Criminal nation? An archaeological view of the Australian convict system

The convict system looms large in Australian popular consciousness and culture, but apart from a few well-worn clichés most people know remarkably little of what it really was, how it operated and what it produced. Some writers have represented convictism and its works as a brutal instrument of punishment, an experimental playground for theorists and reformers, and a near-slave labour force sent to the far side of the world to tame a continent. More recently there has been a shift to seeing the 165,000 men, women and children transported as criminals to Australia between 1788 and 1868 as the founding European population, freed from the social straitjacket and health problems of England, aspirational for personal advancement, and creating the nation we have today. This article provides an overview of the nature of the convict system, with a special emphasis on the convict sites of Tasmania. The recent work by archaeologists towards understanding these places and their operation are analogous to forensic investigation, albeit without identification of suspects as the primary goal.