3 - Convict Tourism

Summary

Australia's cultural heritage is intricately linked to its convict past. Australia's colonial history has two dominant romanticised archetypes: the rural pioneer and the law-breaker (Carroll, 1992; Casella and Fredericksen, 2004; Jones, 2016). Convicts are often seen as embodying both these roles, with all early convicts essentially transported to ‘rural Australia’. The term ‘convict’ ‘has assumed an iconic status in the national gaze unparalleled anywhere else in the world’ (Casella and Fredericksen, 2004, 104), and as such, makes it a desirable tourism drawcard.

More than 162,000 convicts were transported to Australia from England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales over 80 years between 1788 and 1868. Convicts were transported to two major convict colonies: Sydney, NSW, from 1788 to 1840, and Van Diemen's Land (later renamed Tasmania in 1856) from 1803 to 1853 (Maxwell-Stewart and Oxley, 2020). Later, convicts were also transported to Swan River (Western Australia) from 1850 to 1868 (and this has since become an important convict heritage tourism destination, partly due to the imprisonment of Fenian political prisoners sent there during this period). In addition to these transportation sites, several satellite colonies or penal settlements (also known as ‘secondary punishment’ sites for colonial offending that was punished by ‘transportation’) were established at Port Phillip (now Melbourne), Moreton Bay (now Brisbane), Norfolk Island, Newcastle, Port Macquarie, Macquarie Harbour, Maria Island and Port Arthur (Maxwell-Stewart and Oxley, 2020). Several of these sites, such as Port Arthur, have become well-known tourism destinations because of their role as ‘secondary punishment’ sites.

While the convict system in Australia was not predominantly characterised by incarceration and institutionalisation (Jones, 2016), it appears as though those buildings that did incarcerate convicts remain popular tourist destinations that resonate with the popular fascination with an ‘imagined convict past’ (Casella and Fredericksen, 2004, 105). The reality of the convict experience is that they (and free settlers) were transported to provide human labour resources for the creation of a colony, which inevitably meant that the work they performed was often physically taxing and involuntary, and often accompanied by food and clothing shortages (Wise and McLean, 2021). Transportation meant exile, and ‘it was a fierce punishment that ejected men, women and children from their homelands into distant and unknown territories’ (Bogle, 2008, 23).