Tazmania Colony Essay

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England started transporting criminals to Australia in 1788. The reason for this was that the English prisons were owercrowded. Times were poor in those days, and the sentences were hard. You could be sentenced to a life of labour in Australia for stealing a loaf of bread. The first fleet came with 11 ships, carrying 780 British convicts. The 26th of January 1788 the first penal colony was founded in Port Jackson by Captain Arthur Philip. This date is now Australia’s national day. This did not bode well for the native Australians, the Aborigines. They were relocated and forced to live in confined reservations. The Aborigines also lost a lot of their numbers to diseases that the British brought with them. After the ships arrived at shore the convicts marched up to a building where they got undressed, cleaned and inspected. Many of the convicts were then assigned work duties, which…show more content…
Tazmania was considered a fitting place since it’s an island just outside the coast of Australia that is very hard to escape from, which made it ideal for a prison. The penal colony Port Arthur was founded here which soon became the most feared in all of Australia. The prisoners were forced to work hard, up to 10 hours a day, chained in shackles. Guvernor Arthur was a very religious man, and a very strict man, and he ran the colony with an iron fist. The punishments were very severe, there was a whip calle Cat o’nine tails that had 9 ropes with a knot at the end of each one that could cut through the skin like a knife. Pain wasn’t the only torture inflicted on the prisoners, another kind of torture was isolation. The floors outside the isolation cells were covered with carpet to mute the sounds of the guards. If you broke one of the prison rules you could get chained in a cell with walls 30 cm thick, keeping out all light and
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