All events · Empire, Clearance and Removal

Convict Transportation to Australia and the Norfolk Island Penal Settlements

1788–1868 · Oceania

Confinement

Confined

162,000

Convict transportation was recorded in detail: British and colonial registers record more than 162,000 convicts carried on some 800 voyages between 1788 and 1868, about 25,000 of them women, landing in New South Wales, Van Diemen's Land, Moreton Bay and Western Australia. The National Museum of Australia gives the same total; the registers are among the most complete records of any forced migration in this atlas.

Share of the population affected

1.1%

of the population of Great Britain and Ireland at the start of transportation to New South Wales, 1788

Open on the interactive map →

What happened

From the arrival of the First Fleet in January 1788 until the last transport reached Western Australia in 1868, Britain sent more than 162,000 convicted men, women and children to Australia, a sentence of exile that in most cases was permanent because few could afford the return passage. Convicts were assigned as unpaid labour to settlers and to public works, and their labour underwrote the colonial economy. Reoffenders and those convicted in the colonies were sent to secondary punishment stations, chief among them Norfolk Island, occupied as a penal settlement from 1788 to 1814 and again from 1825 to 1855, along with Macquarie Harbour and Port Arthur, where conditions were deliberately severe and prompted parliamentary inquiry in Britain. Irish political prisoners from the rebellion of 1798 and the Young Ireland movement, and Canadian and Chartist prisoners, were transported alongside those convicted of theft. Eleven of the sites are inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage list as evidence of the global convict system. The dispossession of Aboriginal peoples that the settlement caused is covered elsewhere in the atlas.

Parties

The British state transported convicted prisoners from Britain and Ireland to penal colonies in Australia and secondary punishment stations

Disputed

Historians differ over how far convict labour should be described as slavery, forced labour or penal servitude, and over the severity of the system relative to British prisons of the period.

The denominator

Britain's first census in 1801 counted about 10.5 million in Great Britain, and Ireland's population in the 1790s is estimated at roughly 4.5-5 million, giving about 14.5 million around 1788. Both figures grew rapidly over the transportation era: by 1868, when transportation ended, the combined population was over 30 million despite the Irish Famine.

The 162,000 accumulates over eighty years, during which the population of Britain and Ireland roughly doubled; the informative comparison is against the number of people convicted at assizes and quarter sessions, not the general population.

Where the baseline comes from

Convicts in Australia — Wikipediaopen-edited
Penal transportation — Wikipediaopen-edited

On the death toll

Voyage mortality, very high on the Second Fleet of 1790 when about a quarter of those embarked died, fell to around one per cent after surgeons were made responsible for convict health. There was no mass death toll; deaths came from shipboard disease, punishment and labour accidents, and the total has not been aggregated.

Documented forms of violence

Forced LabourArbitrary Detention

British and colonial penal records, parliamentary inquiries into the secondary punishment stations, and the UNESCO World Heritage documentation record penal labour and the punishment regime.

Movements mapped

Convicts transported from Britain and Ireland to New South Wales162,000
Reoffenders sent to Norfolk Island

Countries touched, on present-day borders

Australia, United Kingdom, Norfolk Island

Sources

National Museum of Australia: convict transportation peaksofficial
Convicts in Australiaopen-edited