Chapter 3: Challenging Colonial Myths With Archival Datasets: Cockatoo Island Prison, 1839–1869

Cockatoo Island was colonial New South Wales’ high-security prison, which was operational between 1839 and 1869. Looming eerily in Sydney Harbour, and associated with both the convict era and ‘hell on earth’ Norfolk Island, contemporaries deemed its prisoners the ‘scum and dregs of colonial society’. Over time, this idea became entrenched, including in histories and heritage narratives of the island. Using historic prison registers from the archives to assemble a dataset about the lives of 2,583 people incarcerated on Cockatoo Island from 1847–1869, this chapter disrupts three dominant myths: first, that most people on Cockatoo Island were transported convicts; second, the assumption Cockatoo Island’s inmates were the ‘worst’ kind of criminals; and third, the island’s association with bushranging, an antipodean form of highway robbery. Bringing a data-driven approach to archival material, this chapter spotlights how the arrival of new migrants, legacies of convictism and patterns of settlement in the interior all shaped the inmate population of Cockatoo Island, which was far more diverse than traditional narratives have led us to believe.