Jane Jago, PhD candidate, supervised by Dr Kyle Mulrooney , Professor Hamish Maxwell-Stewart and Dr Jenny Wise (funded by an Australian RTPS Scholarship).

This is a longitudinal study tracing the past footprints of transported poachers and other rural thieves in the British record. The focus is on their prior criminalisation, CJS interactions and sentencing in the various rural courts, and features an examination of 19th century poaching and its occupational connections to illegal food supply chains. The aim is understand the cultural context and motivation of their crimes and to identify patterns in regional Quarter Sessions and Assizes County Court Circuit treatment and transportation sentencing outcomes.

A feature of the project is the use of the extensive Digital History Tasmania database, from which cohorts of property crime types will first be extracted, and an interesting, previously unused set of ‘confessed prior offending’ data collected on the convict’s arrival in Van Diemen’s Land (VDL). Using CJS and demographic data, the extracted sample offender groups will then be then geo-located in Britain and Ireland via GIS modelling software to enable connection to their prior offences and trial court records.

The emphasis will be on using these past records to understand what drove poachers and stock thieves to offend, what part they played in local black-market economies, how the establishment and the law were pitted against them, prior convictions they incurred before being sentenced to exile, and the extent of their representation in the wider property-crime cohort of convicts sent to Van Diemen’s Land.

Quantitative outcomes from the data collection stage of the project will be used for a qualitative reconstruction of life course events and past offending of the selected cohort samples through key thematic narrative analysis and case studies. These frames of reference will include regional and rural criminalisation, differential regional court justice, the overrepresentation of property crime in the VDL convict cohort, and the administrative processing of human convict cargoes.