Vagrant Lives in Colonial Australasia - Empire's Other Histories by Catharine Coleborne Paperback

About the Book

A study of displaced peoples prosecuted for vagrancy in the colonies of Australia and New Zealand which investigates the transcolonial problem of mobility.

Book Synopsis

Winner of the Australian and New Zealand Law and History Society Annual Prize in Legal History 2025 (Best Monograph)

Investigating the history of vagrants in colonial Australia and New Zealand, this book provides insights into the histories and identities of marginalised peoples in the British Pacific Empire. Showing how their experiences were produced, shaped and transformed through laws and institutions, it reveals how the most vulnerable people in colonial society were regulated, marginalised and criminalised in the imperial world.

Studying the language of vagrancy prosecution, narratives of mobility and welfare, vagrant families, gender and mobility and the political, social and cultural interpretations of vagrancy, this book sets out a conceptual framework of mobility as a field of inquiry for legal and historical studies. Defining 'mobility' as population movement and the occupation of new social and physical space, it offers an entry point to the related histories of penal colonies and new 'settler' societies. It provides insights into shared histories of vagrancy across New South Wales, Victoria, Tasmania and New Zealand, and explores how different jurisdictions regulated mobility within the temporal and geographical space of the British Pacific Empire.

Review Quotes

"Catharine Coleborne's excellent new book Vagrant Lives in Colonial Australasia: Regulating Mobility, 1840-1910 will appeal to a wide readership; her writing segues between academic theory and personal narratives seamlessly." --Journal of Australian, Canadian, and Aotearoa New Zealand Studies

"This book offers a model of interdisciplinary inquiry." --History Australia

"This is an engagingly written book, which is thoughtful in its reflections and insightful in its conclusions." --Australian Historical Studies

"A deeply researched, commanding account of an important but neglected area of history. Coleborne applies her magisterial expertise in law, society and mental health to analyse the colonial dispossessed and disenfranchised. Sensitive storytelling places humanity at the forefront. An essential contribution to the study of mobility in precarious times." --Katie Pickles, Professor of History, University of Canterbury, New Zealand

About the Author

Catharine Coleborne is Professor of History at the University of Newcastle, Australia, where she is also the Head of School of Humanities and Social Science. Her research interests include historical understandings of mobility, mental illness, institutions, medicine, law and health in colonial Australia and New Zealand.