Roses from the Heart -

There were altogether some 138,000 men and 25,000* women transported by the British authorities as convicted felons to the Australian colonies in the years between 1788 and 1868. To combat overcrowding in British gaols and get rid of undesirable individuals, they were put on ships and taken halfway around the world to the new colonies in the antipodes established specifically for that purpose. There they found themselves in a strange land where instead of prison walls it was the wild bush and wide ocean that kept them confined and in exile.

Australians have for generations tended to play down or ignore those very early years of history, before the Gold Rushes. For they were not the nation-building years of new-found wealth from wool and gold. They were miserable years of settlements that were little more than an extension of the British penal system, a dumping ground for ‘undesirables’. They were years characterised by violence and brutality, against the native population and against the majority of the white population who were convicts; however they were important years in the building of Australia, the years of the first wave of white migration and people need to understand them if they are to fully understand who they are and where they come from.

Through my involvement with Christina Henri in Australia whose brain-child the Roses From The Heart – Bonnet Project is, and all whom I have subsequently met or corresponded with bringing together Bonnets here in England, I have followed and shared the lives of women from those early times in History. It is very difficult to get a clear understanding of what it was like to be a convict in early Australia; so many stories that are told of that era highlight the sensational – the horrors of Port Arthur or Norfolk Island, the systematic brutality, the incidents of sadness or cannibalism and so on. It all seems too dark and too horrific to be true. However on the other hand we also hear stories of transportation being an escape for many from the grime and poverty of Britain to the healthy outdoor life and newly found opportunities of the Australian colonies .