In this eventful period the colony of New South Wales is already far advanced.
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.
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.
