Contemporary observers often commented on the way convictism was another name for slavery. The Tasmanian Aboriginal people understood the social distinction perhaps better than the slaves themselves: they liked to point out that even defeated in war they remained a free people and of a status above that of the convicts, whom they looked down upon as the unfree. That manumission was the likely but not necessary end of a Van Diemonian convict’s sentence did not mean it was any less a slave system than that of Rome. That a freed slave might rise did not mean the society was any less unfree.
