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.
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.
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.