Review: Black Convicts by Santilla Chingaipe

Picture Australia in the 19th Century, and you may very well imagine convicts, probably English or Irish. If there are people of colour in the picture, they might be Aboriginal people watching from the distance in the colonial landscape, painted into the background of their own land. That’s certainly the depiction I was familiar with until reading Santilla Chingaipe’s Black Convicts. In 2018 Chingaipe learned that the 1788 First Fleet, the landing of which is commemorated on January 26, included convicts of African descent. It inspired her to revisit the archives, revealing that Australia’s depiction of the transportation era has been whitewashed. It complicates our understanding of the atrocities in Australia’s foundations, the genocides and dispossession of Aboriginal people, and the transportation of people as punishment, showing how they belong to the same imperial project. It exposes connections between these systems of violence, exploitation, coercion and unfreedom.

Of the more than 160,000 people transported as convicts, Chingaipe found over 500 who were Black. In this thorough and detailed account, she explores the lives of many of them. Although all unique, patterns emerge. Many were enslaved or descended from the enslaved in the West Indies, where punishment was almost entirely in the hands of plantation owners. Upon finding forms of freedom, whether through military service or during the apprenticeship era (in which the bonds of slavery were traded for indentured labour), they came under the jurisdiction of the colonial government. For crimes often petty (usually theft), and sometimes more intense (rebellion, treason, assault, murder), they were transported to the new Australian penal colonies.

Finding Black convicts in the archives, and what little biographical detail Chingaipe can, is impressive. Even more so is her tracing of the links between the Atlantic slave trade, transportation, and racism. It was through slavery that different laws were developed and applied according to skin colour, later to be propped up with the pseudosciences of the so-called Enlightenment to justify their abject horror. Such racism, applied in the colonies, fuelled the dispossession and murder of Aboriginal people. The convict system, Chingaipe argues, was not so different to other forms of exploitation. Indeed some of the structures of indentured labour were borrowed directly from slavery.

The glimpses of lives — James Tierney, who led a mutiny on Norfolk Island; John Johnstone who participated in the Myall Creek Massacre; Constance Couronne from Mauritius, transported age nine; James Williams who started Australia’s sugar industry — that Chingaipe has gleaned from the archives are affecting. But they are also frustrating. Similar to queer people, Black convicts mainly entered the archives through their encounters with the law. Other material by contemporaries is decidedly pejorative, designed to marginalise. Their lives outside the convict system are missing; for most of the convicts Chingaipe traces, the trail peters out when they finish their sentences. Who knows what lives they went on to lead.

Gay rating: 2/5 for Hendrick Witnalder, convicted of an “unnatural offence” and the last man executed for sodomy in Australia.