Joseph Childs (1787–1870) was a British military officer who served as commandant of Norfolk Island, the remote penal settlement in the South Pacific that Britain used to hold its most intractable convicts. He took command after the dismissal of his predecessor, Alexander Maconochie, whose experimental reforms had alarmed colonial authorities. Childs’s tenure at Norfolk Island left a physical mark that remains visible: the convicts executed during the settlement’s second period were buried in an old sawpit on the eastern side of Kingston Cemetery, in the area now called Murderers’ Mound.
Key facts
- Born: 1787
- Died: 1870
- Occupation: military personnel
Military career and appointment
Childs was born in 1787 and pursued a career as a military officer. His appointment to Norfolk Island placed him at the head of one of the British Empire’s harshest penal stations, a post that required enforcing discipline over a population of transported convicts deemed too dangerous or refractory for mainland Australian settlements.
He succeeded Alexander Maconochie, a Scottish naval officer who had introduced what became known as a mark system, under which convicts could earn credits to reduce the length of their own sentences. British colonial authorities regarded those reforms as dangerously lenient, and Maconochie was removed from the post. Childs stepped into a situation already shaped by that controversy.
Norfolk Island and Kingston Cemetery
The second settlement on Norfolk Island ran from 1825 to 1855, and Childs’s commandancy fell within that period. Executions carried out during the settlement produced a burial problem: the condemned were not interred in the main consecrated ground but in an old sawpit on the eastern side of Kingston Cemetery. That area is now known as Murderers’ Mound, a name that preserves the record of those burials to the present day.
Later life
Childs lived until 1870, outlasting the second settlement on Norfolk Island, which closed in 1855. Beyond his dates of birth and death and his role as commandant, the verified record of his life after Norfolk Island is sparse.
Did you know
- Childs replaced Alexander Maconochie, a Scottish naval officer who in 1833 became the first Professor of Geography at the University of London. Maconochie had introduced a mark system at Norfolk Island that allowed convicts to shorten their own sentences, a scheme that made him deeply unpopular with British colonial authorities and led to his removal. (scottish-places.info)
Data sources
Data updated: 2026-10-30