Documenting Our Most Heinous Sins: True Crime Texts and the Conscience Collective in Colonial Australia

Abstract

The British Government founded modern Australia primarily as a repository for criminals. Lawbreakers and law enforcers navigated unfamiliar surroundings and negotiated a new society, while simultaneously creating the perfect environment to write and read tales of crime. This research unpacks true crime as a topic and a genre, the ways in which these stories are most commonly conceived, then positions true crime as a mode of textual production. A brief history of crime-based storytelling provides essential background for the main focus of this thesis: a major study of Australian criminal cases, of the colonial period, that emphasise accounts of punishment to open up a new way to explore Émile Durkheim’s theory of the conscience collective. This work presents the conscience collective as a significant motivator for reading crime-focused texts in Australia: how individuals can engage with processes of punishment, actively and/or vicariously, to reinforce a group’s norms and to strengthen a society’s moral boundaries. In doing so, this research demonstrates that consuming true crime writing allows for a widespread sense of communal engagement with the punishment of wrongdoers. Applying Durkheim’s theory in such a way also enables a re-evaluation of the role played by true crime in the construction of one of Australia’s most persistent national narratives: the story of the convict. The ubiquity of works documenting our more heinous sins sees many such texts quickly superseded by the next newspaper headline or easily dismissed as cheap long-form entertainment. Yet, true crime stories reinforce social standards, serve as important didactic tools and are critical to our understanding of the Australian literary heritage and the nation’s social history.