Using mobility as both subject and lens, Catharine Coleborne’s Vagrant Lives in Colonial Australasia: Regulating Mobility, 1840–1910 examines the laws governing unwanted movement in the colonies of Eastern Australasia—encompassing Aotearoa New Zealand, New South Wales, Van Diemen’s Land (later Tasmania), and Victoria—in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In telling this history, Coleborne weaves together a vast array of source material. Her nuanced reading reveals a richly contextualized account of those who would be cast as vagrants and vagabonds. The intercolonial frame, emphasis on mobility, and sensitivity to the politics of vagrancy and vulnerability make this text a valuable addition to the growing body of research on vagrancy and vagrants worldwide.
Through seven short chapters—expertly situated in the wider academic literature—Coleborne takes us through the application of vagrancy laws in these colonies and identifies whom the laws targeted, how those targeted were policed, how the laws changed over time, and, perhaps most importantly, how the laws were experienced. Throughout, we see the local adaptations made, attaching the tentacles of the British Empire’s legal framework to new surroundings. These adaptations, in particular laws against consorting with criminals or Indigenous peoples, illustrate the mental gymnastics undertaken by lawmakers operating in places shaped by Indigenous and, in two of the colonies examined here, convict populations.
In the “everyday lives of vagrants” (the title of chapter 4), Coleborne paints micro-histories that enable us to peer into the lives of those whose vulnerabilities produced in others a moral panic, at least as much as the records allow. The destitute, diseased, or drunk—alongside those whose ethnicities or behavior offended boundaries of race, creed, or kin—risked arrest and imprisonment on little more than the whim or the word of the local copper and his complicit magistracy.
Coleborne’s work reminds us of the value of studying vagrancy laws. Broad in scope and application and lacking concise definition and direction, vagrancy laws, whose use largely reversed the onus of proof from prosecutor to defendant, provide historians and their readers with insights into questions of power, fear, conformism, tolerance, and exclusion in the communities in which they were used. One example is the way these laws were used to police sexual relations—and particularly those involving selling sex, gay sex, and interracial sex—in the colonies.
While the discretionary nature of vagrancy laws permitted the policing of hegemonic conceptions of respectability, the poor were most vulnerable to arrest. The visibility of those whose lives were policed in public spaces and mocked in public fora provides a fascinating by-product of the capacity to read into vagrant bodies themselves. The monitoring of a cohort of people on the move meant that those who were mobile and deemed a risk were frequently described in exquisite—if offensive—detail. Police gazettes and photographs sent from town to town and sometimes across borders listed the bodily features of people police should target. The description of Rosa Lake provides one instance: “fresh complexion; black hair; dark brown eyes; small nose and mouth; medium chin; long forehead; wicked appearance” (54). As discussed in the book, these descriptions offer more than simple fascination; they also tell us about experiences and interpretations of disfigurement, disability, poverty, culture, race, medical treatment, and morality.
Coleborne’s study bookends two significant periods in the colonies: the soon-to-be-forged self-government and the end of convict transportation, on one side, and the post-federation period separating Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand, the professionalization of policing, and the introduction of the Old Age Pension, on the other. While vagrancy laws would continue to play a significant role in policing unwanted behavior in the twentieth century, the periodization chosen here is useful and allows us to see shifts in the “category of ‘the vagrant’” (128) and, thereby, the politics of the state and the policing of the people.
In her epilogue to “the precarious present,” Coleborne notes that the book was “written to bring humanity to the lives and stories of ‘vagrants’ who appear in the historical record” (130). She has amply and admirably succeeded in this task. In addition to drawing together extant secondary material and mining several significant data sets, Vagrant Lives in Colonial Australasia incorporates a wide arc of source material, from contemporaneous newspapers to legal and literary texts. Scholars interested in vagrancy and mobility studies, in vulnerable populations, and in how class, gender, and ethnicity shape people’s lived experiences will benefit enormously from Coleborne’s annotated guide to data and digital sources and the extensive endnotes. While the book is relatively short, its content assures its place as a significant and important contribution to the history of vagrancy and mobility, and it deserves a wide readership.
