Journal of Australian Colonial History: Book Reviews
Vol. 11, 2009
Guide 4 to New South Wales State Archives relating to Convicts and Convict Administration, State Records Authority of NSW, Kingswood, 2006, IBSN 0 9751751 0 6, pbk, 419 pp, $59.95.
This guide was recently launched by the State Records Authority and is largely the work of Gail Davis, Senior Archivist, who headed a team of workers to revise the Convict Guide originally produced by Dawn Troy. This new guide is beautifully presented and is well illustrated by reproductions of the original documents. There are eighteen chapters covering Trial and Transportation, Assignment, Tickets of Leave, Sentence Served, Pardons, Convict Establishments, Health and Welfare, Bank Accounts, Rations and Stores, Families of Convicts, Death and Departure, Colonial Trials and Court Records, Gaols, Penal Settlements, Moreton Bay, Van Diemen's Land, Port Phillip and Western Port and Letters about Convicts. There are important Appendices including Ship Arrival, Indents, Musters, English Records, a Timeline, Glossary a Bibliography and a good, thorough, index, a practice sometimes neglected by publishers these days.
In my experience of the State Archives there are two kinds of researchers labouring away on the microfilm readers and the original documents. These are the genealogists who are mainly looking for their own and others' families, and the researcher of broader subjects. This volume is helpful to both. Its original construction follows the course of a convict's 'career' and the multiple organizations that had bearing on that life. This is person-centred, rather than institutionally focussed, making documents seem immediately relevant and accessible for all kinds of researchers. Thus the Public Records Office reels precede the Colonial Secretary's records of the voyages of convict ships and also included are sections on relevant 'records held elsewhere', references to other libraries. The section on records of clothing, rations and stores includes records from the Auditor General, the Colonial Secretary, the Commissariat and the Ordnance Storekeeper's records as well as the Mitchell's Windsor list of persons receiving rations. Thus three pages cover all available records concerning the management of provisions for convict and free.
Each chapter contains a succinct and excellent account of the background to the records, the history of organisations that oversaw each aspect of the convict's life. The introductory section on Transportation gives us the practice of English administration from 1717 to the 1850s and provides us with some idea of the erratic system that governed so many lives in exile. The volume considers the state of play among Australian historians concerning transportation, the assignment system and health. Lively writing, a reference for instance to the availability of cheap gin as an exacerbator of poverty in England, care of Mollie Gillen (1908-2009) assures us that those not academically inclined will read with interest and enthusiasm quite complex points about the nature of administration. The volume's detailed descriptions of the content of records will save researchers considerable time. For example, the records concerning rationing on Norfolk Island includes the information that there is a card index to the register held in the Mitchell Library and that a copy of this index has been included at the beginning of the microfilm of the register. This volume is a product of careful thought and consultation.
Administrative culture has certainly changed since I began my research in Archives in 1980, carefully considering the identities of the rioters in the NSW 1843 elections. This guide has been produced with considerable imagination and creativity. It is an elegant product in its own right and it will inspire many to follow its various intellectual initiatives.
Paula Jane Byrne
Citation: Journal of Australian Colonial History, Vol. 9, 2009, pp. 204-05.