AssetID: 55000336
Headline: RAW VIDEO: AI brings 'convicts' transported to Australia back to life
Caption: Artificial intelligence has been used to reconstruct the faces of the men and women transported to Australia in the 19th century. Between 1788 and 1868, around 162,000 convicts were shipped from Britain and Ireland to penal colonies, many to Van Diemen’s Land - present-day Tasmania. Today, it is estimated that one in five Australians believe they are descended from those transported. In Tasmania, the figure rises to around one in two. For generations, the faces of those people have been invisible. Now, historians working with computer scientists have used digitised records and AI-generated portraits to restore something closer to a human presence. The project is led by Professor Hamish Maxwell-Stewart of the University of New England. With the help of volunteers, he has overseen the transcription and digitisation of thousands of convict records, building a vast database that documents not just crimes and punishments but the minute details of lives. The archives list height, build, hair and eye colour, punishments, marriages, addresses, even the relationships between the witnesses at weddings - often neighbours whose names reappear in Hobart’s 19th-century property valuation rolls. AI has been used to bring these fragments together into portraits. At the Unshackled Convict Memorial at Hobart Penitentiary, visitors can encounter avatars of the transported, generated by combining the facial features of contemporary photographs of prisoners with descriptive details from the records. Some reconstructions were created by layering aspects of 25 different prisoner photographs with similar physical traits. In other cases, portraits were refined by using surviving information about hair colour or complexion. Though the AI is only as reliable as the information provided, the results are striking. Among the figures whose likenesses have been reimagined is William Smith O’Brien, Irish nationalist and leader of the Young Ireland movement. Convicted of rebellion, he was transported to Van Diemen’s Land in 1849. Five years later he was granted a conditional pardon, and in 1856 a full one. He returned to Europe as a celebrated symbol of resistance. Also present is Eliza Davis, convicted in England for theft and transported to Tasmania. Her life, lived under the restrictions placed on women convicts, illustrates the endurance and resilience of those who managed to build families and futures despite oppression. Jane Bonney was another transported for theft, her repeated punishments within the female factory system captured in the official records. So too Mary Anne Ashford, a London domestic servant convicted of theft in the early 19th century. Her memoirs, one of the very few first-hand accounts by a female convict, describe the reality of service, survival and punishment in the colonies. Others were transported not for theft but for politics. Linus Miller, an American involved in the Canadian Rebellion of 1837, was sent to Van Diemen’s Land. His later memoir condemned British injustice and offered some of the most vivid depictions of convict life. George Loveless, a Methodist preacher, was among the six Tolpuddle Martyrs transported in 1834 for forming a trade union. His plight sparked an extraordinary wave of protest in Britain. After a pardon, he returned to England and became a symbol of the labour movement. Then there are the darker figures. Alexander Pearce, transported for theft, twice escaped custody. During one desperate trek through Tasmania’s wilderness, he resorted to cannibalism. Executed in 1824, he remains one of the most notorious convicts in Australian history. By contrast, James Porter achieved one of the most audacious convict escapes. In 1834, he and fellow prisoners seized the brig Frederick and sailed it away from Van Diemen’s Land. Recaptured in Chile, he later published memoirs that recounted both his defiance and the dream of freedom across the Pacific. Transportation, historians note, served several purposes: to ease overcrowded British prisons, to save the state the cost of incarceration, and to provide cheap labour in the colonies. Yet the legacy of those shipped to Australia goes well beyond punishment. The Unshackled exhibition draws out those wider stories – linking convicts, radicals and First Nations resistors, and exploring how their struggles shaped the growth of Australian democracy. Blending artefacts, digital storytelling, school resources and an interactive web-app, it has been described as both immersive and unsettling.
Keywords: feature,photo,video,convicts,australia,ancestry,ai,artificial intelligence
PersonInImage: