A wing & a prayer

A child convict crosses boundaries amid the birth throes of colonial Auckland.

- ANN PACKER

THE SPARROW, by Tessa Duder (Penguin, $22)

Spoiler alert: the author dedicates her first work of fiction for young readers in 20 years “to the memory of the women and girls cruelly and unjustly convicted, transported and imprisoned 12,000 miles from their homeland, to those who died and those who, against all odds, survived”.

Someone had to tell the tale of the Female Factories, those Australian workhouses for female convicts, and who better than Tessa Duder? Her knowledge of tall ship sailing alone would qualify her to write this sometimes harrowing trans-Tasman survivor story.

It wasn’t pretty aboard those sailing ships at the best of times, in spite of the best efforts of women like Elizabeth Fry, who supplied each woman with cloth and sewing essentials. Convict vessels were about as bad as it got, at least on the Antipodean run – and that was before landing in Van Diemen’s Land and incarceration in the Cascades Female Factory.