Australia has a very big history of incarceration. What does that mean to us? What does it mean that we came over to a country that's not necessarily ours and filled it with white prisoners?
The way people are treated in them [prisons] is very similar to gulags.
In this eventful period the colony of New South Wales is already far advanced.
My ancestors came from Co Roscommon, transported to Van Diemen's Land for stealing food.
At the end of my trial, I was rather hoping the judge would send me to Australia for the rest of my life.
Here was a place where men and life and death had reached the lowest form of degradation. How could any reward in national progress even faintly justify the establishment and operation of such a place?
My own view is that this planet is used as a penal colony, lunatic asylum and dumping ground by a superior civilisation, to get rid of the undesirable and unfit. I can't prove it, but you can't disprove it either.
Who knows, maybe this whole planet is an asylum, a penal realm. A place for hard cases.
