Alyssa Madden, PhD candidate, supervised by Martin Gibbs and David Andrew Roberts.

This is an historical archaeological study of the Moreton Bay carceral landscape as the foundation of Queensland’s capital city, Brisbane. The Moreton Bay convict station was established in 1824 on the then-northern NSW European frontier. Continuing until 1842, recidivist convicts were sentenced to hard labour in Moreton Bay for secondary offenses. Whilst the convict station was the primary motivation in an era of transportation, punishment and production, there were other more enduring reasons to establish a penal colony north of Sydney: military defence, and future free settlement.

The research will cover topics including the penal station’s production, infrastructure, process, and logistics, and how the different industries were intertwined within the punitive landscape. Further, this study aims to discover how social, economic, and sexual relationships of conflict and cooperation between convict workers and Indigenous communities developed whilst in competition for the colony’s resources.

Why were particular industries established in early Brisbane? What were the nature of the industrial processes, the links between them, logistics of movement, and associated infrastructure? How was labour deployed across the landscape? How successful were different industries at different times, under different regimes? How did the early Moreton Bay environment shape the nature of convict industry, and how in turn did those industries shape the landscape? How do we identify power relationships in industrial outstations? How did relationships of conflict and cooperation between convict workers and Indigenous communities during conflict over the colony’s resources?