Australian Convict Sites
— — the colony Britain sent across the sea.
Not only on a wall.
“Eleven places where the British Empire put its convicts to work. Hyde Park Barracks in Sydney. Port Arthur on the Tasman Peninsula. The Cascades Female Factory under Mount Wellington. Fremantle Prison's limestone wall. Kingston on Norfolk Island, the hardest of them. The sandstone is the same warm yellow at all of them, and the sea is never far. from the studio
Australian Convict Sites, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
The Australian Convict Sites are a serial UNESCO World Heritage property of eleven separate places, inscribed in 2010, that together represent the largest forced migration of convicts in modern history. Between 1787 and 1868 the British government transported roughly 166,000 men, women, and children to Australia. The sites are spread across four jurisdictions: New South Wales, Tasmania, Western Australia, and the external territory of Norfolk Island. They include penal stations, female factories, a probation station, and the administrative quarters of the convict system.
Most of the sites are built in the warm yellow Sydney and Tasmanian sandstone the convicts themselves quarried. Hyde Park Barracks in Sydney, designed by emancipated convict Francis Greenway and opened in 1819, is the only surviving large-scale convict barracks. Port Arthur on the Tasman Peninsula operated from 1830 to 1877 and held more than 12,000 men over its lifetime. Fremantle Prison, completed in 1859 by convict labour using local limestone, was Western Australia's last working maximum-security gaol; it closed in 1991.
Each of the eleven sites is independently managed and ticketed. Port Arthur, on the Tasman Peninsula about ninety minutes east of Hobart, is the largest tourable site and includes night-time Lantern-Lit Ghost Tours. Hyde Park Barracks at Macquarie Street in central Sydney runs as a self-guided audio museum. Kingston and Arthur's Vale on Norfolk Island, the most remote site, is reached by a two-hour flight from Sydney or Brisbane. Cascades Female Factory in Hobart and Old Government House at Parramatta complete the most-visited core of the serial property.