I’ve just published a book about my 4x great grandfather, James Goodson, and his family. Contact me if you would like a copy!

James, his wife and one of his children were convicts, transported to Australia for their crimes. Their individual stories are incredible to learn about. Imagine stealing food just to survive, and then being banished to an unknown land as a punishment!

Here is a synopsis:

James Goodson was a struggling Essex ploughman, caught stealing oats to feed his starving family. He was transported for fourteen years, far away from his young family to the wilds of Van Diemen’s Land, with no real hope of ever returning. Just as James was about to become a free man on the other side of the world, his daughter was charged with stealing, his wife was charged with receiving stolen goods and his son was charged with breaking, entering and stealing. Unusual coincidence or a cunning family plan to reunite with him?

This is the true story of a family of convicts, separated through their individual punishments – one in a prison in England, one in a peaceful village near Launceston, one on the infamous and horrific Norfolk Island, one in the terrible conditions of the Female Factory in Hobart – all mysteriously re-united at St Matthias’ church on the banks of Van Diemen’s Land’s Tamar River.

Wild Oats is a story of the convict system, told from a handful of perspectives; the author, the convicts, the Red Coats, the jailers, the employers, the clergymen, the Establishment, the community. It is set during an era when the transportation of convicts to Van Diemen’s Land was at its peak but, as a disproportionate and inhumane form of punishment, a perceived moral danger to the children of the fledgling community and a stain on the reputation of an emerging Nation, was detested by the free population who were determined to bring it to an end.

Wild Oats is a story of struggle and of triumph, of desperation and compassion, of the human spirit at its very worst and its very best. It is the truth as it is told within the official records and the newspapers of the day, woven together with an imaginative thread.

It is the scattered grains of a family story, sown into a flourishing field of wild oats.

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