Just Tassie Books

Her husband was controversial. He was in the press, in the courts and in prison. Her husband was charismatic, voluble and irrepressible. He survived shipwreck, ruin and slander. Her husband was an entrepreneur, industrialist and pioneer. We continue to drink his beer; we still attend his theatre. His legacy is concrete. His place in history is secure.

But this is not his story, but the imagined story of his wife, Sophia Degraves.

The greatest escape story of Van Diemen's Land's colonial history by the son of Australia’s best-loved storyteller.

'Is marriage just a series of texts about where the children are and whether we need milk until one of you dies?'

A local Tasmanian family history from 1966, republished in 2023 to celebrate the bicentennial of the Thomas family arriving in Van Diemen's Land in February 1824.