Here’s the hardback cover of my upcoming book with Yale University Press, published in UK and USA in May and as a paperback in Australia around the same time.
There’s an audiobook as well. All available on pre-order now.
Condemned came about because the human story of Britain’s transportation system has never been fully told. Historians have researched the legal, political, penal and other aspects of the topic and we now have a good understanding of the operation and impact of transportation in Australia, America, Africa, India and the many other British possessions where men, women and children were sent to labour. Against this background, I wanted to retrieve and tell a few of the life stories of the transported and convey something of how people dealt with such a traumatic experience. Many were broken by it – but many others flourished and made significant contributions to the places of penance to which they were exiled.
My previous work on the transportation was focused on the Australian experience. When I came to look at the much larger picture of imperial transportation, I learned how adroitly Britain had exploited human resources to build and maintain an extensive empire. As I researched further, I began to see that as the penal transportation system declined, one of its main aims was quietly pursued by other means.
Children were among the earliest victims of the system in the seventeenth century. They were again from the nineteenth century through a charitable continuation of transportation. The tens of thousands of orphaned or unwanted girls and boys conveyed to Australia, Canada, New Zealand and Southern Africa were not felons. But, like the convicts who preceded them, they were sent to provide labour for developing the empire, as well as the means to populate it further.
An important reason for the eventual abolition of transportation was public opposition to its abuses, injustices and sheer brutality. Later, the evils of child migration were exposed and addressed through public advocacy in those countries where unaccompanied children were subjected to institutionalised terror. The success of these hard-fought campaigns prefigures contemporary human rights and social justice campaigns, such as the Black Lives Matter movement.
The large and long story of transportation, in whatever form, covers much of the globe and spans four centuries. The consequences continue into the present century through lingering historical guilt about convict ancestors and inquiries, apologies and compensation payments to the system’s last victims. Those who were, rightly or wrongly, condemned to the grinding inhumanity of transportation deserve to have their stories heard today.
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GRISTLY HISTORY 