This paper – part of a wider study of military convicts in Australia – examines the experiences of about 480 military convicts transported to Western Australia from 1853 to 1868.  That colony’s military convicts differed from its other transportees in that 77 per cent were convicted outside of Britain and Ireland.  While half came from Canada or India, others travelled to Britain from as far away as the West Indies, Crimea and New Zealand before re-embarking for Western Australia.  Their sentences ranged from four years to life.  The extensive period spent journeying before their arrival as convicts sometimes left little of their sentences to be served as much-wanted labourers in the struggling colony.  Yet historians have overlooked this difference, and rather categorised their place of trial as ‘overseas’ or ‘elsewhere’ thereby obscuring the scale of travel of these truly imperial men.  An examination of military convicts in Western Australia, as well as providing a local small-scale perspective, provides a snapshot of some key developments in the British Empire during this era. It enriches our understanding of both the final phase of convict transportation to Australia and the wider role of soldiers and sailors as convicts of the empire.