Tasmania was Britain's gulag. Cold, wet, cut off, and stuffed with the worst of the worst, the lifers, the recidivists, the ones too dangerous for Sydney. Port Arthur was the proof: solitary cells, the Separate Prison, men driven mad by the silent system. The whole island was a penal colony. That's what 'Van Diemen's Land' meant. Convicts everywhere, flogging triangles in every town square, free settlers nowhere in sight.
Convicts were a minority of Tasmania's population for most of its history. Transportation began in 1803 and ended in 1853. Across the whole period, around 75,000 convicts arrived. By 1830, free settlers, soldiers, emancipists, and the children of both already outnumbered the convict population. Hobart was a working port with merchants, whalers, churches, schools, and a respectable middle class while the Separate Prison was still being built. Port Arthur was real, the Separate Prison was as cruel as anything Britain ran anywhere, and the convict shadow lasted long after 1853, but the island was never just a prison. The 'Van Diemen's Land was a gulag' framing is partly accurate for the worst quarter of the worst sites, projected backwards onto the whole place. The other thing it was: a working colonial port from which timber, wool, wheat, and apples were shipped to a hungry world. Plus penal stations. Plus everything else.
Reception
Sources
- University of Tasmania: Convict Records REFERENCE
- Australian Convict Sites World Heritage REFERENCE