Black Convicts (Santilla Chingaipe, Scribner)

In recent years, historians have increasingly shown that the past, especially in the West, was more multicultural than the monoculture so often portrayed. In Australia, where colonial history has consistently been presented as white, Santilla Chingaipe’s Black Convicts: How Slavery Shaped Australia seeks to shine a light on the overlooked stories of Australia’s Black convicts. Driven by her experiences as a Black migrant woman of African descent in Australia, Chingaipe begins with a museum exhibition’s casual reference to ‘African, American and French convicts’ and goes on to create an enthralling exploration of this shadow history of our colonial past. Much of the book’s impact comes from the surprising yet obvious nature of the revelations. Given the British Empire’s global reach and ties to the slave trade, the existence of Black convicts should not be shocking, yet this book is full of eye-opening surprises. Chingaipe looks at individual stories, including First Fleet convict John Moseley, who was enslaved in Virginia and ended up in New South Wales, alongside the broader factors involved—including the role of the sugar trade and the political nature of many of the convicts’ crimes. The past the book reveals is still with us in many ways, for example, in how the proceeds of slavery helped build the historic Como House in Toorak, Melbourne. This thought-provoking look at the history of Australia through a lens of race, capital and slavery will interest history buffs and casual readers alike.

Books+Publishing reviewer: Anthony Morris is a freelance reviewer, novelist, and podcaster. Books+Publishing is Australia’s number-one source of pre-publication book reviews.

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