Transportation, Penal Ideology and the Experience of Juvenile Offenders in England and Australia in the Early Nineteenth Century1

Abstract

Many juvenile offenders transported from Britain to Van Diemen’s Land in the 1830s spent time in the juvenile specific penal station, Point Puer. Here they were subjected to a reform ideology, also transported from the Mother Country, which provided the training and discipline to make them into new colonial subjects. However, this reformatory programme was marred by the more pragmatic needs of an economically deterministic colony. One in which fifteen and sixteen-year-old youths from British cities and urban conurbation’s, with few skills and uneven experience of work, had no place. This article follows a specific group of boys transported to Van Diemen’s Land in the mid-1830s, some of whom were sent to Point Puer, and the others assigned to masters, considering their experiences at the colony in the context of both reform and the broader disciplinary regime.