During the first half of the nineteenth century, one of the uses Britain made of its Australian penal colonies was as a repository for incorrigible indigenes from its various colonies. Included amongst this largely forgotten cohort were several dozen Aboriginal men transported from New South Wales. Sent to such far-flung places as Van Diemen's Land and Norfolk Island, Aboriginal captives were incorporated into the system and worked as convicts. Factors that set them apart from other convicts include their different pathways into captivity, their different understandings of and responses to imprisonment, and the different rationale informing the punishment meted out to them by the colonial authorities.