Australia as a British jail

Something that caught my attention when I was searching information for my map about Australia is how this country was used at the beginning of the history. We know that every country had theirs problems and nations too, but now that I’m searching for more information I realized how different this story is as the story that I thought it was.

This story begins in XII century when Australia was discovered, this island was almost empty and probably it wouldn’t be useful, or that is what they thought. Some years after that, in 1787 to be more specific, United Kingdom was in a colonial period and theirs jails were filled of people, so they started moving them to this new place. The island was used as a jail for 160 thousands of people, like thieves, prostitutes, criminals and political prisoners. They mostly came from England.

This went on until 1868 and it finished because jails in England weren’t full anymore and Europe started an economic crisis. Nowadays almost a quarter of Australians have ancestors who lived there as prisoners.

Now we can realize that we have similar stories, maybe our country was not used as a jail of foreign people, but most of the countries lived difficult periods as they and us.

By: Concepción Andrade Ercilla