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John Ritchie

John Ritchie wrote Punishment and Profit and edited The Evidence to the Bigge Reports which deals with aspects of the convict system.

John Ritchie reviews 'Convict Society and its enemies' by J.B. Hirst

September 1983, no. 54 08 August 2022
In a major piece of historical revisionism, Dr John Hirst has scrutinised the so-called evils of convict society in New South Wales between 1788 and 1840. Together with a mythology that has stemmed from it. He sees the image of Botany Bay as a place of depravity, where ‘vice is virtue, virtue vice’, as having been created by the opponents of transportation, the late eighteenth-century prison r ... (read more)