Along with British and Irish convicts, 627 free men, women and children were transported to the 19th-century penal colonies of Van Diemen’s Land. Their stories, mostly forgotten, are moving.
Long regarded as guardians of morality, women who swore were often policed and punished. But whether protesting or parodying, they have used bad language in creative ways.
We may think tattooing is a modern phenomenon, but the reasons for its popularity are not dissimilar to those seen in the prisons and convict ships of the Victorian era.
Wooredy and his second wife Truganini set off into the Tasmanian wilderness with settler George Robinson in 1830, on a “conciliatory” mission to find other original Tasmanians. Their stories bear witness to a psychological and cultural transition without parallel in modern colonialism.
Early colonial New Zealand had no room for reprobates and was at war with Maori resisters. So between 1843 and 1853, it shipped the worst offenders across the Tasman Sea.