Convict Geographies of Early Colonial Sydney

Abstract

The convict’s environmental, spatial and administrative knowledge of early colonial Sydney was far richer than is generally acknowledged. Not only were the convicts thinking and feeling individuals transported to a foreign land against their will, but the natural world was, in a very real way, all around them. Through their work, their use of their ‘own time’, leisure, and in their pursuit of prohibited activities, the convicts were actively perceiving and reacting to the environment and developed their own understanding of landscapes of the colony and its hinterland. The colony became a place of places that were intimately known and understood, threaded through with action, imagination and cultural designs. The convicts had an internalized consciousness of the spaces and places of the early colony and its hinterland.