Convicts

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.

Charles Bateson reconstructs the voyages of the ships transporting convicts to Australia and also the administrative system under which the ships were selected, manned, provisioned and despatched with their miserable human freight to face a 13,000 mile voyage over tempestuous and largely uncharted seas.

The biography of the Reverend George Eastman — a Church of England clergyman who served for 26 years in parishes across Van Diemen's Land during the final decades of the transportation era, and whose final posting was to Port Arthur. Eastman took an unfashionable view for his time: that convicts could be reformed, and that religious instruction, education and practical training were the means to achieve it.