Re: Deportation of Sheep Stealers to Australia

Dave Postles (pot@leicester.ac.uk)
Sat, 11 Nov 1995 10:16:37 +0000

Convict transportation to New South Wales ended in 1840, to Van Diemen's
Land in 1852. By the last years of the 1840s (ie. the years of the famine)
the numbers of minor offenders being transported was well down. Instead
there was an emphasis on sending 'exiles' (i.e. prisoners who had already
served part of their sentences in one of the new 'reformed' prisons like
Pentonville, and were given a pardon _on condition_ that they left for the
colonies (for obvious reasons they were sometimes known as 'Pentonvillains').

Much the same qualifications apply to the convicts transported (from
1850-1867) to Western Australia - i.e. they tended to be guilty of
serious crimes, OR pardoned exiles, OR juvenile offenders. I'm sure this
included some Irish, but for this the best source is the National Archives
of Ireland's database of Irish convicts, which is searchable, and available
on the World Wide Web at http://147.252.133.152/nat-arch/

There was a fair traffic across the Pacific to the Californian gold
rushes in 1848, (and vice versa, from California to Victoria, from 1851) -
but for this, you might do better investigating American immigration records.

Marion Diamond,
History Department,
University of Queensland,
e-mail med@lingua.cltr.uq.oz.au

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