Between the XVIII and XIX century, Australia was used as a jail fot British convicts. More than 165000 convicts were sent to Australia.
Why they used this country as a jail?
The population of England increased a lot. So obviously; the violence, the murders and the alcoholism increased too. They need a place to have their convicts, so they decided to send them to Australia.
What happened after they served their sentence?
Mostly, they stayed in the country working, they could forget their past and start over again as settlers.
What about the buildings?
Now, are there as World Heritages. Are only 11 prisons as museums.
Some people can say that this help to colonized Australia, but it was just to have another jail, a big one.
I don't know if this is true but my brother told me when I was a little girl that they used it as a jail because it was a big island so they couldn't scape and also because in the ocean were sharks.
Also, the 20% of the first tripulation to travel to Australia were women. Some of them were workers and convicts.
The people who went there to have a job, worked in factorys.
Besides, the convicts worked too. As farmers, carpenters, nurses and staff. The convicts with education worked in the administration of the jails. This was really helpful to the British colony to colonized the island fastly.
This ended when the convict's population was of 1 million of people. The colony could be maintened and continue to grow.
What I think about this is that england wanted to find a place to send people they regarded as the scum of the country(convicts) and keep away from them. Maybe in some point we can do a comparison, because developed countries as USA, England among others throw away their "electronic trashes" to poor countries in Africa. They think that Africa is like a dumpster, but it doesn´t.
ReplyDeleteIt is really terrible as the former empires apart from conquering, eradicate and subdue native people through violence, used these territories such as jails. A similar situation lived at that time the places colonized in North America. England based on the excuse of the overpopulation that it had at the time, but that reason did not justify the precarious living conditions that the convicts lived trough. They were slaves who had to perform forced labor by order of the Crown to satisfy the british requirements of expansion. It did not matter age or sex due to the convicts were children, women and men. Unfortunately this is one of the episodes of the history that instead of reminding we want to forget them.
ReplyDeleteThe reality of Autralia is that they were invaded for England and transform their territories in jails. I understand that England had an overpopullation but this wasn't fair for the native people from Australia. Everything that happened here is another fact which reveals that Developed Countries took advantage of their power.
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