Just Tassie Books

A pictorial history of the convict era at Port Arthur — illustrated throughout with 19th century photographs from the Beattie Studio in Hobart. J.W. Beattie was Tasmania's most significant colonial-era photographer, whose studio documented the island's landscape, people and history across the late 19th century.

Ian Brand and Michael Sprod's history of the probation system — the major experiment in convict management that replaced the assignment system in Van Diemen's Land from 1839 and shaped the colony's labour system, landscape and penal administration for the following fifteen years.

The first theatrical performance in Australia — a 1788 convict staging of George Farquhar's play The Recruiting Officer at Sydney Cove, to mark King George III's birthday — later inspired Thomas Keneally's novel The Playmaker and Timberlake Wertenbaker's play Our Country's Good. Robert Jordan, Foundation spent years combing British and colonial newspapers, court records and logbooks to uncover the real story of Australia's first forty years of theatre — organised not by nostalgic soldiers and settlers, as long believed, but by convicts themselves.