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Thousands of English, Scottish, Welsh and Irish convicts transported to Australia, as well as people resisting colonial invasion and forced into the convict system, will be brought back to life in a groundbreaking digital exhibition revealing a new understanding of the convicts’ contribution to the struggle for Australian democracy.
The Monash University‑led exhibition, titled UNSHACKLED: The True Convict Story, will be officially launched by Federal Assistant Minister, former Tasmanian Labor Leader and local MP Rebecca White at the Woolmers Estate, Longford on Friday 30 January. The UNESCO World Heritage-listed convict site will offer Tasmanians and interstate visitors an immersive encounter with the political prisoners, rebels and unfree workers who helped shape modern democratic rights.
UNSHACKLED reveals how Australia’s unfree convict workforce of 160,000 resisted the exploitation of their labour in their place of exile – forging early forms of solidarity, improving conditions, and ultimately contributing to the end of transportation. The exhibition also highlights more than 3,600 political prisoners transported for protest, democratic reform, media freedom, unionism and anti‑colonial revolution, many of whom had profound influence on democratic movements in Australia and abroad.
Associate Professor Tony Moore, project lead from Monash University’s School of Media, Film and Journalism, said political prisoners remain central to the exhibition’s story.
“Few Australians realise that from the earliest days of the Sydney penal colony their homeland was once the British Empire’s Guantanamo Bay, where about 3600 rebels, radicals and protesters were transported as political prisoners in the late 18th and 19th centuries,” Associate Professor Moore said.
“‘Death or Liberty!’ was the rallying cry of a stream of political exiles including liberals, democrats and republicans; English machine breakers, trade unionists and Chartists; radical journalists, preachers and intellectuals; and of course Irish, Canadian and even American revolutionaries opposed to imperial rule.”
UNSCHACKLED’s Professor Hamish Maxwell-Stewart said the exhibition will reveal how, from the earliest days of settlement, Australia’s unfree workforce fought back through inventive solidarity in the face of brutal coercion.
“Over 20 per cent of Australians have convict ancestry, and the figure is 70 per cent for Tasmanians,” Professor Maxwell-Stewart said. “Woolmers is one of 11 Australian convict sites placed on the UNESCO World Heritage register in 2010. This exhibition uses recently digitised UNESCO Memory of the World convict records to explore the importance of the contribution of convicts to the Australian economy and the many ways they resisted their masters and penal administrators. Transportation to Australia should have resulted in a coercive and repressive society. This ground-breaking exhibition describes why it did not.”
Exhibition co-creator Steve Thomas, Creative Director of Roar Film, said the exhibition will be a ground-breaking multimodal experience.
“Melding traditional museum presentation with engaging storytelling, the exhibition will bring to life the stories and characters with data-visualisation, sensitive and innovative technology, original music and soundscapes,” Mr Thomas said.
Unshackled is created by Roar Film and the Woolmers estate in partnership with University of New England and Monash University. It is generously sponsored by the Mineworkers Trust and Maurice Blackburn Lawyers, with Foundational funding from the NSW Teachers Federation, the Trade Union Education Foundation, Libraries Tasmania, and the Australian Manufacturing Workers Union.
Unshackled is the penultimate public event of Conviction Politics; the Convict Routes of Australian Democracy, a four-year ARC Linkage Project led by Monash University that has produced data visualisations mapping convict resistance and impact, an interactive online hub hosting 100 short documentaries and articles, a book Unfree Workers, and teaching resources for Australia’s classrooms.
Woolmers will serve as the exhibition’s Australian base, with a mobile pop up version of the exhibition traveling around Australian capital cities and regions, the UK and Ireland throughout 2026. Click here for more information about Conviction Politics, including the UNSHACKLED trailer.
ABOUT CONVICTION POLITICS
Conviction Politics: Investigating the Convict Routes of Australian Democracy, was funded by an ARC Linkage project grant of $757,205 over four years, with a further $310,000 cash funding and $1,094,251 in-kind contributed by industry partners, including screen production house Roar Film, the NSW Teachers Federation, The Union Education Foundation, Tasmanian Archive and Heritage Office, the Australian Manufacturing Workers Union, The Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery, the National Museum of Australia, Maurice Blackburn Lawyers and in the UK the Trade Union Congress, the People's History Museum and the National Records of Scotland.
The project’s university partners are Monash University, University of New England, the Australian Catholic University, Griffith University, University of NSW, University of Tasmania and internationally the University of South Wales and University College Dublin.
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