The author of the magnificent bestselling account of the First Fleet returns to early Sydney to tell the story of the years that followed as it's never been told before. The British plan to settle Australia was a high-risk venture. We now take it for granted that the first colony was the basis of one of the most successful nations in the world today. But in truth, the New World of the 18th century was dotted with failed colonies, and New South Wales nearly joined them. The motley crew of unruly marines and bedraggled convicts who arrived at Botany Bay in 1788 in leaky boats nearly starved to death. They could easily have been murdered by hostile locals, been overwhelmed by an attack from French or Spanish expeditions, or brought undone by the Castle Hill uprising of 1804. Yet through fortunate decisions, a few remarkably good leaders, and most of all good luck, Sydney survived and thrived. Bestselling historian David Hill tells the story of the first three decades of Britain's earliest colony in Australia in a fresh and compelling way. 'David Hill captures Australia's past in a very readable way.' The Weekly Times

In the Penal Colony is a short story by Franz Kafka written in German in October 1914, revised in November 1918, and first published in October 1919. The story is set in an unnamed penal colony. Internal clues and the setting on an island suggest Octave Mirbeau's The Torture Garden as an influence. As in some of Kafka's other writings, the narrator in this story seems detached from, or perhaps numbed by, events that one would normally expect to be registered with horror. "In the Penal Colony" describes the last use of an elaborate torture and execution device that carves the sentence of the condemned prisoner on his skin before letting him die, all in the course of twelve hours. As the plot unfolds, the reader learns more and more about the machine, including its origin and original justification. The story focuses on the Explorer, who is encountering the brutal machine for the first time. Everything about the machine and its purpose is told to him by the Officer. The Soldier and the Condemned (who is unaware that he has been sentenced to die) placidly watch from nearby. The Officer tells of the religious epiphany the executed experience in their last six hours in the machine. Eventually, it becomes clear that the use of the machine and its associated process of justice – the accused is always instantly found guilty, and the law he has broken is inscribed on his body as he slowly dies over a period of 12 hours – has fallen out of favor with the current Commandant. The Officer is nostalgic regarding the torture machine and the values that were initially associated with it. As the last proponent of the machine, he strongly believes in its form of justice and the infallibility of the previous Commandant, who designed and built the device. In fact, the Officer carries its blueprints with him and is the only person who can properly decipher them; no one else is allowed to handle these documents.

In the eighty years between 1787 and 1868 more than 160,000 men, women and children convicted of everything from picking pockets to murder were sentenced to be transported 'beyond the seas'. These convicts were destined to serve out their sentences in the empire's most remote colony: Australia. Through vivid real-life case studies and famous tales of the exceptional and extraordinary, Convicts in the Colonies narrates the history of convict transportation to Australia - from the first to the final fleet. Using the latest original research, Lucy Williams reveals a fascinating century-long history of British convicts unlike any other. Covering everything from crime and sentencing in Britain and the perilous voyage to Australia, to life in each of the three main penal colonies - New South Wales, Van Diemen's Land, and Western Australia - this book charts the lives and experiences of the men and women who crossed the world and underwent one of the most extraordinary punishment in history.

The Mettray Penal Colony was a private reformatory without walls, established in France in 1840 for the rehabilitation of young male delinquents. Foucault linked its opening to the most significant change in the modern status of prisons and now, at last, Stephen Toth takes us behind the gates to show how the institution legitimized France's repression of criminal youth and added a unique layer to the nation's carceral system. Drawing on insights from sociology, criminology, critical theory, and social history, Stephen Toth dissects Mettray's social anatomy, exploring inmates' experiences. More than 17,000 young men passed through the reformatory before its closure, and Toth situates their struggles within changing conceptions of childhood and adolescence in modern France. Mettray demonstrates that the colony was an ill-conceived project marked by internal contradictions. Its social order was one of subjection and subversion, as officials struggled for order and inmates struggled for autonomy. Toth's formidable archival work exposes the nature of the relationships between, and among, prisoners and administrators. He explores the daily grind of existence: living conditions, discipline, labor, sex, and violence. Thus, he gives voice to the incarcerated, not simply to the incarcerators, whose ideas and agendas tend to dominate the historical record. Mettray is, above all else, a deeply personal illumination of life inside France's most venerated carceral institution.

A multilayered social and cultural analysis that focuses upon the will of civil society and the will of those who actually lived and worked in the bagne, or penal colony.

Australia's economic history is the story of the transformation of an indigenous economy and a small convict settlement into a nation of nearly 23 million people with advanced economic, social and political structures. It is a history of vast lands with rich, exploitable resources, of adversity in war, and of prosperity and nation building. It is also a history of human behaviour and the institutions created to harness and govern human endeavour. This account provides a systematic and comprehensive treatment of the nation's economic foundations, growth, resilience and future, in an engaging, contemporary narrative. It examines key themes such as the centrality of land and its usage, the role of migrant human capital, the tension between development and the environment, and Australia's interaction with the international economy. Written by a team of eminent economic historians, The Cambridge Economic History of Australia is the definitive study of Australia's economic past and present.

Between 1850 and 1868, approximately 10,000 British convicts were transported to Western Australia, in one of the final phases of global penal transportation. The arrival of these men utterly transformed the small Swan River Colony, bringing capital, labour, population influx, and contact with the outside world. Yet their contribution has been downplayed in Western Australian history, outweighed by a sense of shame that the first free Australian colony requested voluntary conversion to penal status in order to survive. This book, based on the author’s PhD research in archaeology, investigates the lives of convicts transported to Western Australia, and in particular, how their presence in the colony served as a form of modernity, fundamentally transforming it in the process. It focuses on the use of the administrative category of the ticket-of-leave to allow convict labour to be used throughout the colony. As such, the text examines the impact of the convict system on regional areas of Western Australia concentrating on the Eastern District communities of Guildford, Toodyay and York, and the convicts who worked there. Using archaeological data from three convict depots, supported by a range of other data sources such as historical documents, genealogical information and oral histories, the nature of convict life in the regions is teased out. In the process, the unique nature of the Western Australian penal colony is demonstrated and the contribution of convicts to the history of the state explored.