Emma D. Watkins - Life Courses of Young Convicts Transported to Van Diemens Land

Life Courses of Young Convicts Transported to Van Diemens Land

Emma D. Watkins

History of Crime, Deviance and Punishment

Series Editor: Anne-Marie Kilday, Professor of Criminal History, Oxford Brookes University, UK

Editorial Board:

Neil Davie, University of Lyon II, France

Johannes Dillinger, University of Maine, Germany

Wilbur Miller, State University of New York, USA

Marianna Muravyeva, University of Helsinki, Finland

David Nash, Oxford Brookes University, UK

Judith Rowbotham, Nottingham Trent University, UK

Academic interest in the history of crime and punishment has never been greater and the History of Crime, Deviance and Punishment series provides a home for the wealth of new research being produced. Individual volumes within the series cover topics related to the history of crime and punishment, from the later medieval to modern period and in both Europe and North America, and seek to demonstrate the importance of this subject in furthering understanding of the way in which various societies and cultures operate. When taken together, the works in the series will show the evolution of the nature of illegality and attitudes towards its perpetration over time and will offer their readers a rounded and coherent history of crime and punishment through the centuries. The series broad chronological and geographical coverage encourages comparative historical analysis of crime history between countries and cultures.

Published:

Crime and Poverty in 19th-Century England, Adrian Ager

Print Culture, Crime and Justice in Eighteenth-Century London, Richard Ward

Rehabilitation and Probation in England and Wales, 19001950, Raymond Gard

The Policing of Belfast 18701914, Mark Radford

Crime, Regulation and Control during the Blitz, Peter Adey, David J. Cox and Barry Godfrey

Italian Prisons in the Age of Positivism, 18611914, Mary Gibson

Forthcoming:

Deviance, Disorder and Music in Modern Britain and America, Cliff Williamson

Fair and Unfair Trials in the British Isles, 18001940, eds. David Nash and Anne-Marie Kilday

I would like to thank Prof Barry Godfrey for his supervision of the thesis that led to this book, not only through guidance, but also through going above and beyond in setting up opportunities which aided this study and my development as a researcher. One such opportunity was a fellowship at the University of Tasmania with Prof Hamish Maxwell-Stewart. I would like to thank Hamish for his assistance and guidance in that time.

I would like to thank my dissertation examiners Prof Heather Shore and Prof Barry Goldson for a positive viva voce experience and many excellent recommendations for improvement, which I hope are reflected in this monograph.

I thank my parents for their continuing and unquestioning support throughout.

This book is dedicated to Simon for everything.

In the nineteenth century many convicted juveniles were handed down a sentence of transportation to Australia. This book will explore the crimes and punishments of some of these individuals, as well as their pre- and post-transportation lives, including family life, occupational standing and mortality. These juvenile convicts will then be contextualized within the punishment system, economy and culture that they were thrust into by their forced movement to Van Diemens Land (VDL) (now known as Tasmania). Were these juvenile convicts, who were convicted at the Old Bailey (the Central Criminal Court in London), able to form settled colonial lives? This is not simple to determine. However, certain aspects surrounding the formation of relationships, employment and criminal desistance all point to a settled life. This may not mean climbing the social and economic spectrum of society, but rather the formation of a stable and normal working-class life free from crime. In essence, despite their early-life upheaval, were they able to form families and maintain employment? Or, were they plagued by unemployment, instability and criminal activity related to a lack of ties be they social or economic? Marrying and having children, for example, did not necessarily result in a settled life but such factors supported one. Similarly, committing a crime in the colony after freedom does not conclude the life was unsettled. However, if a juvenile continued in crime up until his or her death, which resulted in repeated punishments and confinement thereby preventing any work and family life, this would be an unsettled life. As well as uncovering what a settled life was for these juveniles, the lasting impact of the experience of being transported to a penal colony during youth will be explored.

When convict transportation to Australia began in the late eighteenth century it was not a new concept. Not only had exile or banishment been a punishment for centuries, but also, by the seventeenth century, transportation was increasingly used for criminals. As early as 1607 criminals were transported to the Virginian plantations in Colonial America (Shaw 1966, 2223). Britain was not alone or the first to use transportation; other European countries had already used criminals and vagrants to colonize imperial territories as has been demonstrated in Andersons (2016) work on the Carceral Archipelago. The history of transportation has been widely studied (Shaw 1966; Hughes 2003; Brooke & Brandon 2005), with a focus on different aspects of convict lives, for example: on skills and employment (Nicholas 1988; Oxley 1996); family-life (Maxwell-Stewart et al. 2015); health (Kippen & McCalman 2015); and reoffending (Frost & Maxwell-Stewart 2001). Yet, there has been a concentration on adult convicts, and juvenile lives are only lightly touched on. That is not to say juveniles have been ignored. There has been significant work on juvenile offending, as Godfrey et al. (2017) have pointed out, including: administrative histories of judicial and penal reform for children (Bailey 1987; Radzinowicz & Hood 1990); more social- and cultural-based studies on juvenile delinquency (Pinchbeck & Hewitt 1973; Pearson 1983; King 1998, 2006; Shore 1999a, 2011; Ellis 2014); studies of juvenile institutions (Stack 1992; Cale 1993; Cox 2003); studies of the policing of juveniles (Jackson & Bartie 2014); and studies of juvenile court records (Bradley 2007, 2009). However, the study of the whole lives of offenders convicted as juveniles has been scarce. Thanks to the works of Shore (1999a), Slee (2003), Jackman (2001, 2009) and Nunn (2015, 2017) there has been an increasing focus on male juvenile convicts but this focus has been largely from an institutional perspective. This is similarly the case for juvenile females. Research on female offenders has expanded but, excepting the work of Cox (2003) which concentrates on training and reform in Britain, the concentration has been on adult female convicts (Beddoe 1979; Oxley 1996; Smith 2008b; Williams 2014; Kavanagh & Snowden 2015) with only a passing notice of juveniles. Given the few female juveniles transported, it is not surprising that they were overlooked but this research has now focused on their young lives. As Nunn pointed out, it is difficult to form an adequate picture of the male juvenile lives beyond the institution (2017, 171). This is largely because research into convicts ends with the Conduct Records but this research goes beyond these records by combining them with non-criminal records including newspapers, and birth, marriage and death records, much in the manner of Godfrey et al. (2017). This will allow an understanding of both their lives under sentence and their life-outcomes.