Unfree intersections: the study of Australia’s convict past and the growth of the digital humanities

Investigations of the nature and operation of the convict system and its significant impacts on colonial Australian society and economy have been a signature element of Australian historical archaeology since its earliest years and have featured regularly in the pages of ASHA publications. We would however argue that archaeology’s failure to find a framework for analysis, or to keep up with evolving questions from cognate disciplines, has limited our understanding and appreciation of both the evolution of systems of convict management as well as the diverse nature of convict experience. The paper reviews the authors’Landscapes of Production and Punishment project, an interdisciplinary investigation of the convict system that focusses on the labour and industrial aspects of its operation. This lens allows us to synthesize a growing body of major and minor site data from research and commercial contexts within a single framework that allows us to track changes at micro and macro-scales. A particular focus of the interdisciplinary perspective has been to harness a digital humanities approach that integrates newly accessible bodies of biographical and production data and links these to spatial and archaeological contexts, allowing to track people and products as they flow through the system.