Cockatoo Island was seen as Sydney's most notorious 19th century prison. The prison opened in 1839, a year before convict transportation to New South Wales (Australia) ended.
Cockatoo Island had replaced Norfolk Island as the main site of ‘secondary punishment’ for convicts in the colony.
Norfolk Island had been known as a ‘hell-on-earth’, which resulted in Cockatoo Island being tarnished by association. Norfolk Island's prisoners were believed to be the ‘worst’ kind of criminals. Due to this, Cockatoo Island was seen as a relic of the convict-era that had passed.
This was far from the truth. Cockatoo Island prisoners were largely convicted of minor property crimes at lower courts. These prisoners may also have broken regulations that meant they lost their ‘ticket-of-leave’ (right to freedom in the colony).
Cockatoo Island was more diverse than is usually recognised. Alongside British and Irish men, there were Aboriginal Australians punished for frontier warfare, Chinese immigrants seeking their fortunes on the gold field, and Black and Asian sailors on shore leave.
Research funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) produced a dataset based on registers of prisoners at Cockatoo Island (Sydney) prisoners (1839-69), to show an alternative narrative. The £108.3k project received £86.6k funding from the ESRC, and ran from October 2018 - September 2019.
Research outputs have created a database of prisoners incarcerated at Cockatoo Island between 1847-69. This can be used to trace your criminal ancestor, or to research the history of punishment in post-convict era Australia.
Read more about these convict lives on the Cockatoo Convicts WordPress project site.
Cockatoo Island: the confines, comprising the scum and dregs of colonial society
– Empire (Sydney), 21 June 1861, p. 2
Trace your criminal ancestor
You can download the dataset of 2583 prisoners at Cockatoo Island between 1847-57 to trace your criminal ancestor, or to research the history of punishment in post-convict era Australia.
The dataset includes the following information:
- prisoners name and aliases
- ship and year of arrival in Australia
- their ‘status’ upon arrival in the prison (under original sentence of transportation, free by servitude, born in the colony, free migrant)
- place of origin
- physical appearance (eye- and hair colour, scars, tattoos)
- occupation
- age
- details of colonial conviction (place of trial, type of court, date of conviction, offence and sentence)
- Duration of imprisonment at Cockatoo Island prison (when and where they arrived and discharged from)
- under what conditions prisoners were discharged (ticket of leave, free pardon, transfer.
Data collection involved transcription (with some minor standardisation of spelling) from archival materials kept at the New South Wales State Archives (call numbers: 4/4540, 4/6501, 4/6509, 6571, 4/6572, 4/6573, 4/6574, 4/6575, X819).
Since historic record-keeping practices changed over time, not all variables are recorded consistently for all prisoners.
Our aim is to embed an interactive version of the Cockatoo Island Prisoners dataset on this project page, but in the meantime an Excel file can be downloaded below:
- Download the Cockatoo Island Prisoners dataset 1847-69 as a Microsoft Excel file (1.8MB).
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