Book launch

Urchin Convicts | Alistair Scott

In the early nineteenth century, amidst public anxiety about the threat to public order and respectability posed by juvenile offenders, over two thousand boys who had been eking out a living on the streets of Britain’s towns and cities were transported to the Point Puer Boys Establishment in Van Diemen’s Land. There they were to be turned into productive colonial workers.

At Point Puer, despite the rhetoric of reform, most of the boys endured unrelenting punishment and maltreatment. For some, transportation to Point Puer became a death sentence, with one in thirty dying there.

Those who survived Point Puer were released into the colony semi-skilled at best, to be confronted by an unwelcoming society anxious to put its convict origins behind it. Some of the boys established themselves in the colony but most inevitably struggled in their later lives, reoffending – often with violence – and remaining on the fringes of respectable colonial society. Ongoing trauma and alienation were common threads in their lives, and some were hanged for their crimes in the colony.

This is their story.

Alistair Scott was born and raised in northern Lutruwita/Tasmania. A former journalist, ministerial adviser and state servant, Alistair is a past general manager of natural and cultural heritage with the Tasmanian Government. In 2022, he gained a PhD at the University of Tasmania after completing a thesis on the life courses of the male juvenile convicts held at the Point Puer Boys Establishment near Port Arthur between 1834 and 1849. Alistair is currently a director of National Trust Australia.

Alistair will be in conversation with renowned historian and delightful conversationalist Prof Hamish Maxwell-Stuart. Join them at the Afterword Cafe.