Sound and fury in colonial Australia: the search for the convict voice, 1800-1840

Abstract

This thesis uses an aural analysis of penal-era Australia to enliven, and unsettle, discussion of convict subjectivity within penal-era historiography. The ‘search for the convict voice’, the quest to discover something of the inner-lives of figures that have transfixed Australians for generations, is expanded as well as complicated by an analysis of the sounds of penal life. By reimagining the soundscapes of penal society as complex conglomerations of sounds and noises, voices, conversations, screams, grunts, groans and silences, this thesis enlarges our conception of what a convict voice is, and where best to search for its most genuine expression. The convict voices that form this thesis are part of the story of Australia’s penal, legal and social evolution. As such, they are enduring and permanent, and their legacy can be seen in the development of Australia’s colonial institutions, not in opposition, or contradiction, to such developments. The aim of this thesis is to use aural history to show how convict language and noise, despite the restrictions placed on it by the processes of legal argument, corporal punishment or forced garrulity or silence, was a part of the very fabric of the penal system. The convict voices that emerge from this thesis are forged within, and therefore form an indelible part of, the very processes that created a distinctive Australian society.