Convict Fremantle: A Place of Promise & Punishment by Michal Bosworth

Book Description

Secondhand. Good condition. Ex library copy with no external stickers. Stamps on inside pages. Remnant date due slip on half-title page. Wear to book edges and corners. Faint marks on foredges. Body text and binding are still very good.

Long recognised for its fine old buildings, the cosmopolitan port city of Fremantle held special significance as the first landfall of early settlers to the Swan River Colony. For them, it offered the promise of a new life, but the future was far darker for thousands of convicts transported to the colony after 1850.

Michal Bosworth takes the reader on a fascinating journey through nineteenth-century Fremantle, centring on the grim complex of buildings set up to house the prisoners. She paints vivid pictures of the lives of prison officials and convicts, some confined for 21 hours a day in cells barely more than five cubic metres, and she chronicles the attempts of desperate inmates to escape a Dickensian establishment that can still be visited today as a heritage site and tourist attraction.

Awarded Second Prize - 2005 Fremantle and East Fremantle Local History Awards.