Death or Liberty: Rebels and Radicals Transported to Australia – 1788-1868

In the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the British Government banished their political enemies-viewed with the same alarm as today’s terrorists’—to the shores of Australia.

Sent as convicts to the other side of the world, these political prisoners included liberals, democrats and republicans; machine breakers, food rioters, trade unionists and Chartists; radical journalists and intellectuals; Irish revolutionaries, Scottish Jacobins, and Canadian and even American insurgents.

Criminals and traitors in the eyes of the law, many of these transported political prisoners were heroes and martyrs to their own communities, and are still revered in their homelands as freedom fighters and patriots, progressive thinkers and crusading reformers. Yet in Australia, memory of these rebels and their causes has dimmed.

In Death or Liberty historian Tony Moore brings new life to their stories and restores them to their rightful place in Australian and world history.