BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN: 138,000 KING’S MEN & 25,000 WOMEN – A MILITARY CAMPAIGN
Wednesday, February 28th, 2018‘Dear Jack…I value Death nothing but it is in leaving you my dear behind and no one to look after you’. Denis Prendergast, Oxford Book of Australian Letters, ed. Brenda Niall and John Thompson, Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 1998
1788 – 1868: 163,000 convicted criminals were transported from the British Isles to Australia between 1788 and 1868. Only 25,000 were women.
Of these 12,500 went directly to Tasmania. Zero women were transported to West Australia where transportation ended in 1868. See: G is for Genocide
‘The tender [Supply] may be employed in conveying to the new settlement a further number of women from the Friendly Islands, New Caledonia etc. from whence any number may be procured without difficulty; and without a sufficient proportion of that sex it is well known that it would be impossible to preserve the settlement from gross irregularities and disorders’. London, Heads of a Plan for Botany Bay, 1786