The European settlement of Australia from 1788 was accompanied by a prolonged dispossession of the indigenous people, who became British subjects by law. Regimes of punishment had an important role in this dispossession. The available information suggested that conventional modes of punishment were modified to accommodate indigenous offending. Public execution and corporal punishment of Aborigines continued after their exclusion as options for the settler population. In addition, imprisonment was shaped to the goal of managing a seemingly intractable indigenous population. However, the colonial government developed less violent punitive resources to manage the indigenous population in completing the process of disposition. Strategies of social control increasingly used in an attempt to address the distinctive challenges posed by a dispossessed indigenous population included incarceration within unique institutions, segregation from the settler population, and surveillance and regulation through an expanding bureaucracy. Notes and 33 references (Author abstract modified)