#convict settlement

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The Founding of Australia 1788 by Algernon Talmage

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“Governor Thomas Brisbane’s decision to settle the northern coast of Australia in the mid-1820s was also explicitly motivated by commercial interests, though this time to tap into the market for trepang (sea cucumber) in China, and as a gateway to further trade with the southeast Asian archipelago. The British had recently relinquished territories seized from the Dutch in the Indonesian archipelago during the Napoleonic wars, so they were eager to expand their commercial reach. A secondary motive was to prevent any European power claiming territory on the unsettled edges of the Australian continent. In 1818, Captain Philip Parker King had surveyed the northern coast and reported back with evidence of abandoned Macassan (Sulawesi) camps for smoking trepang. 

On the basis of this report, trader William Barnes wrote to the Secretary of State for the Colonies, Lord Bathurst, in July 1823 with a proposal to establish a British trepang fishery on the Cobourg peninsula. The chairman of the East India Trade Committee, George Larpent, urged Bathurst to approve a British settlement there for “the greatest benefit to the commerce […] of the United Kingdom [...] [and to] place our flourishing possessions in that quarter of the Globe in greater security”. Despite Larpent’s advice to settle on the mainland, the Colonial Office issued Captain Barlow instructions to establish a settlement in the “Apsley’s Channel between Melville and Bathurst Island”. Looking at a map in London, the islands may have seemed to Lord Bathurst physically closer to trading routes, even though currents, winds, and reefs actually rendered them almost impossible to access.

In 1824, forty-five settlers – only three of them free men – were shipped aboard the HMS Tamar to the northern coast. The convicts were chosen by the Principal Superintendent of Convicts on the basis of their trades, with the majority skilled in construction, and their ethnicity, as thirteen of the eighty convicts selected were black as officials thought they were better able to withstand hard labour in a tropical climate than white convicts. Ultimately, the difficulty of navigating the Apsley Strait – which was shallow, rocky, and subject to strong winds during the monsoon season – meant few British trading ships got through to the settlement and no Macassan vessels at all. On deciding to abandon it in 1829, Governor Ralph Darling suggested the convicts be relocated to Croker Island, a few kilometres off the Cobourg Peninsula. Instead, the convicts were transferred to the existing settlement at Port Raffles. It seems that colonial governors and imperial administrators had an island bias even when local experts and East India Company officials suggested better-located mainland sites for settlement.

Underpinning these epistolary exchanges was the idea that islands were interchangeable and universally preferable for convict-built commercial hubs. This is underlined by the comparisons made by East India Company officials and colonial newspapers between the “Australian” islands – Norfolk Island and Melville Island – and Indian Ocean island penal colonies – the Straits Settlements. The Straits Settlements were East India Company penal settlements for Indian convicts at Penang, Malacca, and Singapore, and were united in 1826. On 10 March 1825, The Australian colonial newspaper hoped that “[w]hat twenty years have accomplished at Penang, at which period it was a barren sand, it is not unreasonable to suppose that half that time will bring to pass at Melville Island”. In 1827, an East India Company officer (calling himself “M”) suggested in the Asiatic Journal that Melville Island be reopened to replace “its two rivals”, Penang and Singapore, as the destination for Indian convicts. The anonymous officer concluded that Melville Island should not be abandoned, for “the same reasons that Norfolk Island was reoccupied” as a penal settlement in 1825, namely for “its utility to Australia, as a Northern emporium and naval station”. Though Norfolk Island and Melville Island were administered by New South Wales, they mapped better onto Pacific and Indian Ocean maritime trading routes. These Australian islands were part of a much wider practice of sending convicts as “empire-builders” to islands that were economically and politically strategic for British imperial interests.”

- Katherine Roscoe, “A Natural Hulk: Australia’s Carceral Islands in the Colonial Period, 1788–1901.” International Review of Social History 63 (2018), p.50-52.

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Tasmania, Australia

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Government Gardens. As early as the 1830s ornamental trees were planted at Port Arthur. By 1838 the avenue leading to the church was lined with young trees. In 1846-7 an adjacent hop field was developed into an ornamental garden primarily for the enjoyment of the ladies of the settlement. The gardens were much admired and reached their peak in the late 1860s.

The Port Arthur Historic Site…

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