ISBN 978-1-922452-47-4 PAPERBACK

Brutal Beginnings

‘To be hanged by the neck, until dead…’ was Thomas Cheshire’s sentence for highway robbery in England. On appeal, the punishment reduced to transportation for life; destination, the penal colony of Sydney Town, New South Wales.

Thomas Cheshire, one of four-hundred-and-twenty-one male felons, boarded the notorious second fleet vessel Neptune departing from England. Each shackled male convict remained in irons for the journey of just over five months and suffered deplorable, crowded conditions, deprivation, starvation and murderous floggings.

In a maimed, diseased state, Thomas Cheshire arrived at Sydney Cove.

During his years of servitude, he laboured alongside other fatigued, miserable wretches, who shared a pitiful existence of demonic proportions.

After completion of a decreased sentence, Cheshire joined the controversial New South Wales Corps, serving in part on infamous Norfolk Island.

Characteristically, Cheshire was an aggressive spouse, cunning manipulator, liar and thief who by sheer will and self determination, coped with adversity, recurrent loss and hard labour.

Throughout his bleak life he experienced little recompense. Broken relationships were punctuated with miserable, soul destroying situations of woebegone measures that rarely righted themselves.