Document ID: chunk:federal_register_of_legislation:F2016L01891:body:0:p154
Version: federal_register_of_legislation:F2016L01891
Segment Type: other
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Character Range: 440982–443938

Architect | CONTEXT | GML Heritage

11.6 Heritage Listing Citations
11.6.1 World Heritage List

Decision: 34 COM 8B.16

The World Heritage Committee,

1.
2.
3.

Having examined Documents WHC-10/34.COM/8B and WHC-10/34.COM/INF.8B1,
Welcoming the additional information provided by the State Party;

Inscribes the Australian Convict Sites, Australia, on the World Heritage List on the basis of criteria (iv)
and (vi);

Adopts the following Statement of Outstanding Universal Value:
Brief synthesis

The property consists of eleven complementary sites. It constitutes an outstanding and large-scale
example of the forced migration of convicts, who were condemned to transportation to distant colonies
of the British Empire; the same method was also used by other colonial states.

The sites illustrate the different types of convict settlement organized to serve the colonial
development project by means of buildings, ports, infrastructure, the extraction of resources, etc. They
illustrate the living conditions of the convicts, who were condemned to transportation far from their
homes, deprived of freedom, and subjected to forced labour.

This transportation and associated forced labour was implemented on a large scale, both for criminals
and for people convicted for relatively minor offences, as well as for expressing certain opinions or
being political opponents. The penalty of transportation to Australia also applied to women and
children from the age of nine. The convict stations are testimony to a legal form of punishment that
dominated in the 18th and 19th centuries in the large European colonial states, at the same time as
and after the abolition of slavery.

The property shows the various forms that the convict settlements took, closely reflecting the
discussions and beliefs about the punishment of crime in 18th and 19" century Europe, both in terms
of its exemplarity and the harshness of the punishment used as a deterrent, and of the aim of social
rehabilitation through labour and discipline. They influenced the emergence of a penal model in
Europe and America. Within the colonial system established in Australia, the convict settlements
simultaneously led to the Aboriginal population being forced back into the less fertile hinterland, and to
the creation of a significant source of population of European origin.

Criterion (iv): The Australian convict sites constitute an outstanding example of the way in which
conventional forced labour and national prison systems were transformed, in major European nations
in the 18th and 19th centuries, into a system of deportation and forced labour forming part of the
British Empire's vast colonial project. They illustrate the variety of the creation of penal colonies to
serve the many material needs created by the development of a new territory. They bear witness to a
penitentiary system which had many objectives, ranging from severe punishment used as a deterrent
to forced