Detailing the development of the prison and its outlying stations, including its dreaded coal mines and providing an account of the changing views to convict rehabilitation, Convict-era Port Arthur focuses in on a number of individuals, telling the story through their eyes. Charles O’Hara Booth, a significant commandant of Port Arthur; Mark Jeffrey, a convict who became the grave digger on the Island of the Dead; and William Thompson, who arrived just as the new probation system started and who was forced to work in the treacherous coal mines. Convict-era Port Arthur will for the first time provide a comprehensive history of Port Arthur, its horrors and its changing role over a fifty-year period. In gripping detail, using the experiences and words of the convicts, soldiers and administrators who spent time there, David W. Cameron brings to life these deeply miserable days.

The World Heritage-listed Port Arthur penitentiary is one of Australia's most visited historical sites, attracting over 400,000 visitors each year. Designed to incarcerate 480 men, between 1856 and 1877 thousands of convicts passed through it. In 2016, archaeologists began one of the largest ever excavations of an Australian convict site. Recovering Convict Lives: Historical Archaeology of the Port Arthur Penitentiary makes their findings available to general readers for the first time. Extensively illustrated, it is a fascinating journey into the inner workings of the penal system and the day-to-day lives of Port Arthur convicts. Through the things they left behind - the sandstone base of a prison wall, a clay pipe discarded in a washroom, gambling tokens dropped between floorboards - this book tells their stories. Praise for Recovering Convict Lives 'In this richly illustrated volume readers will be taken on an archaeological tour of a lost world of work, leisure and punishment. A forensic reconstruction of one of Australia's most iconic buildings, Recovering Convict Lives peels away the layers of time to reveal the hidden history of everyday life in a penal station.' - Professor Hamish Maxwell-Stewart, author of Closing Hell's Gates

Why is it that Australians are still misled by myths about their convict heritage? Why are so many family historians surprised to find a convict ancestor in their family trees? Why did an entire society collude to cover up its past? Babette Smith traces the stories of hundreds of convicts over the 80 years of convict transportation to Australia....

The Port Arthur convict photographs are a truly remarkable survival from Australias colonial past. Taken shortly before the infamous Tasmanian penal settlement closed for good, these images record the faces of men sent to Australia on convict ships between the 1820s and the 1850s. Now, for the first time, they are the subject of a fascinating new book from the National Library of Australia. Through its pages readers will come face to face with some of Australias reluctant pioneers and explore their often extraordinary lives. Using transportation records, trial documents, offi cial correspondence, prison files, local and overseas newspaper reports and eyewitness accounts, the author has pieced together biographies of some of the men and their female partners who found themselves transported to the colonies.

A 'mate' is a mate, right? Wrong, argues Nick Dyrenfurth in this provocative new look at one of Australia's most talked-about beliefs. In the first book-length exploration of our secular creed, one of Australia's leading young historians and public commentators turns mateship's history upside down. Did you know that the first Australians to call each other 'mate' were business partners? Or that many others thought that mateship would be the basis for creating an entirely new society - namely a socialist one? For some, the term 'mate' is 'the nicest word in the English language'; for others, it represents the very worst features in our nation's culture- conformity, bullying, corruption, racism, and misogyny. So what does mateship really mean? Covering more than 200 years of white-settler history, Mateship demonstrates the richness and paradoxes of the Antipodean version of fraternity, and how everyone - from the early convicts to our most recent prime ministers, on both sides of politics - have valued it. 'This is essential reading for anyone interested in one of Australia's key national myths.' Books+Publishing

The year 2022 marks the 200th anniversary of the establishment of the penal settlement at Macquarie Harbour. This convict penal settlement located on the isolated primeval rugged west coast of Van Diemen’s Land (Tasmania) quickly gained a reputation as an ‘Earthy Hell’. Colonial historian John West succinctly recorded in 1852: ‘The name Macquarie Harbour is associated exclusively with remembrance of inexpressible depravity, degradation, and woe. Sacred to the genius of torture, Nature concurred with the objects of its separation from the rest of the world, to exhibit some notion of a perfect misery. There, man lost the aspect and the heart of man …. This region is lashed with tempests: the sky is cloudy, and the rain falls more frequently than elsewhere. In its chill and humid climate, animal life is preserved with difficulty; half the goats died in one season, and sheep perished; vegetation, except in its coarsest and most massive forms is situated and precarious …. The passage to this dreary dwelling place was tedious and often dangerous. The prisoners, confined in a narrow space, were tossed for weeks on an agitated sea. As they approached, they beheld a narrow opening chocked with a bar of sand and crossed with peril. This they called Hell’s Gate – not less appropriate to the place than to the character and torment of the inhabitants: beyond they saw impenetrable forests, skirted with an impervious thicket; and beyond still enormous mountains covered with snow, which rose to the clouds like walls of adamant: every object wore the air of rigour, ferocity, and sadness’. This was just the beginning for those sentenced to Macquarie Harbour the barbaric treatment from officials and fellow convicts alike, resulted in Macquarie Harbour representing a true convict hell hole, not only resulting in murder, but in cannibalism by several men in their attempts to escape.

Living on a damaged planet challenges who we are and where we live. This timely anthology calls on twenty eminent humanists and scientists to revitalize curiosity, observation, and transdisciplinary conversation about life on earth. As human-induced environmental change threatens multispecies livability, Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet puts forward a bold proposal: entangled histories, situated narratives, and thick descriptions offer urgent “arts of living.” Included are essays by scholars in anthropology, ecology, science studies, art, literature, and bioinformatics who posit critical and creative tools for collaborative survival in a more-than-human Anthropocene. The essays are organized around two key figures that also serve as the publication’s two openings: Ghosts, or landscapes haunted by the violences of modernity; and Monsters, or interspecies and intraspecies sociality. Ghosts and Monsters are tentacular, windy, and arboreal arts that invite readers to encounter ants, lichen, rocks, electrons, flying foxes, salmon, chestnut trees, mud volcanoes, border zones, graves, radioactive waste—in short, the wonders and terrors of an unintended epoch. Contributors: Karen Barad, U of California, Santa Cruz; Kate Brown, U of Maryland, Baltimore; Carla Freccero, U of California, Santa Cruz; Peter Funch, Aarhus U; Scott F. Gilbert, Swarthmore College; Deborah M. Gordon, Stanford U; Donna J. Haraway, U of California, Santa Cruz; Andreas Hejnol, U of Bergen, Norway; Ursula K. Le Guin; Marianne Elisabeth Lien, U of Oslo; Andrew Mathews, U of California, Santa Cruz; Margaret McFall-Ngai, U of Hawaii, Manoa; Ingrid M. Parker, U of California, Santa Cruz; Mary Louise Pratt, NYU; Anne Pringle, U of Wisconsin, Madison; Deborah Bird Rose, U of New South Wales, Sydney; Dorion Sagan; Lesley Stern, U of California, San Diego; Jens-Christian Svenning, Aarhus U.