Racialising settler colonialism: Jan E. M. Richardson, ‘”Other” black peoples: rethinking race and settler colonialism in Australia’s northern tropic’, Settler Colonial Studies, 2025 | settler colonial studies blog

Racialising settler colonialism: Jan E. M. Richardson, ‘”Other” black peoples: rethinking race and settler colonialism in Australia’s northern tropic’, Settler Colonial Studies, 2025

08Mar25

Abstract: The Moreton Bay penal station was established in 1824 in a remote area of northern New South Wales – now part of Queensland – to punish convicts for offences committed in the colony. To discourage these ‘repeat offenders’, prisoners performed hard labour in irons and were regularly flogged under an unforgiving tropical sun. Among the station’s inmates were twelve men of African and South Asian ethnicity, including George Brown of Ceylon and Sheik Brom of India. Both South Asians escaped from Moreton Bay and lived with the district’s First Peoples, gaining knowledge of their languages, customs and laws. Later, following closure of the penal station in 1839, another thirty convicts of African ethnicity were sent to Moreton Bay as government workers, including Mauritians, Afro-Caribbeans, and Khoisan men from the Cape Colony. Their experiences varied widely from becoming mediators and interpreters for First Peoples to serving in the Border Police where they enforced ‘law and order’ on a contested frontier. Using detailed archival research to reconstruct the life stories of these convicts illuminates the complex spaces they occupied, complicating narratives of ‘white’ settlement and conflict with First Peoples in Queensland.

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