Chinese Prisoners on Cockatoo Island, Sydney
The small sandstone island of Cockatoo Island in Sydney Harbour is best known as a convict stockade which held the ‘worst’ of the convict system: former-Norfolk Islanders and bushrangers are its most famous inhabitants. However, from the 1850s onwards Cockatoo Island acted primarily as a local prison for those convicted in the colony of […]
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 […]
Unrequited Love: The Enduring Pain of Convictism in Western Australia
By Kellie Moss The sentence of transportation signified the physical removal, or banishment of convicts, from the wider social body to colonies overseas. In the case of transportation to Australia (1788-1868), convicts were not allowed to return to Britain, even after the expiration of their sentences. This permanent severance of their connections to friends, family […]
Academic encounters? International Relations Studies and the “Carceral Archipelago” project
My recent appointment as lecturer at the History Department of the Utrecht University has brought me in close contact with the bourgeoning field of International Relations (IR) studies. Inevitably, as I read articles and books on the subject, and design and teach related courses, I am comparing the theoretical and methodological assumptions of IR with […]
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 […]
Attitudes to Convict Ancestry: Documentary Review
In this blog post I review the documentary ‘A Secret History of my Family: Gadbury Sisters’, which aired in 2016, and discuss how it reflects changing attitudes to convict ancestry amongst British and Australian descendants. It is re-blogged from the the wonderful History on the Box in which postgraduate students from the School of History, Politics and IR at the […]
Unwell or Unwanted? The Mental Health of Western Australia’s Convict Population
By Kellie Moss Western Australia welcomed the transportation of convicts in 1850 as a solution to the economic problems which had affected the colony since its foundation as a free settlement in 1829. However, the 1857 Penal Servitude Act significantly altered the kinds of convicts being sent as deportation was discontinued for sentences shorter than […]
The Two Fredericks: A snapshot of male intimacy in prison
In the 1840s, campaigners for the abolition of convict transportation engaged in a campaign of scare-mongering about the prevalence of sexual acts between male convicts (dubbed “unnatural acts”). This strand of anti-transportation rheotirc was particularly effective because it suggested that a system that was supposed to engender moral reform actually produced moral degradation.[1] Panic about rampant homosexual activity […]
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 […]
The case for ‘remain’ in the EU referendum – my view as the director of a €1.5 million European funded research project in History
At the end of last week, thirteen Nobel prize-winning scientists wrote a letter to the right leaning newspaper The Daily Telegraph, urging Britain to vote ‘remain’ in the forthcoming European Union (EU) referendum. The scientists warned of the consequences of a British exit (or ‘Brexit’) from the EU, drawing attention to the fact that […]
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