Lucy Frost

Shortlisted for the 2025 Tasmanian Literary Awards Premier's Prize for Non-fiction Longlisted for the 2024 Green Family Tasmanian History Award All families have their secrets, and a convict ancestor or an illegitimate birth were shames that families once buried deep. Among the best-hidden stories in Australia's history are those of the convict orphans. Agnes arrived on a convict transport aged...

Her superb research and sympathetic reconstructions of nineteenth-century Scotland and Australia bring to life a long-forgotten but fascinating group of women. - Siân Rees, author of The Floating Brothel In the early nineteenth century, crofters and villagers streamed into the burgeoning cities of Scotland, and families splintered. Orphan girls, single mothers and women on their own all struggled to feed...