Making Crime Pay
The Challenge
Making Crime Pay uses digital data to reimagine Australia’s convict past. Traditionally, historical records have been stored in archives and libraries, artefacts have been placed in museums, while historic sites have been independently managed by heritage bodies. Such policies have hindered attempts to understand our past and create meaningful and rich visitor experiences. This matters as public interactions with museums, archives, libraries and heritage sites provide vital revenue streams as well as increasing civic and cultural awareness. This project extends the largest historical dataset assembled in Australia to date and uses this to connect archival records to places in ways designed to revolutionise public understandings of our past.
The Solution
Data from over 60 archival series have been digitised and linked to recreate the life courses of over 74,000 convicts transported to Van Diemen’s Land. Individual events have also been geolocated allowing these to be linked to place. This has resulted in the creation of millions of data points that can be utilised to tell stories at scale. Making Crime Pay also uses AI and other scripting techniques to reimagine processes originally designed to humiliate and intimidate convicts. This includes repurposing physical descriptions, together with other life course events and historic images to generate images that can be used to challenge public perceptions of what criminals look like.
Outcome and Impact
The project team have worked with the Tasmanian Government, the National Trust Tasmania, the Port Arthur Historic Site Management Authority and Woolmers Estate World Heritage Site to create new interpretative experiences. These have included Unshackled Penitentiary, an interactive experience installed in the National Trust Tasmania owned and operated Penitentiary Chapel in Hobart. This has won several heritage tourism and architectural awards as well as raising the profile of the Penitentiary Chapel as a visitor experience. In late 2025 it became the number one experience on TripAdvisor in Australia and the South Pacific. The project team has also supplied data to the Port Arthur Historic Site to help with their Little Depraved Felons: The Boys of Point Puer exhibition and Unshackled: The True Convict Story installed in January 2026 at the Woolmers World Heritage site in northern Tasmania, as well as working with BBC Wales and Beaumaris Gaol in the UK to reimagine Welsh Convicts transported to Australia. Other projects are planned in the near future.
Links:
Port Arthur Historic Site: What's On: Little Depraved Felons
