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Black Convicts: How Slavery Shaped Australia

Monday 19th October 2026

Filmmaker, historian and author Santilla Chingaipe reveals the extraordinary stories of the Black men, women and children transported to Australia by British colonial authorities.

 

When the First Fleet arrived in Australia in 1788, it carried British convicts alongside men, women and children of African descent. By 1840, hundreds of Black convicts had been transported across the British Empire to Australia, yet their lives have been largely erased from the history many people are taught.

In her groundbreaking debut non-fiction book, Black Convicts: How Slavery Shaped Australia, Zambian-born Santilla Chingaipe uncovers the stories of people of African descent living within Australia’s colonial penal system.

Drawing on eight years of research, Chingaipe traces the lives of hundreds of people transported to Australian penal colonies during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Her work reveals powerful connections between Britain, the Caribbean, Africa, slavery, colonial punishment and the development of modern Australia.

Among the people featured are David Stuurman, a South African chief exiled for resisting colonial rule; John Caesar, regarded as Australia’s first bushranger; Billy Blue, the ferryman whose name survives in Sydney’s Blues Point; and William Cuffay, a leading Chartist whose influence extended into Australia’s labour movement.

Black Convicts was shortlisted for the Stella Prize and longlisted for the Cundill History Prize.

Before becoming an author and historian, Santilla Chingaipe worked as a journalist with SBS World News. She spent almost a decade reporting across Africa and covering Australia’s African diasporic communities. In 2019, she was recognised at the United Nations as one of the world’s most influential people of African descent under the age of 40.

The event will include an audience question-and-answer session, followed by an opportunity to purchase signed copies of Black Convicts.

Presented by Smithdown Litfest and the Research Institute for Literature and Cultural History at Liverpool John Moores University.

The event is held in memory of Ebroje Azanuwha, who was an LJMU MA Writing student from 2017 to 2019.

For enquiries, contact amira@jacarandabooks.co.uk.

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