The Colonial Ambiguities of Military Labour on the Penal Frontier: The Newcastle Penal Station 1804–24

This article examines ordinary soldiers garrisoned at the Penal Station of Newcastle, not merely as the discontented imperial captives of Linda Colley’s famous title, but as discontented imperial labour. At Newcastle they were deliberately reconstituted as such to manage periodic shortages in convict labour. Although military labour is one of the largest occupational groupings in the nineteenth century, it is also one of the most overlooked in the study of labour history. Colonial soldiers are traditionally excluded from the language of labour and its associated conflicts. They are, after all, deployed, but rarely, we assume, employed. This analysis pivots around the material history of a set of humble cedar boxes, intricately connected to the settlement’s function in the provision of valuable natural resources. The soldiers’ boxes also beg interesting questions about the political and subterranean economies of the settlement and the submerged working-class patterns of exchange and negotiation. Such questions reveal a defining conflict over the control of colonial labour, land and resources.