The life-course demography of convict transportation to Van Diemen’s Land

ABSTRACT

This paper reports on a sample of 16,953 male and 7,783 female convicts transported to Van Diemen’s Land between 1818 and 1853 whose life courses have been reconstructed as much as possible from cradle to grave to explore the effects of critical life stages and the impact of a shared exposure to a stress regime of penal servitude, forced labour and exile. It uses survival and family formation of a lineage as the key measures of life outcomes. It finds that male convicts, while not producing many descendants because of sex imbalances, did well biologically out of being transported, while female convicts, entering servitude under a greater burden of previous abuse and deprivation, continued to suffer a severe gender penalty in survival and significant secondary infertility after sentence. Early life effects from the social environment, or crime economy, into which men were born remained remarkably persistent, while the previous history of prostitution and/or alcohol abuse dramatically shortened the lives of women. These were the embodied effects, over generations, of structural violence against women in the most deprived and dangerous neighbourhoods of from the late-eighteenth century through to the 1840s in Great Britain and Ireland, and transported with them to the Australian colonies.

KEYWORDS:

• Convicts
• Tasmania
• mortality
• fertility
• early life effects

Acknowledgments

We thank the reviewers for their careful reading of our manuscript and their constructive comments and suggestions which significantly improved this work. We thank Hamish Maxwell-Stewart and Deborah Oxley for the use of their transcribed convict data. We thank the following staff and volunteer researchers: Nola Beagley, Geoff Brown, Tricia Curry, Lance Dwyer, Alison Ellett, Jennifer Elliston, Leanne Goss, Cheryl Griffin, Jan Kerr, Maureen Mann, Garry McLoughlin, David Noakes, Teddie Oates, Judith Price, Steve Rhodes, the late Cecile Trioli, Colin Tuckerman, Jenny Wells (Ships Project checkers and researchers); Colleen Aralappu, Maureen Austin, Vivienne Cash, Dianne Cassidy, Glenda Cox, Kathy Dadswell, Margaret Dimech, Brian Dowse, Ros Escott, Barry Files, Peter Fitzpatrick, Janet Gaff, Nanette Gottlieb, Stuart Hamilton, Jane Harding, Robyn Harrison, Graeme Hickey, Margaret Inglis, Bronwyn King, Jenny Kisler, Darryl Massie, Elizabeth Nelson, Margaret Nichols, Rosemary Noble, Keith Oliver, Maureen O’Toole, Margaret Parsons, Annette Sutton, Robert Tuppen, Rob Weldon, Lyn Wilkinson, Glad Wishart, Jacqueline Wisniowski, Judith Wood (Ships Project researchers); Sandra Silcot (systems designer); Claudine Chionh, Robin Petterd (web designers); Len Smith (advisor); Colette McAlpine (Female Convicts Research Centre coordinator); and Trudy Mae Cowley (Female Convicts Research Centre advisor and web administrator).

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Australian Research Council [DP0771033, DP110102368];