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Date: November 22, 2024 Fri
Time: 11:51 am
Time: 11:51 am
Results for convict labor (australia)
1 results foundAuthor: Dillon, Margaret C. Title: Convict Labour and Colonial Society in the Campbell Town Police District: 1820-1839 Summary: This thesis examines the lives of the convict workers who constituted the primary work force in the Campbell Town district in Van Diemen’s Land during the assignment period but focuses particularly on the 1830s. Over 1000 assigned men and women, ganged government convicts, convict police and ticket holders became the district’s unfree working class. Although studies have been completed on each of the groups separately, especially female convicts and ganged convicts, no holistic studies have investigated how convicts were integrated into a district as its multi-layered working class and the ways this affected their working and leisure lives and their interactions with their employers. Research has paid particular attention to the Lower Court records for 1835 to extract both quantitative data about the management of different groups of convicts, and also to provide more specific narratives about aspects of their work and leisure. Local administrative records from the Convict Department, the Colonial Secretary’s Office and the Engineers Department as well as the diaries and letters of colonists, accounts of travellers, almanacks and newspapers have also been used. Some key results proposed in the thesis include the following: Local magistrates had more varied and liberal middle class backgrounds than their contemporaries in New South Wales. They willingly became the governor’s agents of control over the convict work force, accepting his political authority, and remained primarily interested in increasing their wealth. The duties undertaken by convict police were more complex than the literature acknowledges and the claims of corruption and inefficiency made against police by the contemporary press are challenged. Ganged men maintained interactions with the general community outside their gangs, including complex trading and commercial transactions. The scarcity of female convicts caused them to have significant bargaining power and be allocated as a priority to the largest landowners, where they gave satisfactory service as domestic workers and showed little evidence of being unduly promiscuous or difficult to manage. On farm worksites where a mixed work force of assigned men, ticket holders and free men worked, convicts established hierarchies of control of the significant resources such as alcohol and cash and redistributed these amongst themselves by supplying market needs within their own reach. The political economy of the district and the ambitions of the large landowners to acquire wealth rapidly were instrumental in changing the ways they managed their convict workforces, while their convict workers also exploited any opportunities they could find to improve their conditions and retain as much of their freedom and working class culture as possible. On sites where convicts and employers negotiated reasonable working conditions, employers rarely took their workers before the courts on discipline charges. The convict administration was unable to enforce its expectations about the strict control of convicts by free market employers, neither could it fully limit convicts’ movements around rural districts, by stemming the high absconding rates from government gangs or the more limited movements of assigned men and women around the villages or farms where they worked. As an employer, the administration frequently failed to deliver the basic necessities to which its ganged men were entitled by regulation, nor did it always deliver rewards to those who complied with its requirements. Instead it kept men and women at work by sanctioning local magistrates to use harsh punishments like imprisonment, flogging and sentences to road parties and chain gangs for convicts who were charged with disobeying trivial work regulations. Details: Hobart, Tasmania: University of Tasmania, 2008. 299p. Source: Internet Resource: Dissertation: Accessed April 11, 2011 at: http://www.convicthistory.com/entire.pdf Year: 2008 Country: Australia URL: http://www.convicthistory.com/entire.pdf Shelf Number: 121290 Keywords: Convict Labor (Australia)Female InmatesFemale PrisonersHistorical StudiesPrison Labor |