ABSTRACT
It may appear unorthodox to discuss transported British convicts in terms of a migrant group in a volume such as this. It is, however, this contextual location that has recently produced the most valuable understandings of transportation to the penal colonies. Since 1988 Australian convict historiography has begun seriously to address the context of other forced migrations, looking to the material on New World slavery, and penal migrations to Mauritius, the Andaman Islands, and French Guyana. This intellectual approach was further developed by Ian Duffield and James Bradley, editors of Representing Convicts, first published in 1997; a work that examined transportation to Australia, but was explicitly aware of its broader comparative context.1 Serious scholars of convict history can no longer deny global comparisons, nor indeed fail to recognise the varying forms of unfree migrant labour that followed the cessation of convict transportation to Australia, including indentured Chinese, Melanesian, Aboriginal and European labourers, as part of a greater comparative framework.2 This paper examines food as part of the convict experience, and while within the confines of this discussion it is not possible to explore such comparisons in a sustained way, the roles of food outlined here would find parallels in other unfree migrant labour groups.
