Convict Land

Australia's most amazing characters of the convict age.

The year 2022 marks the 200th anniversary of the establishment of the penal settlement at Macquarie Harbour. This convict penal settlement located on the isolated primeval rugged west coast of Van Diemen's Land (Tasmania) quickly gained a reputation as an 'Earthy Hell'.

In 1790, five convicts escaped Sydney by boat and were swept ashore near present-day Newcastle. They were taken in by the Worimi people, given Aboriginal names and started families. Thus began a long and at times dramatic series of encounters between Aboriginal people and convicts in the second penal settlement in Australia.

In the early 1800s magistrates in the Australian colonies were often frustrated by the language used by reoffending convicts to disguise their criminal activities and intensions. Convict clerk James Hardy Vaux came up with a useful idea: a dictionary of slang and other terms used by convicts. And so, in 1812, he compiled what was to be Australia's first published dictionary.