Convict Landscapes: Locating Australia's Convicts, 1788-1868 - Van Diemen's Land

Abstract

The data contained in this webmap was generated by Dr Richard Tuffin as part of two associated projects: Landscapes of Production and Punishment: the Tasman Peninsula 1830-77 (ARC, DP170103642, 2017-19) and his Postdoctoral Fellowship ‘’A mill to grind rogues honest’: convict labour at an Australian industrial prison’. <br/> This mapping locates over 270 places where convicts were incarcerated and laboured across the colony of Van Diemen’s Land between 1803-77. It will prove useful to those wishing to understand more about the role unfree labour played in the formation of the colony. The dataset underpinning it is freely available to researchers, facilitating the geolocation of non-spatial data by researchers. Point coordinates have been provided using the GDA 94 (MGA Zone 55) reference system. The dataset also provides information on the type of convict place, its temporal range of occupation and metadata on contemporary administrative management. Each place has been uniquely coded, providing a tag that can be appended to non-spatial data to facilitate geographic linkage. <br/> The mapping and offence data was originally compiled by Dr Richard Tuffin within a geographic information system, with Esk Mapping & GIS creating the web-mapping interface. It incorporates data compiled by researcher John Dent as well as by Hamish Maxwell-Stewart, from data sourced for the ARC linkage project 'Conviction Politics: Investigating the Convict Routes of Australian Democracy'.