Some books that are set during or about the lives and times of my ancestors.

Fiction

A Fortunate Life by AB Facey
Tells the true story of one man's struggle, ranging from the Australian outback in the early 1900's to the battlefields of World War One, through the Depression and then another war. He battled the entire way without his own parents for support. But he claimed he still led a fortunate life.

For the Term of His Natural Life by Marcus Clarke
A living, breathing image of Australia in the colonial era. Drawing on historical fact, Clarke builds a story about the whole convict system around one man, who was sentenced to transportation on a charge of murder of which he was innocent.

The book's characters represent all that was Australian colonial society: convict commanders; their wives and children; governors; church clergy; hardened criminals; petty criminals; and one or two Aborigines. They also stretch geographically across the colonies from Van Diemen's Land to New South Wales, to Norfolk Island, and even back to the mother country. The story gives an outsider's view of Australian colonial life in the nineteenth century.

Gould's Book of Fish by Richard Flanagan
Set during the 1830s in a hellish island prison colony off the Tasmanian coast, the novel centres around a real-life thief and convict, English forger William Buelow Gould.

Harp in the South by Ruth Park
The story of an Irish Australian family, the Darcys, who live in the inner-city slum of Surry Hills in the aftermath of World War II. Their daughter Roie becomes a woman too quickly amidst the brothels, razor gangs and tenements.

The Secret River by Kate Grenville

From Amazon.co.uk - A dramatic and evocative historical novel set between the slums of Nineteenth-century London and the convict colonies of Australia. Following a childhood marked by poverty and petty crime in the slums of London, William Thornhill is sentenced in 1806 to be transported to New South Wales for the term of his natural life. With his wife and children, he arrives in a harsh land to a life that feels like a death sentence. But, among the convicts there is a whisper - that freedom can be bought - an opportunity to start afresh on lush, 'unclaimed' land away from the infant township of Sydney, up the Hawkesbury River.

Non Fiction

The Fatal Shore by Robert Hughes
Follows convict transportation from the squalor of Georgian Britain and its obsessive fear of mob violence to the grim prison hulks - Noah's Arks of small-time criminality - that disgorged their human cargoes into the most elaborate penal system the world had ever seen. Many of those who survived the first fleets were condemned to starvation, disease and horrifying brutality, and yet within eighty years Australia became a promised land to which people have flocked ever since.

Damned Whores and God's Police by Ann Summers
An excellent book on the history of women in Australia, starting from the first years of colonisation, when women were viewed as "damned whores" through to the early 1800's when women were also seen as the moral guardians of the community - "God's police".

The Commonwealth of Thieves by Tom Keneally
From Amazon.co.uk This is a very readable and entertaining history of the Sydney experiment that does justice to both whites and blacks and is interspersed with colourful prose, ironic humour and well rounded biographies of the main characters in what was quintessentially a race dominated crucible. Whilst the narrative covers, in depth, the founding four years or so and is very detailed this work is not simply a carbon copy of The Fatal Shore rather a microscopic study of the crucial years of survival for a colony that would in years later become the great nation of Australia.

Books related to my history

Mary Wade to Us
Compiled by The Mary Wade History Association (a group of descendants) in 1986, it tells the story of Mary and her descendants.

The Floating Brothel by Sian Rees
Story of the Lady Juliana, on which Mary Wade was transported to Australia. Recently made into a tv programme.