Integrating Historical Records through Digital Data Linking: Convicts Prosecuted for Collective Action in Van Diemen's Land

Abstract

This article explores the ways in which prosecution data was recorded and utilised at different administrative levels in the colony of Van Diemen's Land (Tasmania). We do this through an analysis of convict collective action, deploying methodologies of aggregate data analysis to highlight previously hidden relationships between the charges brought against individual convicts. Record sets related to two convict stations situated on the Tasman Peninsula (south east Tasmania) will form the focus of this discussion. The first of these is a bench book consisting of court summaries for the Tasman Peninsula Coal Mines (1833-48). The second consists of conduct records pertaining to convicts who passed through the Port Arthur penal station between 1830 and 1877. Instances of collective action will be used to explore the administrative intent behind these two different forms of record-keeping, demonstrating how they facilitated (or failed to facilitate) identification of acts of collectivised offending. As will be shown, records of immediate control, like bench books, were capable of identifying instances of collective action. We will demonstrate through data linkage methodologies that many more acts may have gone unrecorded. Our examination of these collective acts will discuss the ways in which administrators reacted to this type of offending and whether such behaviours attracted markedly different forms of censure.