Dorset's Convicts in the Australian Colonies; Transportation

I shall certainly be buying the November 2017 issue of Dorset Life, if only for the three-page article by John Wright (read today in the County Library, but apparently not available in W.H.Smith or other retailers for a couple more days).

Many years ago, when living in Australia, I became very interested in the grave-stones of two Wessex convicts in Port Arthur's Island of the Dead, Tasmania (Van Diemen's Land), Edward Spicer, from Poole, Dorset, who died, aged 47, on 19 January 1854, and Australia's first novelist, the convicted Somerset forger Henry Savery.

Edward Spicer

Affliction sore

Long time I bore

Physicians were in vain

Till God did please

That Death should ease

Me from my pain.

Here's what I jotted down around the time of my visit to Port Arthur:

Port Arthur: Island of the Dead

The first two stones we're shown

When we've been transported

To the Island of the Dead -

They stand alone on the lower ground -

Commemorate two convicts

Who had creative flair.

From Poole in Dorset,

Edward Spicer,

Who penned his moving epitaph,

Soon to disappear,

By erosion of the sandstone face;

Henry Savery,

A Somerset man,

Inveterate forger -

Remembered by a modern stone,

A forgery itself,

As befits the maker

Of Australia's first novel;

He cut his own throat,

And died of a "stroke".

They are part of a long tradition,

Death in custody, dishonourable graves;

From Rottnest Island

To Tasman Peninsula

The story's much the same.

The stones of soldiers, officers, guards

(Those on higher ground, along with wives and children),

Face North, not East:

Face not the rising sun, but Home.
The convicts' headstones do not mark their graves.

But somewhere hereabouts, a few paces more or less,

Two sons of Somerset and Dorset share

A common plot

Of broadly

                British

                         Earth.


Related:

William Barnes' poem on free (economic) migration from Dorset to Van Diemen's Land