Penal transportation or transportation was the relocation of convicted criminals, or other persons regarded as undesirable, to a distant place, often a colony, for a specified term; later, specifically established penal colonies became their destination. While the prisoners may have been released once the sentences were served, they generally did not have the resources to return home.
Major General Lachlan Macquarie, CB was a British Army officer and colonial administrator from Scotland. Macquarie served as the fifth Governor of New South Wales from 1810 to 1821, and had a leading role in the social, economic, and architectural development of the colony. He is considered by historians to have had a crucial influence on the transition of New South Wales from a penal colony to a free settlement and therefore to have played a major role in the shaping of Australian society in the early nineteenth century.
D'Arcy Wentworth was an Irish surgeon, the first paying passenger to arrive in the new colony of New South Wales. He served under the first seven governors of the Colony, and from 1810 to 1821, he was great assistant to Governor Lachlan Macquarie. Wentworth led a campaign for the rights and recognition of emancipists and for trial by jury.
William Redfern was an English-raised surgeon in early colonial Australia who was transported to New South Wales as a convict for his role in the Mutiny on the Nore. He is widely regarded as the “father of Australian medicine“.
A Certificate of Freedom was a government issued document given to a convict in one of the Australian penal colonies at the end of the convict's sentence. This stated that the ex-convict had been restored "to all the rights and privileges of free subjects", effectively now a free person, and could seek out employment or leave the colony.
William Hutchinson was a British convict who was transported to the Australian colonies, ultimately to become a successful public servant and businessman.
The history of Australia from 1788 to 1850 covers the early British colonial period of Australia's history. This started with the arrival in 1788 of the First Fleet of British ships at Port Jackson in the lands of the Eora Nation, and the establishment of the penal colony of New South Wales as part of the British Empire. It further covers the European scientific exploration of the continent and the establishment of the other Australian colonies that make up the modern states of Australia.
The convict era of Western Australia was the period during which Western Australia was a penal colony of the British Empire. Although it received small numbers of juvenile offenders from 1842, it was not formally constituted as a penal colony until 1849. Between 1850 and 1868, 9,721 convicts were transported to Western Australia on 43 convict ship voyages. Transportation ceased in 1868, but it was many years until the colony ceased to have any convicts in its care.
The following lists events that happened during 1790 in Australia.
John Thomas Bigge was an English judge and royal commissioner. He is mostly known for his inquiry into the British colony of New South Wales published in the early 1820s. His reports favoured a return to the harsh treatment of convicts and the utilisation of them as cheap agricultural labour for wealthy sheep-farming colonists. Bigge's reports also resulted in the resignation of Governor Lachlan Macquarie whose policies promoted the advancement of ex-convicts back into society.
Between 1788 and 1868, about 162,000 convicts were transported from Britain and Ireland to various penal colonies in Australia.
William Chopin was a convict transported to Western Australia. After gaining his Ticket of leave he worked as a chemist and later as a provider illicit abortions.
Campbell Town is a town in Tasmania, Australia, on the Midland Highway. At the 2006 census, the town had a population of 772.
Joseph Lycett was a portrait and miniature painter, active in Australia. Transported to Australia for forging banknotes, Lycett found work in the colony as a painter specialised in topographical views of the major towns of Australia, and some of its more dramatic landscapes.
Robert Sidaway, a convict of the First Fleet, was transported to Australia for stealing in 1788. Robert is known for being baker for the British Marines of Sydney and opening the first theatre in Sydney in 1796.
Convict women in Australia were British prisoners whom the government increasingly sent out during the era of transportation (1787-1868) in order to develop the penal outpost of New South Wales into a viable colony.
John Cadman worked as a publican in England, before becoming a convict and being transported to Australia.
A ticket of leave was a document of parole issued to convicts who had shown they could now be trusted with some freedoms. Originally the ticket was issued in Britain and later adapted by the United States, Canada, and Ireland.
James Hardy Vaux was an English-born convict transported to Australia on three separate occasions. He was the author of Memoirs of James Hardy Vaux including A Vocabulary of the Flash Language, first published in 1819, which is regarded as both the first full length autobiography and first dictionary written in Australia.
Edmund Bults, better known by his alias Edmund Edgar, was an English-born painter, engraver and lithographer who was transported as a convict to the British penal colony of New South Wales.
