Artist unknown – Cooking Pot Riot, Norfolk Island, 1846

We’re used to thinking about transported convicts as the victims of an oppressive system. There was certainly plenty of cruelty, misery and general unpleasantness. But there was also opportunity for many. The penal transportation system in Australia was a large and long-lasting  experience that involved hundreds of thousands of people, not only as prisoners but also warders, soldiers, servants and their families, all connected somehow or other to the penal bureaucracy of ‘the fatal shore’.

 

When large numbers of people are thrown together as they were in this system, most not only survived, but also practised the enduing creativity of human beings. Convicts sang, danced, wrote, acted, painted, engraved (sometimes feloniously!),  tattooed and generally involved themselves in the full range of human creativity. We’ll never know how much they did because their works were often ephemeral, oral or otherwise transitory, neither respected by the establishment nor officially documented. But fragments, hunts and chance survivals have come down to us and increasingly been revealed by diligent researchers. 

 

This site brings together mainly online sites about convict creativity, with links to relevant sources, research projects, resources, etc. It is a work in progress and will, hopefully, grow over time.