Juvenile convicts and their colonial familial lives

Abstract

Convicts were transported from Britain to Van Diemen’s Land from 1803 until 1853. Approximately 10 000–13 000 juveniles were among the 148 000 convicts transported. This article has traced the lives of female and male juvenile convicts transported, who were sentenced at the Old Bailey (the Central Criminal Court in London), and voyaged to Van Diemen’s Land. By exploring individual lives, and contextualising their experiences, it is possible to go beyond the circumstances of offending–through to their punishment period, to their lives upon release. This article will focus on one aspect of juvenile convict lives post-transportation–their familial life. The method of nominal record-linkage has been used across a variety of criminal and non-criminal records (including civil records and newspapers) in order to build up a picture of these young offenders. Going beyond the institution and focusing directly on female and male juveniles is important in understanding the lives of this unique group. From the behaviour of the juvenile convicts themselves, to the decisions of the administrators and the conditions of the penal colony into which they were thrust; were these female and male juvenile convicts able to form ‘settled’ colonial lives and which factors inhibited or facilitated this process?

Keywords:

• Transportation
• family life
• juvenile convict(s)
• Van Diemen’s land

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Barry Godfrey for his supervision of my research which led to this article.

Notes

1. The assignment system was the process of assigning convicts to free settlers to carry out labour. Females would usually be set to domestic tasks and males, had more varied roles, but largely included rural and urban general labour roles if they lacked skills that were in demand. The probationary system, which replaced the assignment system, was implemented in an attempt to make the transportation system a more equal punishment for all convicts. Under this system male convicts had to undergo a set period in the public works before they could earn a probationary task and work, for wages, for free settlers or the government. Females usually spent their probation on-board the Anson hulk.

2. The minimum age of marriage was only raised, in 1942, from twelve for women and fourteen for men, to sixteen and eighteen respectively.

3. As with the female juvenile convicts, the male juveniles were compared with a 1–25 sample of their adult counterparts transported to VDL supplied by Founders and Survivors.

4. These digital repositories were used to trace the lives of the juvenile convicts and subsequently build-up the case studies

5. Includes the following types of sources; Permission-to-Marry registers, Birth, Death and Marriage Records, Conduct Records, Description Lists, New South Wales and Tasmania, Australia Convict Musters.