In the years between 1788 and 1868 around 162,000 convicts were sent to the colonies of Van Diemen’s Land, New South Wales and Western Australia. It has been estimated that one in five Australians has convict ancestry. In Tasmania (formerly Van Diemen’s Land) it was estimated in 2009 that seventy-four percent of the population were descended from convicts.

In February 2014 I visited Tasmania, spending a day at the Port Arthur Penal Colony and I couldn’t help but reflect on the harshness of a system that transported people to the other side of the world and then suffered even greater brutality if they were unfortunate enough to fall foul of the law and be transported again to Port Arthur.

Although transportation sentences were time-limited and in theory a convict could return to Britain after he or she had served their sentence. In practice, very few could return as the cost of the passage was prohibitive and so most convicts lived out the rest of their lives in Australia helping to build the foundations of this great country.