In Part Two, the shaping of gendered, sexual and racial identities is further explored. As in Part One, these identities are examined in the context of punishment and resistance. But in this section we also consider how women's incarceration made all aspects of family life problematic, especially motherhood, marriage, and the treatment of children.

The theme of motherhood begins this section, with particular reference to the contradictory place of convict maternity in colonial society. While on the one hand colonial authorities wished to feminise convict women and populate the state, on the other, they denied them the essence of nineteenth-century femininity: maternity. The practice of removing children from their convict mothers recalls the treatment of Aboriginal mothers. 'Motherhood' pointed to concerns about the civilised and uncivilised; the pure and the polluted.

These themes are further explored in Chapter Six, in an analysis of the male and female orphan schools. Convict orphans were both punished and protected; they were the source of social and political anxiety. Racial purity and virility―the cornerstones of British imperialism―defined understandings of the 'orphan', largely as a reaction to fear of contamination from Aboriginal children. Both sanitary and racial cleanliness defined British identity.

Finally, the meanings attached to understandings of motherhood, fatherhood, and in the identities of being free or bound come into focus in the final chapter. The motifs of the abandoning, wandering and absent mother and the flight of the father are examined for cultural meaning.