Responsibility for colonial violence rested at multiple levels. Individual actors were clearly culpable, but so were private employers who formally or informally sanctioned brutality.

The latter had an acute and unwavering belief in the validity of their newly if often illegally acquired property rights, and the legitimacy of any action that guaranteed them. The Sydney Herald responded vehemently when the state prosecuted the alleged perpetrators of the Myall Creek massacre of , urging the jury to acquit.

The colonial state had a duty of care and, as in the case of Myall Creek did act to prosecute under the auspices of new Governor George Gipps. Notably, prosecution of whites for killing Aborigines was not repeated. In other respects, the state appears the architect. Genocide — a contested term Kociumbas — takes various forms and several are to be found in VDL.

The Colonial Government responded with money, men and martial law. Ryan has argued that this was an Imperial strategy used elsewhere in the British Empire, and that it succeeded in ending the war Ryan, Convicts were recruited into these and other roving parties. Treatment of indigenous people can be seen to vary in accordance with their economic value to local employers. Aborigines were most at risk when viewed as obstacles to progress.

In places where their labour could be utilised — particularly as stockmen, or domestic servants — violence against Aboriginal people was to some degree constrained, and those who regularly employed Aborigines were less likely to participate in killing Palmer, This led easily into assimilation policy which from involved the systematic removal of light-skinned Aboriginal children to be brought up white — the Stolen Generations.

Real gains were slow in coming. Inclusion in the census population returns, equal wages — for some, any wages — land rights, enquiries into Black Deaths in Custody and Stolen Generations, all had to wait until later in the 20th century.

It was in the 21st century that symbolic action was taken. This was in response to recommendations made by the National Inquiry into the Separation of Aboriginal Children from their Families, and in a context of growing public pressure. Lorraine Peeters, one of the Stolen Generations, responded graciously presenting the gift of a glass coolamon created by the Balgo artist, Bai Bai Napangardi. Inside was a message of appreciation for the apology.

Together these two acts were designed to forge a pathway towards Reconciliation of the Nations. Just as once the convict stain prevented navel-gazing, the conquest of Aboriginal Nations provides a profound and lasting scar on society that has often been more comfortable to ignore.