Longlisted for the 2025 Stella Prize
Santilla Chingaipe – Black Convicts
Nonfiction · Scribner Australia, an imprint of Simon & Schuster Australia
About the Book
On the First Fleet of 1788, at least 15 convicts were of African descent. By 1840 the number had risen to almost 500. Among them were David Stuurman, a revered South African chief transported for anti-colonial insurrection; John Caesar, who became Australia’s first bushranger; Billy Blue, the stylishly dressed ferryman who gave his name to Sydney’s Blues Point; and William Cuffay, a prominent London Chartist who led the development of Australia’s labour movement. Two of the youngest were cousins from Mauritius—girls aged just 9 and 12—sentenced over a failed attempt to poison their mistress.
But although some of these lives were documented and their likenesses hang in places like the National Portrait Gallery, even their descendants are often unaware of their existence.
By uncovering lives whitewashed out of our history, in stories spanning Africa, the Americas and Europe, Black Convicts also traces Australia’s hidden links to slavery, which both powered the British Empire and inspired the convict system itself. Situating European settlement in its global context, Chingaipe shows that the injustice of dispossession was driven by the engine of labour exploitation. Black Convicts will change the way we think about who we are.
Black Convicts represents a substantial intervention in our understanding of the convict archive and offers a new understanding of Australia’s participation in slavery since colonisation.
– 2025 Stella Prize Judges
About the Author
Santilla Chingaipe
Santilla Chingaipe is a filmmaker, historian and author, whose work explores settler colonialism, slavery, and postcolonial migration in Australia. Chingaipe’s critically acclaimed and award-winning documentary Our African Roots is streaming on SBS On Demand; Black Convicts builds on the research for that, taking it further. The recipient of several awards, she was also recognised at the United Nations as one of the most influential people of African descent in the world in 2019. She is a regular contributor to The Saturday Paper, and served as a member of the Federal Government’s Advisory
Further Reading
Reviews
“Chingaipe’s commitment to presenting a balanced view is commendable; she confronts uncomfortable truths about the harsh realities faced by Black convicts and the oppressive colonial power structures without shying away from their complexities.” Dorcas Maphakela, Arts Hub
“With a bowerbird eye Chingaipe looks again at our seemingly well-known, White-dominated past to show Black people as active and indeed integral participants across the colonial period.” Jane Lydon, The Conversation
Links
Listen to Santilla Chingaipe on ABC’s Radio National, The Story of Australia’s Black convicts
Listen to an episode of The Monthly podcast, Santilla Chingaipe is Rewriting History
Judges’ Report
Santilla Chingaipe’s Black Convicts: How Slavery Shaped Australia is that rarest of works – a book that changes how the reader understands history as they read. Chingaipe reinterrogates the colonial archives and identifies close to 500 people of African descent who were transported from across the empire to Australia as convicts. As far as the archive allows, she follows their experiences on this continent and demonstrates the impact they had on the colony. Chingaipe then goes further and places the transportation of convicts in the context of a much broader arc of history – European imperialism, the transatlantic slave trade, and the exploitation of labour in the pursuit of profit. She specifically demonstrates the links between the convict system and plantation slavery, including through systems of punishment, degradation and surveillance. The work has implications for the way the United Kingdom and the United States understand their own histories of racism, slavery and transportation. Black Convicts represents a substantial intervention in our understanding of the convict archive and offers a new understanding of Australia’s participation in slavery since colonisation.
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