1
Penal Station Objectives
The system of transportation of convicts to Australia is renowned in history for it
brutal treatment of the convicts1, although recent research making comparisons of records
available have come to question this2. A cluster of penal colonies were created along the coast
of New South Wales and Van Diemans’s Land, and it is these colonies as a whole which will
be the focus of this paper, with regard to the objectives of establishing a penal station, and
whether these objectives were met.
The different penal stations that were established were intended to be places of secondary
punishment to service convicts who received sentences for offences c