“No,no,not more of those damned whores!”
             
              “… the far greater number were harmless
                           unfortunate creatures”
 
Who were these women? Exiled from their homes in Britain, never again to see their families, they entered an alien world and made it their own, if they survived.
 
Shipwreck and disease, the humiliation of stocks, iron collar, and head-shaving and always the threat of the female factories designed to control their minds and crush their spirits, they endured all this and more.
 
Tony Raynor draws on twenty years of research to create a vivid portrait of the convict era and he brings back to life some of the women who became the founding mothers of Tasmania.