The convict women who built a continent..."A moving and fascinating story." -Adam Hochschild, author of "King Leopold's Ghost"

"The Tin Ticket" takes readers to the dawn of the nineteenth century and into the lives of three women arrested and sent into suffering and slavery in Australia and Tasmania-where they overcame their fates unlike any women in the world. It also tells the tale of Elizabeth Gurney Fry, a Quaker reformer who touched all their lives. Ultimately, this is a story of women who, by sheer force of will, became the heart and soul of a new nation.

Reviews

Australia's early years as a prison colony to which British convicts were transported are well known, but less noted is that among those convicts were 25,000 women from England and Ireland sent there in the late 1700s and early 1800s. Mostly desperate petty thieves, these women suffered from abuse, poor living conditions inside and out of prison, and a world offering few options to their gender. Swiss (The Male Mind at Work) tells the story of the convict women through the experiences of several, e.g., Agnes McMillan of Glasgow-convicted of shoplifting-whom Swiss presents as typifying the experience. Swiss vividly relates McMillan's rough life in Glasgow, her difficult passage halfway around the world, and brutal imprisonment in what is now Tasmania, before earning her freedom. Swiss certainly succeeds as a storyteller, weaving a tale from her research, but she is less successful in placing McMillan and the other women into a larger sociological or historical context, or in going on to define their significance to Australia's beginnings. Verdict While Swiss does well as a raconteur, advanced students may be disappointed in her work as history.-Elizabeth Goldman, Perth & Union Dist. P.L., Ont. (c) Copyright 2011. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.