The Last Convict by Anthony Hill
About Anthony Hill
Born in Melbourne in 1942, Anthony Hill is the author of 20 books, many based on historical fact. They include the award-winning Soldier Boy (2001) about the youngest known ANZAC, and the companion book Young Digger (2002, 2016), concerning a French war orphan smuggled to Australia at war’s end. Other military novels are The Story of Billy Young (2014) and For Love of Country (2016). Anthony’s historical novel Captain Cook’s Apprentice won the NSW Premier’s young people’s history prize in 2009. His current work is about Matthew Flinders and the voyage of HMS Investigator, the first to circumnavigate Australia 1801-03. For further information, visit Anthony’s website.
A Quote from Anthony Hill
“I’m honoured to have The Last Convict long-listed for this award. For 14 years I’d been wanting to write the story of Samuel Speed, widely accepted as the last transported convict to survive in Australia. He lived until 1938, not long before I was born. For years I couldn’t get beyond the few official records of his conviction, transportation to Fremantle in 1866, freedom in 1871 and death, until I found an interview Speed gave to a Perth newspaper before died. At last the character I’d long imagined began to come to life. I’m pleased other readers have felt the same.”
About The Last Convict
Oxford 1863: Young Samuel Speed sets a barley stack alight in the hope it will earn him a bed in prison for the night. He wants nothing more than a morsel of food in his belly and a warm place to sleep off the streets. What he receives is a sentence of seven years’ servitude, to be served half a world away in the penal colony of Fremantle, Western Australia.
When Samuel boards the transport ship Belgravia, he is stripped of his clothing and even his name, and given regulations of when to rise, eat, clean and sleep. On arrival at Fremantle Prison, hard labour is added to the mix and he wonders if life can get any worse. The only solace he finds is a love of reading, which allows the likes of Tom Sawyer and Oliver Twist to become his lifelong friends.
Samuel is granted a ticket of leave in 1867 and full freedom in 1871, but what sort of life can a man forge for himself in the colony, with no skills, no money and no family? Will it be the beginning of the life he has always dreamed of, or do some sentences truly never end?
