Norfolk Island, a tiny green speck upon the expanse of ocean that separates Australia and New Zealand, is now a place of somewhat improbable beauty. Ringed almost entirely by cliffs, the first European explorations dubbed it ‘only a place fit for angels and eagles to reside in’. Today the landscape is still dominated by the eponymous pine trees whose name belies their quintessentially Pacific appearance. They present an incongruous backdrop to the sound of imported blackbirds, the shops stocked with duty-free Royal Doulton and Crown Derby porcelain, and the Burne-Jones stained-glass windows of the mission church. If ever there were an edge of empire, this is it.

In 1825 British imperial reforms decreed that Norfolk Island become part of a system designed to render convict transportation, in the words of the secretary of state, ‘an Object of real Terror to all Classes of the Community’. A previous settlement on the island had been abandoned in 1814 as too remote and costly. Now this distance, 1700 kilometres east of the increasingly prosperous colony of New South Wales, would be put to new disciplinary use as part of a major transformation in penal governance. As the declared destination for reoffenders of the worst type, the outpost would be feared and despised as ‘Norfolk's fell Isle’ and, because all women would be banned, ‘the modern Gomorrah’. This dark history continues to figure prominently in the Gothic-inflected commentaries of tour buses and nighttime ghost walks. Convicts unlucky enough to end up on Norfolk Island, it is widely assumed, often chose death rather than endure its horrors. With suicide regarded as a crime against God, some would even cast lots to elect one of their number to the office of executioner. The man with the short straw would only await the hangman's noose before joining his murdered comrades in the afterlife.

Like much of what we know about transportation to Norfolk Island, this image of depravity and mass despair needs to be tempered with a more prosaic reality. Both the intentions of imperial policy and the lurid reputation of the island were undercut by the messy practices of actually running a penal system. From unlucky circumstance or bureaucratic bungling, a far wider variety of prisoner ended up there than the hardened criminals of legend.