About the project

Conviction Politics is a digital history project funded by the Australian Research Council and industry partners as part of the Linkage scheme. It investigates how Britain’s Australian colonies – beginning as some of the most unfree and unequal jurisdictions on earth – became some of the first polities to give all working men the vote by the 1850s and in quick time earned a reputation as the social laboratory of the world.

The answer is to be found in newly digitised UNESCO listed convict records, in the Tasmanian archives held by Libraries Tasmania. The project codes and analyses convict records, as well as colonial newspapers and activists' own media to map patterns of convict collective action against the exploitation of their labour and harsh conditions. Conviction Politics explores connections between the c. 3600 political prisoners transported between 1788-1868 and the 164,000 mass of ordinary convicts, many of whom were dispossessed in Britain and Ireland by turbo-charged capitalism of their common land and traditional craft and agricultural occupations. Together they reveal a story of the empire-wide struggle for political and human rights, and the unlikely victory of Britain’s reformers and radicals in their place of exile.

Building on Tony Moore’s book Death or Liberty, the international documentary of the same name and Michael Quinlan’s The Origins of Worker Mobilisation 1788-1850, Conviction Politics reveals how from the earliest days of settlement, Australia’s first work force resisted exploitation through inventive solidarity in the face of coercion, while a vanguard of transported rebels, liberal pamphleteers, industrial protesters and radical agitators changed the political direction of the colonies.

Unrest in Britain, Ireland, and throughout the empire was triggered by capitalist commodification, land enclosure, imperialism and the destruction of traditional ways of life, and from 1788, the British Empire’s seizure and colonisation of the Australian continent. This brought dislocating and destructive forces to bear on First Nations in Australia, who fought against this dispossession, with many internally exiled into the convict system, from where they continued to resist. While the distribution of Indigenous land to the land hungry of Britain and Ireland, including pardoned convicts, helped the rulers avoid a revolution back home and had a catastrophic impact on First Nations people, the project reveals some acts of recognition and solidarity between Aboriginal people and European convicts.

An international partnership between leading academic historians, media practitioners, archive collections and museums led by Professor Tony Moore from Monash University, Conviction Politics synergises various streams of research, including the Monash-based SensiLab team of Professor Jon McCormack, Professor Kim Mariott and Dr Monika Schwarz, the political prisoner research team including Moore, Dr Mike Davis, Professor Nick Carter , Dr Julie Brooks and PhD student Daisy Bailey and the collective resistance data research team led by Professors Hamish Maxwell-Stewart and Michael Quinlan with Dr Trudy Cowley. The multimedia production team at Roar Film is headed by Steve Thomas, director and writer of the Death or Liberty documentary. Collaborators include labour historian and museum professional Professor Andrew Reeves, archaeological historian Richard Tuffin, and Bentham Centre historian Tim Causer.

Conviction Politics is proudly partnered with Australian organisations the NSW Teachers Federation, The Union Education Foundation (an initiative of the Australian Council of Trade Unions), Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery, Libraries Tasmania, the National Museum of Australia and Maurice Blackburn Lawyers. Internationally, partners include the People’s History Museum in Manchester, the National Records of Scotland, the Trades Union Congress, University College Dublin’s Australian Studies Centre, and the University of South Wales. Collaborating institutions include Sydney Harbour Trust’s Cockatoo Island, University College London’s Bentham Project and the Gwent Archives in Wales.

Conviction Politics communicates its discoveries to the community via an innovative online hub incorporating over 100 entertaining micro-documentaries produced by Roar Film with the research team, and a travelling international digital exhibition. The interactive transmedia hub curates in one place the documentaries, data visualisations, an interactive spatial and temporal atlas, a diversity of protest media (songs, stories, cartoons, banners, poetry, badges, posters, novels, memoirs), and international archive collections on political prisoners and convict resistance. The travelling digital exhibition is scheduled to tour Australia, the UK and Ireland in 2024-2026.

Conviction Politics provides a space for research exchange and public engagement and pedagogy, including schools, community groups, and unions. Most political and ordinary convicts were young, and some used the new media of their day to communicate once radical ideas such as freedom of speech, writing and assembly, strength in unity, working class political participation and national self-determination free of empires. Conviction Politics harnesses the new digital media of today to communicate these still potent ideas to a wide audience, and especially to young Australians.