Description - Most Perfectly Safe by Granville Allen Mawer
If you had to sail to Australia in the early nineteenth century there were worse ways to travel than being transported as a convict. Your living conditions were better than those of the sailors who manned your ship. Discipline was harsher for the troops who guarded you. And, disease and mutiny apart, it was, as the Admiralty claimed, 'most perfectly safe'.
Until 1833
Allen Mawer takes us back to Australia's colonial past to vividly describe what life was really like on a convict transport - and conduct an investigation into a train of disasters that, were they to occur today, would at least be worth a Royal Commission and might put paid to a political career or two.
This lively account of the convict trade in the 1830s and the shipwrecks that plunged it into crisis, is the first scale account of the experiences of the convicts (both men and women), the guards and crew, the civil servants who ran the system and the businessmen who profited from it.
Most Perfectly Safe is a fascinating yarn for anyone interested in Australia's pioneering past and the age of sail.
Allen Mawer grew up at Manly, sailed 14-foot skiffs and went to school on the ferry. He is the author of Fast Company: The Lively Times and Untimely End of the Clipper Ship Walter Hood.
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