The Lives and Labour Skills of the Port Arthur woodworkers, 1866-1874

The Port Arthur settlement relied heavily on the skilled labour of convict woodworkers. The detached and isolated station, with its dense and diverse woodlands and its multifarious construction and maintenance needs, required their expertise and labour daily over many years. During the decades following the end of convict transportation to Van Diemen's Land in 1853 the timber trade was one of the biggest employers (next to agriculture) of convict labour at Port Arthur. However, little has been written on the lives and labours of these woodworkers, or on the management of their labour at Port Arthur during this era. This article considers a group of forty convicts who were incarcerated at Port Arthur during its final years as a convict station between 1855 and 1877, and whose work was recorded in two ledgers or 'workbooks' covering the period 1866 to 1874.2 Were these men the aged and ailing 'dregs' of the convict system, as contemporaries often claimed, or were they skilled tradesmen who eventually led productive, crime-free lives?3 Drawing on the workbooks, as well as other contemporary sources, biographical and work profiles have been created for each convict woodworker, revealing something of their experiences within and outside the penal system, as well as the types of building, production and maintenance they were engaged in during these years. The collated data also allows for an examination of what became of this cohort after their release from Port Arthur.