MEET THE AUTHOR

Rosemary Collins talks to historian and writer LUCY WILLIAMS about her third book

What inspired you to write this book?

It came off the back of working on a four-year project at the University of Liverpool called the Digital Panopticon ( digitalpanopticon.org), which was tracing 90,000 men, women and children tried at the Old Bailey in London and sentenced to either imprisonment in England or transportation to Australia. Once I got researching I realised that a sentence of transportation was only the beginning of so many stories, and I got pulled into all these twisting, turning, surprising tales of ordinary and extraordinary men and women that I just really wanted to share.

The convicts’ treatment often seems very unjust by modern standards – was it hard to read their stories?

Convict stories usually end one of two ways: well, when someone unexpectedly turns their life around despite the odds, or not so well, for fairly obvious reasons. No matter how many you uncover, it’s hard not to feel a little emotional tug at either of these outcomes. Above all, like most of the people who research convict Australia, I ended up sympathising with the vast majority of convicts, who went through a fairly traumatising experience for often relatively minor crimes.

What advice would you give to someone researching a convict ancestor?

The first thing to do is to read as much as you can get your hands on about the penal colony and the period in which your ancestor lived. This will help you understand things that you find later on in records, or it will point you towards specific records or settlements that might be relevant for you. The second thing is don’t give up, because it can be a really long-term project trying to find an ordinary person who was shipped from one side of the world to the other. Check all the online resources, and don’t be afraid to ring national libraries and local record offices, or to join genealogy groups, particularly in Australia.