‘Useful and worthy members of the colony’? : The life courses of the Point Puer boys who stayed in Tasmania (2022) by Alistair Scott is his PhD thesis examining the life course of some of those boys transported to Point Puer in Tasmania.

What Scott found was that the boys – some as young as 9 – experienced “punitive treatment” on Point Puer and when they were released, they were ill-prepared for life in the colony.

In part, Scott concludes:

“The treatment of the Point Puer boys challenges the perception that for most convicts,
transportation to Van Diemen’s Land was a relatively benign experience that did not
prevent them from integrating into colonial society.8 As I have shown, the convict lives of
most of the boys sent to Point Puer were dominated by long hours of forced labour
punctuated by regular physical punishment and periods of solitary confinement. Inevitably,
many struggled in their later lives on the island.”