This was also the heyday of Perth’s favourite bushranger, Joseph Bolitho Johns, or ‘Moondyne Joe’, the subject of J.B O’Reilly’s novel, and a man celebrated not for his crimes of horse-stealing and petty larceny, but rather for his feat of escaping from Fremantle Prison on numerous occasions, and once from a custom built cell ordered by Governor Hampton. Moondyne Joe later turned his hand to carpentry and gold prospecting, accompanied by his wife, Louisa Hearn, who like many women of the period were brought out on ‘bride ships’ to provide domestic workers for the colony, and who like many ended up in Fremantle Prison charged with drunkenness and vagrancy, victims of poverty and unemployment.

Due to the shortage of workers and new emigrants to the colony, young male inmates from the Parkhurst Reformatory on the Isle of Wight were sent to Perth in 1842, and when that proved insufficient, convict transportation to the colony began in earnest in 1849. The agreement was that those transported would consist of men incarcerated for minor crimes, such as forgery, but many were later discovered to have been charged for serious violent crime – evidence of mother Britain emptying her prisons. A new convict establishment was built in Fremantle, described by Fenian prisoner J.B. O’Reilly, who later escaped and wrote the first novel set in the colony, Moondyne, as ‘a vast stone prison…spread out like a gigantic starfish.’ The convicts were sent to work for local farmers, and embarked upon major infrastructure projects, such as the building of roads throughout the colony, where due to the sandy soils, ‘Hampton’s cheeses’ or transverse cuts of jarrah were used. The highly unpopular Governor Hampton in particular used convict labour to build some of Perth’s most celebrated buildings, such as the Pensioner Barracks, the Perth Town Hall, and the Treasury Buildings, all designed by Richard Roach Jewell (the latter buildings employing Jewell’s ‘signature’ use of Flemish bonded brickwork, made of clay locally sourced in East Perth and fired at different temperatures to produce different colours.)

The convict period in Perth ultimately endured for a period of some twenty years, as the last Australian colony to accept convicts. As a measure of the social problems of the time it’s worth quoting historian Geoffrey Bolton’s statement that in one year ‘it was estimated that one quarter of the male population of Fremantle had been run in for drunkenness, and there was a good deal of petty theft and that was because people were pretty hard up.’ It was also said that during this period the crime rate in Perth was seven times greater than in Adelaide.