Conviction Politics

Conviction Politics is an international digital history project exploring the impact of radicals and rebels transported as political convicts to Australia on their place of exile, and the patterns of collective resistance by the mass of unfree convict women and women to the exploitation of their forced labour.

In the 18th and 19th centuries, thousands of democratic reformers, rural labour protestors, Irish freedom fighters and revolutionaries were exiled as political prisoners to Britain’s Australian colonies, where Indigenous people opposing dispossession joined them as prisoners. As convicts, they resisted exploitation through inventive solidarity inthe face of coercion, and in turn changed the political direction of the colonies.

Conviction Politics traces how these convicts and their ideas helped lay the foundations of egalitarianism, political and social democracy, unions and workers rights and national self-determination in Australia and the UK.

Through archival research, data analysis and visualisation, documentary, animation and song, the project is producing an innovative suite of digital content exploring these stories and their contemporary resonance.

Based at Monash University, Conviction Politics collaborates with researchers from universities in Australia, the UK and Ireland, and is partnered with a range of museums, archives, and unions.

An Australian Research Council Linkage Project led by Monash University. FInd out more