Caught on Screen: The Convict Experience in Film and Television

Abstract

Since the origins of Australian cinema, filmmakers have told stories about convicts: those men, women and children transported from their homelands whose role as founding settlers was often viewed as a stain on the country’s reputation. This thesis argues that with the rise of screen culture, convicts emerged as key historical figures who shaped and defined ideas and attitudes about Australia’s colonial past. It navigates a way through the popular representation of the convict experience in an unprecedented collection of convict-related film and television programs, from silent epics to musical melodramas and reality television. The thesis demonstrates the critical role their production and reception has played in ascribing meaning to convictism, and more broadly to the processes of colonisation that established white Australia. The research focuses on a range of important mythologies appearing on screen and examines their interaction with other cultural works such as literature, visual art and theatre, as well as intellectual thought. These include a focus on convict victimology, convicts as nation builders and convicts as agents of colonisation. As filmmakers negotiated, and audiences responded to, these often problematic histories, their visions of the past powerfully shaped a wide range of historical discourses relating to race, class and gender in Australia. Their mass appeal disrupts the historical orthodoxy that a desire to suppress the convict ‘birth stain’ was a dominant force shaping Australian history-making during the first half of the twentieth century. For many Australians, going to the movies or watching television defined the convict era and its legacies for modern nationhood.