Isabella and William, Convicts and Australia’s First Teachers

Description

Isabella Rosson, a skilled mantua maker, was pregnant, literate and about thirty years old when in January 1787 she was convicted at the Old Bailey, London’s Central Criminal Court, of feloniously stealing 12 shillings’ worth of clothing and bed linen from her employer, and then sentenced to transportation to New South Wales.
This is the story of her trial, her long voyage to Botany Bay and loss of her child, her achievements as the colony’s first teacher, and her return to England in 1810 as a free woman. It is also the story of corruption and the gross abuse of official power in the early years of British settlement, about which Isabella’s husband William Richardson, a convict and a teacher, would testify before Parliament’s Select Committee
on Transportation in 1812.