Chapter 1: Introduction

In 1642, some 128 years before Captain James Cook visited Australia, an island South of Australia was named by explorer Abel Tasman. He called the island Van Diemen’s Land after the governor of Batavia in the Dutch East Indies. This small Island was about 160 miles long by 80 miles wide (Fleming, 2012). It received 73,000 convicts over 50 years, beginning in 1803. It only became a separate colony from New South Wales in 1825 (Brooke & Brandon, 2005). Van Diemen’s Land became self-governing in 1856, when it gained its own fully elected legislature, which was after convict transportation had ended (Fleming, 2012). Partly to enshrine this shift, the island was renamed Tasmania after that explorer in 1856. This book is not a history of convict transportation, which has been done elsewhere (Hughes, 1996; Shaw, 1966; Watkins, 2020; Williams, 2018). This book explores the intersection of convictism and poverty and the effects the penal apparatus had on those who went through the system and came out the other end only to end up re-institutionalized within the charitable system, a charitable system that very much reflected the convict system they left.