See the Profiles of Those Exiled in Convict Records of Australia

The Convict Records of Australia reflect the forced emigration to the continent of Australia of 165,000 people in the 180 years between 1788-1868, representing the beginning of the modern age of globalization by government agency. 

Selected by the judicial apparatus of industrializing Britain, the convicts were sentenced to the punishment of exile. Yet their forced labor ultimately resulted in the establishment of viable colonies, which became assets to the mother-country. 

The forensic details about individual convicts have enabled historians to build a picture of the human capital which shaped the economy, demography, and culture of early colonial Australia.

The convicts’ lives were minutely documented by a dedicated bureaucracy, generating a rare body of records of 19th century working class people, from their British roots to their Australian fates. 

In 1901 these colonies peacefully became an independent federation of states – the Commonwealth of Australia – just over a hundred years after the first convicts landed at Sydney Cove in 1788. 

In that the convicts became the ancestors of perhaps one-third of modern Australia’s population, their records are of irreplaceable social significance. 

These rare personal records of the ordinary folk who populated early colonial Australia constitute data that shaped Australian national consciousness, enable genealogical research, and are touchstones of the contemporary sense of “Australian-ness.”