Thesis (M.A.)--University of Wisconsin--Madison, 1964. / eContent provider-neutral record in process. Description based on print version record. Includes bibliographical references (leaves [112]-127).

This thesis explores the moral and sexual anxieties produced by the transportation of male convicts to the penal colonies of Australia. My aims are twofold. First, this study argues that male sexuality lay at the heart of penal and colonial political discourse. The moral anxieties this both reflected and produced directly informed the penal administration of the convict population. This was implicit in the ways that convict bodies were ordered, surveilled, disciplined and accommodated. In this analysis the sexual and behavioural management of male prisoners is considered to be a fundamental dynamic within contemporary perceptions of criminal reformation. Second, this thesis examines the ways that these moral concerns permeated the wider colonial society. Free British settlers took their cultural cargo with them to the colonies. In the context of the penal colonies, they also had to negotiate the specific cultural and social implications of transportation. The moral concerns of colonial society were often played out around the politics of imperial transportation. This is examined through a consideration of the cultural meanings of colonial discourse and the many tensions that lay beneath it. During the slow transition from penal colony to respectable free society, colonists utilised and manipulated their moral and cultural anxieties in a number of political ways. This thesis argues that the moral and sexual anxieties of colonial society were both real and imagined. They informed a variety of discourses that linked the colonial periphery with the metropolitan centre in a relationship that was reciprocal but also antagonistic.

This thesis explores the moral and sexual anxieties produced by the transportation of male convicts to the penal colonies of Australia. My aims are twofold. First, this study argues that male sexuality lay at the heart of penal and colonial political discourse. The moral anxieties this both reflected and produced directly informed the penal administration of the convict population. This was implicit in the ways that convict bodies were ordered, surveilled, disciplined and accommodated. In this analysis the sexual and behavioural management of male prisoners is considered to be a fundamental dynamic within contemporary perceptions of criminal reformation. Second, this thesis examines the ways that these moral concerns permeated the wider colonial society. Free British settlers took their cultural cargo with them to the colonies. In the context of the penal colonies, they also had to negotiate the specific cultural and social implications of transportation. The moral concerns of colonial society were often played out around the politics of imperial transportation. This is examined through a consideration of the cultural meanings of colonial discourse and the many tensions that lay beneath it. During the slow transition from penal colony to respectable free society, colonists utilised and manipulated their moral and cultural anxieties in a number of political ways. This thesis argues that the moral and sexual anxieties of colonial society were both real and imagined. They informed a variety of discourses that linked the colonial periphery with the metropolitan centre in a relationship that was reciprocal but also antagonistic.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Texas at Austin, 1999. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 483-509). Available also in a digital version from Dissertation Abstracts.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Northern Illinois University, 1977. / Includes bibliographical references (p. [267]-278).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Chicago, 1919. / "Private Edition, Distributed by the University of Chicago Libraries, Chicago, Illinois." "Reprinted from the Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology, Vol. X, No. 4; Vol. XI, Nos. 1 and 2; February, May and August, 1920." Includes bibliographical references (p. [97]-106).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Chicago, 1919. / "Private Edition, Distributed by the University of Chicago Libraries, Chicago, Illinois." "Reprinted from the Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology, Vol. X, No. 4; Vol. XI, Nos. 1 and 2; February, May and August, 1920." Bibliography: p. [97]-106. Also available on the Internet.

This thesis is a study of assigned male convict labour in rural Van Diemen’s Land in the period 1820-40. Throughout this period agriculture and pastoralism were centxal to the colonial economy, and this sector was the largest private employer of convict labour, yet there has been no prior sustained investigation of the nature and experience of rural convict employment in Van Diemen’s Land. Research has involved use of records of convict transportation, the records of the convict department, colonial court records, and the correspondence of the colonial secretary’s office. Extensive use has also been made of the colonial press, published contemporary accounts, and unpublished journals of colonists. The thesis begins with a discussion of two oppositional representations of rural convict labour: John Glover’s painting ‘My Harvest Home’, and the ballad ‘Van Diemen’s Land’. These representations demonstrate the polarised debate on the nature of convict labour. Rural convicts have been largely neglected in the recent historiography of convict transportation; this thesis argues that this neglect is unwarranted, and that rural convict labour resists reductionist understanding of convict labour. Chapter 1 examines farming in the colony, demonstrating the importance and vitality of this sector of the economy. Chapters 2-4 discuss convict assignment, management, and convict responses. It is argued that assignment effectively placed those with experience of farm work with rural employers. Convicts’ skills are seen to have been relevant and useful to the rural economy. The management of convict servants operated both formally at the level of the Convict Department regulations and the magistrates bench, and informally on individual properties. Informal management best utilised incentives rather than force. Thus convicts were able to negotiate the authority of their employers through various means, including resistance. Chapters 5-7 discuss the convict experience of rural labour. Material conditions of diet, housing and clothing are examined in chapter 5. Convict recreational culture is investigated in chapter 6; it is argued that convicts created an important site of autonomy in this form. The intimate lives of convict men are discussed in chapter 7. Often seen as brutal and brutalising, it is argued that these relationships were important and meaningful sites in male convict experience.

Written in memory of the first women convicts transported to Botany Bay, this unthinkable history, a concept posed by the historian, Paul Carter, is an experiment in extending the boundaries of academic remembering, so that the complex lives of those resilient women might be given recognition. Researching the women??s lives required an ethnographic method, or ??spatialized?? history, based on original archival research, together with research of rituals, art, literature, newspapers and music; and, importantly, the laws which circumscribed their behaviour. A research focus was thus the administration of criminal codes and the character of prominent judges, including the significance of the Recorder of London. Theories of history based on the work of philosophers such as Heidegger, Deleuze, Guattari, Derrida, Foucault and the ethical philosopher, Wyschogrod, with her feminist perspective, have influenced narrative themes and tropes. This experimental hybridization of historical methods and the poetics of fiction might be classified as ficto-critical historiography, where ficto-critical functions as an epithet, not a polarity, as is the case with ficto-historiography and the coinage, faction. As a meditation on the ??maybe?? of historiography, the experiment enters the debates about the relationship between history and fiction and the significance of remembering. The incompleteness of records, their silences and partialities, the forensic reading required to contextualize them, the perspective from which the narrative is told, together with the metaphorical levels of all writing, are explicitly acknowledged. Fundamental to that acknowledgement is the narrative trope of simulacra. The narrative figures are thus copies without originals; they are an acknowledgement of the absence which haunts memories, while avoiding scepticism or relativity. The semi-omniscient, intrusive voice of the narrator, the dialogic placement of other ??voices??, variously contrary, affirmative, informative or philosophical; together with the acknowledged artifice of narrative dramatizations in which the figures are assembled from multiple sources, are important elements in the grammar of this transgressive act of remembering with its footnotes and phantoms.

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