World Away

This narrative invites adult readers to reimagine themselves as an 11-year-old child in 19th-century County Somerset, England. You have a younger brother... both sons of a once-proud apple cider artisan who left for London one morning, never to return. His last words to you: "e;While away, take care of your brother and help Mother, son."e;Already in ill health, your mother dies within the year. Now orphans, your only means of survival is stealing food and clothing from villagers. After being caught twice and released with warnings, a new English law against child felons forces your constabulary to send you to the Old Bailey for sentencing. (Children had recently been hanged there for lesser crimes.) You escape execution but are sentenced to transportation from England to Port Arthur Penal Settlement in Van Diemen's Land first imprisoned on a derelict hulk in the Thames, surrounded by adult male convicts: unhygienic, cruel, and predatory. You survive both the hulk and the voyage to the Great South Land but nothing prepares you for Point Puer. Many friends, already frail and undernourished, are forced into adult labour gangs with matching expectations. Homesickness, illness, and constant vigilance to avoid convict violence leave you in perpetual terror. So traumatised are some boys that they vanish into the infirmary, never to return. This faction-genre narrative blends fact with fiction. Such boys existed. Such conditions existed. Such harrowing treatment of children served economic ends. While historians recount their fates, few authors explore the minds of these children undoubtedly filled with fear, horror, and trauma. A reminder: This story of fiction woven with fact is for adult readers only.