Katherine Roscoe

This dissertation suggests there was continuities in the discourses of how rape was imagined and remembered during the Mutiny of 1857 and Partition in 1947 respectively. By comparing discourses of rape  in press and literature it complicates divisions between colonial and post-colonial, seeing continuities in the deployment of gender to uphold national narratives and patriarchal norms. It suggests that when rape was real, it contained fictionalised elements, and that both discourses relied on the sensationalising of unspeakable crimes that silenced those women who were victims of it.

This dissertation explores the temporal regime of Pentonville prison in the mid-nineteenth century. It suggests that far from one universal system of strict and regular apportioning of time, that the kinds of 'time' convicts were encouraged to experience and actually did depended on the activities which they were completing. It explores time in relation to labour, religious instruction, mental and bodily health, and punishment.

Rottnest Island was the only prison established solely for Aboriginal convicts in colonial Australia. Traditionally, Rottnest has been analysed through the prism of punishment. This viewpoint focusses on how Indigenous people were held accountable under laws set down by the invaders of their land.

Rottnest’s policies can also be explored through the lens of labour.  Rottnest experimented with different strategies of exploiting Aboriginal convict labour during its time as a prison. These varying labour strategies emerged at the intersection between theories on indigeneity, attitudes to criminality and financial concerns. A focus on labour explodes assumptions about island prisons as isolated and prisoners as immobile.  Most importantly, this paper elucidates the way in which theories on punishment and understandings of race were filtered through pragmatic concerns. The economic needs of the colony conflicted with humanitarian thought emanating from the metropole and settler-colonists demands for protection from crime. These wider issues come into place through discussion in the press and in the legislature about Rottnest Island and the role of Aboriginal convict labour.  This paper will trace the shifts in Rottnest’s labour policy across its 60 years as a prison to explore the complex interactions between punishment, economics and Indigeneity.

The creation of the Aborigines Protection Board in 1886, and the resulting monetary provision instituted by S.70 in the 1889 Constitution Act – stand in seemingly strong contrast to the array of punitive bills aimed at Indigenous convicts. Yet it was the deplorable conditions of Rottnest’s inmates in the 1880s that sparked controversy that helped create the Aborigines Protection board.  The 1883 Inquiry into Rottnest's management was wide-ranging – encompassing the health of prisoners and the use restraints for punitive purposes. The outcry surrounding the treatment Rottnest’s inmates brought the usually isolated prison island to the forefront of public debate – engaging the public, the press and colonial administrators in Perth and London.  As ‘wards’ of the state, discussions of convict welfare centred around questions of moral responsibility of government, with an added dimension concerning the rights of Aborigines as the original occupants of this land.  As such, this paper positions Rottnest as central to British imperial policy for quelling Aboriginal resistance and subjugating the Aboriginal population, and as catalytic to the protection discourses that eventually resulted in Section 70.

This paper explores how the particular island geography of four Australian prison islands were all subject to different kinds of tensions between isolation and connection. It suggests that in the administration of convict islands connection and isolation were both considered positives and negatives depending on the specific local circumstances. By drawing these islands into one framework, this research highlights how central the island geography was to administrating prison islands, without suggesting that flattening the geographical and institutional diversity between them all.

This paper argues that those people who utilised 'nefarious geographies' (Karskens, 2012) were most desirable for incarceration on islands. Using the examples of Australian prison islands Rottnest and Cockatoo, it draws attention to bushrangers and aboriginal people as the inmate populations who needed to be distanced by physical natural barriers as they  upset British control of the spaces of mainland colonisation.

This paper presents some preliminary findings of my PhD so far. It explores how exterior spatiality of two Australian prison islands (Rottnest and Cockatoo) were fundamentally linked to the purposes of imprisonment and the kinds of convicts incarcerated there. The proximity of Cockatoo to Sydney harbour and its natural sandstone reserves made labour the primary driver. Whilst the specific cultural meaning of Rottnest for local Aboriginal groups and its geographic isolation made it ideal for the removal of Aboriginal people whose resistance to British occupation had been criminalised.

This paper presents the findings of my MA research at King's College London. Typically the replication of  architectural design of Eastern State Penitentiary (USA) in Pentonville (UK) is taken as evidence of similar penal ideologies. In fact, an investigation of the way the prisoners day was divided and 'time' was imagined in each  shows very different ideologies surrounding rehabilitation and punishment of prisoners.

This paper explores how contradictory heritage ethos-  towards convicts and aboriginal history respectively - have led to the negation of aboriginal convict history on Rottnest Island. It argues that these narratives need to be both equally represented.

This guest blog for Port Towns & Urban Cultures' Coastal Blog explores how small islands presented three particular challenges when used as penal spaces: (1) the sea as a site of mobility (2) the costliness of running them (3) their remoteness from administrative authority.

Reflections during a research trip to Australia. I suggest that the material spaces in which convicts lived their everyday lives can connect the researcher more to individual stories than the vast archives  which can make them feel distant and undifferentiated.

A summary of three papers presented by Carrie Crockett, Kellie Moss and Katy Roscoe - three PhD students on the Carceral Archipelago. The papers explored the history of convicts at Sakhalin, Western Australia and Australian prison islands respectively.

A summary of a New History Lab seminar presented by Prof. Clare Anderson, with additional presentations by Kellie Moss and Katy Roscoe, on the Carceral Archipelago Project. Less than a year into the European Research Council funded project, the presentation outlined initial findings on the vast global scale of convict transportation. It described the broad aims of the project in terms of centring imperial circulations, connecting convictism to other forms of coerced labour, and the use of the "politics of comparison" to draw together case studies from an international team of researchers.

In the context of Australian settler colonialism, island imprisonment was a symbolically potent punishment used for the subjugation of both incumbent European and resident Indigenous populations. However, in the long-term, islands were deeply problematic as penal sites. They were simultaneously too isolated from administrative and public scrutiny, and too connected to potentially disruptive maritime spaces. This paper explores the “Carceral Archipelago” of colonial Australia to interrogate the ways in which ‘paper utopias’ of isolation conflicted with the negotiated realities of island imprisonment. This approach highlights the mediated nature of colonial power, by foregrounding the agency of convicts, local administrators and crews of sailors as they interpreted and disrupted instructions from Westminster. This PhD research is undertaken as part of the European Research Council project, the Carceral Archipelago, which investigates convict transportation at a global scale, 1415-1960s.

World History Workshop, University of Cambridge, 3 November 2016

Since the ‘transnational’ turn, influenced by the field of ‘Ocean Studies’, global and imperial histories have brought to light the movements of people across borders and across oceans. This includes the transportation convicts in the British Empire. Despite their lengthy journeys from Britain and Ireland to Australia, or between imperial possessions, historians have often confined them to the terrestrial boundaries of their destination.  This paper challenges this historiographical move, by drawing attention to the key role of island peripheries in the ongoing colonisation of the Australian mainland. The first part of the paper presents a ‘typology’ of carceral islands associated with Australian penal colonies that incarcerated a variety of people – European, Indigenous and immigrant – for a variety of purposes: to deter law-breakers, to dispossess Indigenous Australians, and to extract labour for maritime expansion. As sites of expulsion islands were essential tools of governance for the British colonial government. The second half of the paper moves away from island connections to the mainland, to focus on their imaginative and physical connections to one another. It argues that they formed a network of penal expulsion that encircled the continent. Using archival material from the Colonial Office, India Office, and the penal institutions themselves, this paper views the history of Australian colonialism from the outside in: and shows that peripheral sites holding marginalised people were actually central to both mainland development, and empire-wide networks of trade, punishment and governance.

This paper explores the intra-imperial circulation of convicts transported from mainland Australia to a number of surrounding islands. The case-studies demonstrate the varied use of islands for incarceration of different people, over an extended period of time. The case studies are: the transportation of skilled British and Irish convicts to Melville Island in the Northern Territory (1824-28); the expulsion of colonial convicts to Cockatoo Island in Sydney Harbour (1839-1869); the imprisonment of Indigenous convicts on Rottnest Island, (1839-1931); and the transferral of prisoners to St Helena Island in Queensland (1869-1932). Historians of convict Australia tend to study the transportation of convicts from metropolitan Britian and Ireland, and their subsequent dispersal as convict workers around the Australian mainland. Instead this paper presents Australian islands as interconnected sites of puntive expulsion, connected through circulations of convicts, administrators and policy. By analysing convict islands in one frame the metropole and the mainland are both decentred, in favour of dynamic, mobile and regional frames of analysis.The paper will engage with the way in which empire was mediated by negotiations between administrators in the colonies. As the nineteenth century progressed circulations of convicts to islands increasingly threatened and superceded relationships with the metropole. Secondly, the penal islands trascended traditional periodisation by continuing and adapting their penal function after the abolition of transportation from elsewhere in the British empire, and through transitions from colonialism to independence. Thirdly, these case studies demonstrate that islands were selected for diverse purposes including territorial expansion, extraction of labour and for the social control of Indigenous people. Finally, the paper will draw demonstrate strong links between the destination, the type of convict, and their sentence, bringing legal cultures into one frame with the working geographies, and cultural associations, of the island prisons.