Poetry and Punishment: The Unacknowledged Legislators of Botany Bay

This paper explores the relationship between the poetic and the decidedly unpoetic forms of justice at large in the Australian convict colonies of New South Wales and Van Diemen’s Land in the first half of the nineteenth century. The argument is divided into three parts. The first draws on Robert Hughes’s The Fatal Shore (1986) to give the general context of the extreme violence of the penal system, and to suggest that the enduring success of Hughes’s account is due to its consistent use of poems and ballads as documentary sources. The second part shows how Hughes’s sweeping historical view is buttressed by the particular case of the Irish convict-poet Frank MacNamara (1811–1863). The third part develops a few of the reasons why we should look to the actual practice of poetry, rather than to theories of punishment, for the ‘social sympathies’ (Shelley, 2016, p. 653) needed to found a colony.