Aboriginal Convicts in the Colonies: Resisting the Expansion of the Australian Frontier

Historian Kristyn Harman notes that at least 90 Aboriginal men were transported from parts of southeast mainland Australia to Van Diemen's Land. She explains this in the context of the expanding colonial frontier and how seperate court trials individualised and criminalised these Aboriginal men as petty criminals, instead of the fighting force that they were. -- Conviction Politics is an international digital history project exploring the impact of radicals and rebels transported as political convicts to Australia on their place of exile, and the patterns of collective resistance by the mass of unfree convict women and women to the exploitation of their forced labour. In the 18th and 19th centuries, thousands of democratic reformers, rural labour protestors, Irish freedom fighters and revolutionaries were exiled as political prisoners to Britain’s Australian colonies, where Aboriginal people opposing dispossession joined them as prisoners. As convicts, they resisted exploitation through inventive solidarity in the face of coercion, and in turn changed the political direction of the colonies. Conviction Politics traces how these convicts and their ideas helped lay the foundations of egalitarianism, political and social democracy, unions and workers rights and national self-determination in Australia and the UK. Through archival research, data analysis and visualisation, documentary, animation and song, the project is producing an innovative suite of digital content exploring these stories and their contemporary resonance, including 100 short documentaries. Based at Monash University, Conviction Politics collaborates with researchers from universities in Australia, the UK and Ireland, and is partnered with production company Roar Film and a range of museums, archives, and unions. Produced by Roar Film. -- Love history? Like, share and subscribe to our channel for more! We'll be uploading new short documentaries every week.