Andrew Gill - Convict assignment in Western Australia, 1842-1851 The Parkhurst ‘apprentices’

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​Andrew Gill’s most recent book on Parkhurst convicts, Guardians and apprentices. Convict assignment in Western Australia, 1842-1851, revises and expands on an earlier volume, published in 1997, Forced Labour for the West: The Parkhurst “apprentices” 1842-1851. In 1997, juvenile migration and juvenile convicts were hot topics, made so by Royal Commissions and books by other authors, notably Andrew’s namesake, Alan Gill, (Orphans of the empire. The shocking story of child migration to Australia). Now interest in Parkhurst has subsided; access to archives via websites has reduced the visibility of Forced labour for the west. Guardians and apprentices. This re-asserts the importance of Parkhurst convicts to the economy and society of Western Australia in the 1840s; and denies that the Parkhurst ‘boys’ were ‘helpless waifs, artful dodgers or weak & sickly’, or permanently ‘traumatised’ by their experience of punishment in Parkhurst Prison on the Isle of Wight. Rather they were young workers who were conscious of their sentence of Transportation and the coercion of the assignment system (apprenticeship) which compelled them to work for a ‘mere nominal wage’ in the shabby genteel colony of Western Australia. Andrew maintains that his description of them as convicts was not purely semantic as alleged by Dr Fiona Bush and he rejects the description of them as mere child apprentices by Dr K Moss, Profs H Maxwell-Stewart and Jeremy Martens. They were not part of the silent ‘helot class of servants’ imagined by the late CT Stannage. In his publication, Guardians and apprentices, Andrew recognises that the last five years of convict assignment administered by Frederick Wittenoom were just as important as the first five years governed by John Schoales. It was Wittenoom who hastened the end of convict assignment and the inauguration of ticket-of-leave, as a means to control the convict population.

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Members and guests are warmly invited to join us before the meeting for drinks and nibbles. 

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