The Tin Ticket: The Heroic Journey of Australia's Convict Women by Deborah J Swiss

Book Description

Secondhand. Good condition. Wear to book corners and edges, particularly to corners now reinforced with book tape. Mark on back cover from price sticker remnant.

Historian Deborah J Swiss tells the heartbreaking, horrifying, and ultimately triumphant story of the women exiled from the British Isles and forced into slavery and savagery, who created the most liberated society of their time.

Convicted of minor crimes, four women - Agnes McMillan, Janet Houston, Bridget Mulligan, and Ludlow Tedder, were exiled to Van Diemen's Land. Tin tickets, stamped with numbers, were hung around the women's necks as they were loaded aboard the ships to carry them to their new home.

Crossing shark-infested waters, some died in shipwrecks during the four-month journey. Others were impregnated against their will by their captors. They arrived as nothing more than property. But as the year passed, they managed not only to endure privation and pain but to thrive on their terms, breaking the chains of bondage and forging a society that treated women as equals and led the world in fighting for women's rights.

The Tin Ticket takes us to the early nineteenth century and into the lives of these extraordinary women and chronicles how their destinies were touched by the Quaker reformer Elizabeth Gurney Fry. Ultimately, it is the story of women discarded by their homeland and forgotten by history-women who, by sheer force of will, became the heart and soul of a new nation. (back cover)