Death Or Liberty

Death or Liberty reveals how the British Government of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries banished to the end of the earth Australia political enemies viewed by authorities with the same alarm as today s terrorists : Jacobins, democrats and republicans; machine breakers, food rioters, trade unionists, and Chartists; Irish, Scots, Canadian and even American rebels. While criminals in the eyes of the law, many of these prisoners were heroes and martyrs to their own communities, and are still revered in their homelands as freedom fighters and patriots, progressive thinkers, democrats and reformers. Yet in Australia, the land of their exile, memory of these rebels and their causes has dimmed. This is the first narrative history that brings together the stories of the political prisoners sent as convicts to Australia from all parts of the British Empire, spanning the early days of the penal settlement at Sydney Cove until transportation ended in 1868. Author Tony Moore asks who were these prisoners, and what led them to take the radical actions they did? Why did the authorities so fear these dissenters and rebels, and was transportation effective in halting dissent? What became of the political convicts in Australia and who escaped or returned home?