Australian Convict Sites
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How it came to be
Over 80 years, from 1787 to 1868, around 166,000 men, women and children were sent to Australia as convicts. Women and children from the age of nine could be sentenced to transportation.
Hyde Park Barracks in Sydney, designed by the architect Francis Greenway, housed 600 male convicts. The Cascades Female Factory in Tasmania opened in 1828, and in its first decade 208 of the 794 children born or held there died. Port Arthur, a penal settlement of the 1830s, keeps about 30 convict-built structures.
About 85% of convicts in Australia spent part of their sentence in the assignment system. Fremantle Prison, built in the 1850s from local limestone, could hold up to 1,000 prisoners. The eleven sites were inscribed in 2010.
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