In the 1870s, as Port Arthur penal settlement was closing, someone photographed the remaining convicts. Those photographs survived. This book reproduces them — the actual faces of men transported to Van Diemen's Land from Britain and Ireland between the 1820s and the 1850s. Not paintings, not drawings, not reconstructions — photographs. You are looking at the real people.
Nicholas Shakespeare — novelist and biographer of Bruce Chatwin — came to Tasmania on holiday, found a house on an east coast beach near Swansea, and decided on the spot that this was where he wanted to live. He didn't yet know that his ancestor was Anthony Fenn Kemp — the corrupt, colourful and influential figure now known by some as the Father of Tasmania — or that he would find relatives still living on the island.
Richard Flanagan blends memoir and history, tracing his father's WWII imprisonment near Hiroshima through to his own life in Tasmania. Softcover, 2024, 280 pages.
Deborah J. Swiss traces the lives of four women transported to Van Diemen's Land in the 19th century — following them from their origins in Scotland and Ireland through the voyage, the assignment system, and their years in the colony.
Dan Sprod's biography of Jorgen Jorgenson — one of the most extraordinary figures in Tasmanian history, and arguably in world history of the period. The Usurper is the definitive biography — 718 pages, fully indexed, including the full text of Jorgenson's own account of the Iceland 'revolution.'

