Carrie Crockett
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Transporting Convicts from New Zealand to Van Diemen’s Land
By Dr Kristyn Harman Senior Lecturer in History, University of Tasmania Like many New Zealanders, I grew up hearing stories about the Australian penal colonies, particularly anecdotes of London pickpockets and similarly desperate, impoverished characters, and the harsh and sometimes unfair regimes of punishment and deprivation under which such convicts lived and laboured. These […]
A Day in the Life: Convicts on board Prison Hulks
By Anna McKay, AHRC Collaborative Doctoral Partnership Student, National Maritime Museum & University of Leicester. In 1775 the outbreak of the American Revolution halted the transportation of felons to the colonies. One year later, with gaols overflowing, the Criminal Law Act -also known as the ‘Hulks Act’- was passed. Convicts awaiting transportation were […]
Of Satellites and Sentiment: The Forgotten Vietnamese Prisoners of French Guiana
By Dr. Lorraine M. Paterson On April 18, 2008, Vietnamese journalist Danh Đức was standing in the rain at the Kourou Space Center, the European Space Agency’s spaceport in French Guiana, a territory that is, as an overseas département, still an integral part of France.[1] Eyes heavenward, Danh Đức was eager to witness the […]
The library in the penal colony: Chekhov’s unsung gift to Sakhalin
Chekhov’s contribution to the cultural landscape of the Sakhalin penal colony (1868-1905), the establishment of several school libraries containing more than 2,200 volumes for the island’s children and their convict parents, has received little attention compared with the acclaim accorded his prodigious 1890 demographic census of prisoners. “I visited every settlement and went into every hut,” he wrote.”I don’t […]
The double-minded revolutionary
In 1884, a Russian woman by the name of Liudmila Volkenshtein was found guilty of anti-tsarist “terrorism” by a military court in St Petersburg. Her crimes were bound up with her membership in an underground group called “The People’s Will” (Narodnaia Volia), an organization that in 1881 had carried out the assassination of Tsar Alexander II. Volkenshtein herself […]
In my prison notebook
Last year I came across a rare archival find: multiple editions of a 19th century prison newspaper covertly produced by Russian inmates between 1890 and 1905. The newspaper editions, now brittle paper manuscripts fraying brown along their edges, were archived along with a note of introduction by the editor-in-chief. The editor describes the way in […]
Protection for Whom? Aboriginal rights in the Swan River Colony
by Kellie Moss In June 1829, Governor James Stirling founded the Swan River Colony on the mainland of Western Australia. Whilst the hype surrounding the new colony attracted almost 2000 people to Swan River in the first year, few of these initial settlers concerned themselves with the rights of those they were dispossessing. Furthermore, […]
The Great Escape
Peter Kropotkin is remembered today as a brilliant Russian social revolutionary, geographer, scientist, and anarchist writer.Less well known, however, is the name of the friend and co-conspirator who significantly prolonged Kropotkin’s life by engineering his remarkable prison break in 1876. Dr. Orest Edward Veimar, a St. Petersburg surgeon, was the chief architect of Kropotkin’s […]
Empire’s Exile: The Story of Lý Liễu
by Lorraine M. Paterson In 1923 in the British colony of Trinidad, a young English woman returned from visiting her family in a suburb of the capital, Port of Spain, to find that her Chinese husband of six years, Lý Liễu, had packed up his possessions and left her and their two small children. […]
Forced Labour and Shifting Borders
Some may argue (for good reason) that the collapse of space and time is a commonplace condition of twenty-first century life. From where I sit, however, I wonder: do many experiences symbolize the post-modern blurring of geographies and temporalities as deftly as air travel? I contemplate this admittedly non-unique yet nevertheless miraculous phenomenon—the inhabitation of […]
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