Readings Best Books of 2024, Non-Fiction

The story of Australia’s Black convicts has been all but erased from our history. In recovering their lives, Santilla Chingaipe offers a fresh understanding of this fatal shore, showing how empire, slavery, race and memory have shaped our nation.

'The defining read of the decade. This is a work of global significance.' Meanjin

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.