18
Seven years transportation.
That meant that the government would pack me with hundreds of other convicts and send me to Van Diemen’s Land or some other part of Australia to work as a slave in vile conditions. I was in shock as two hefty men escorted me away from that courtroom and down to the same cell as I had inhabited before the trial. It was empty now, with my p********e companions having gone to wherever the court sent erring women, and the murdering mother sentenced to the gallows.
Strangely, I did not think of their predicament. I only thought of myself and the horror stories that I had heard about Van Diemen’s Land. It lay thousands of miles away on the other side of the world, a place of s*****y and death, of terrible heat and worse people. I would be mingling with the most
