The timeline below offers excerpts about crime written by nineteenth and twentieth-century contemporaries. Some of the writers are visitors to Australia who wrote about crime as part of travel guides, or treatises on colonial social conditions, after visiting local slums, prisons or other institutions for the poor or criminal. Other authors are local residents whose work as police, lawyers or prison officers brought them into contact with criminals. Some accounts are by criminals themselves. Taken together, they paint a colourful and complex picture of understandings and anxieties about criminal offending between the nineteenth and twenty-first century.
Learning Activity
In reading through the quotations about crime and criminality from contemporary commentators across time, reflect upon the following questions:
- What are the different concerns expressed about crime in different periods?
- Did particular historical events give rise to specific anxieties or types of crime?
- What methods for dealing with crime are suggested?
- Based on these sources, what are the different factors that you understand to have contributed to criminality historically?
- Do any of the authors express contradictory viewpoints to each other?
- Is there evidence of understandings of crime changing across time?
- How might the authors’ backgrounds or the context in which they were writing have influenced the types of views that they express?
- What are the similarities and differences you observe to the ways in which crime is discussed today?
- Were there perhaps other relevant factors that contributed to crime that have not been raised in these accounts?
- How might you find evidence about such other influences and the effect they had?
Further Resources
Many of these historical accounts are freely available in digital formats through the National Library of Australia, if you wish to read them in full. 