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.
Transported to Van Diemen’s Land aged 11, Ellen Miles went on to riot in Launceston’s Female Factory, seek fortune in gold-rush Victoria and live to nearly 90.
John Skinner Prout’s 1849 painting of the Cascades Female Factory in Hobart, Van Dieman’s Land, where Alexandrina bore an illegitimate child.
Wikimedia Commons
Deported to Australia as a convict at the age of 18, Alexandrina Askew reinvented herself as a woman of means, with a mysterious habit of misplacing her purse.