Chain Letters: Narrating Convict Lives

by Lucy Frost (Editor), Hamish Maxwell-Stewart (Editor)

This is the first book to apply new academic understandings of the convict transportation system to explore the lives of individual convicts. In searching for the convict voice, each chapter is a detective story in miniature, either an exercise in discovering the identity behind a particular account or a piecing together of a convict life from the scattered fragments of a tale. Many issues of great contemporary interest arise from these stories, including the multicultural nature of Australian colonial society and, above all, the importance of love and hope.

Genres: History

272 pages, Paperback

First published April 1, 2002

Reviews

[Rhonda · Rating 5 out of 5]

I really enjoyed this. It looks at convict letters but also looks at how they sit within location, the influence of distance and an often permanent social exile, the harsh realities of the penal system, the reason for and the consequences of intensive record keeping. It also includes the different forms those letters take from handwritten letters to communicated messages in tattoos and in convict love tokens - coins scraped back to blank surfaces and inscribed by hand with messages to friend and family. I particularly liked that the approach included contributors acknowledging and analysing how their descriptions, their approach and their interpreting the letters, in whatever form, was filtered through their own reality. When I finished the phrase 'convict letters' had become bland, flat and generic. Even though the letters were fragmentary something about the authors looking at themselves as they looked at the details of the writers they discovered including the invisible presence of record keepers with their blinkered focus gave a shadowy flesh to these writers.. There is a line about elusive figures in the background of the letters and records uncovered which, in stating the existence of the questions left unanswered, bought each seperate writer, though faceless, to a brief flickering life.