Floating Prisons

Most people think of Australia's convict past as decidedly English. Anne McMahon tells the story of the Irish prisoners roped into the British transportation scheme. Poverty, civil unrest and overcrowded prisons in Ireland from 1823 to 1837 led to thousands of men being sentenced to transportation to Australia. They were confined mainly to hulks moored in Cork Harbour and at Kinstown near Dublin. Violence, illness and meagre rations were the norm. Anne McMahon's vivid descriptions of what it was really like to endure transportation—squalid living conditions and long sea voyages—reveals the Irish convict experience.