The Tin Ticket: The Heroic Journey Of Australia's Convict Women (2010) - Plot & Excerpts
Take an interesting story, do impeccable research, then ruin it all with extravagant prose and over-emotional drama – that’s The Tin Ticket. Nothing speaks more for the need of a good editor than this book. The writing is bad. There are too many adjectives used and after a while one does get tired of the ‘stately Quaker’ and the ‘grey eyed lass’ and would prefer a return to the simpler Elizabeth and Agnes. Also, I know you are talking about a Scottish girl but can you dispense with the ‘lasses’ bit, please? It’s intensely irritating. On the plus side, the research is awesome. There is also a detailed appendix laying out different documents such as rules applicable to prisoners and records of the women described in this book. The in-depth research is somewhat spoilt by the author claiming that all rich people (except Elizabeth Fry, who is quite obviously a saint!) are horrible bastards and all poor people must be excused for turning to theft. I would have better appreciated a book that based its premise on the fact that the punishments were excessively harsh for petty crimes and not completely excusing people for committing crimes! The attempts at humour also fall flat because the author’s anger against anything ‘authority’ is so blatant that it gets very annoying for the reader. What’s worse is that you have to be poor, convicted, female AND the author’s protégée to gain her sympathy. Other convicts could be very vengeful and were pretty much ‘low-life troublemakers’. The story also jumps all over the place. It deals with different women but it’s not woven well together. The last protégée of the author was not represented properly. She might as well have been left out. The ending seemed rushed and while the chapter on the gold rush was really out of context for this book, I enjoyed reading it the most. The sudden rush of the author to finish the book actually made reading the ending so much better than the rest of the book since she had to leave out her flowery emotional crap and focused on facts. Basically this is a highly fictionalised account of female transports to Australia and is well researched but written badly. The reviews from readers of this book are all over the map, some harsh, others full of praise. The book did not seem overwrought to me, but rather a page turner. That said, of course there is fictionalization of the experience of the women who were forced into transport. And, yes, the author makes it quite clear that she found the evidence of what happened to them appalling. But also there is hope, since many of these convicts became productive and resourceful settlers in Australia. For me this was an eye opening read. I knew about this chapter in history, but not that much about it. It was ground I had not covered in any depth. Swiss wrote her book after researching the subject and tells her story through the lives of several real women who were transported to Van Diemen's Land (Tasmania) for petty crimes necessitated by dire poverty. An unmerciful justice system and rigid class system in England ensured a ready supply of poor women, as well as children, whose lives counted for very little. In Victorian England, these women faced exile and imprisonment, providing free labor in the newly opening lands "down under." Of course, we cannot know exactly what the real Agnes McMillan, Janet Houston, Bridget Mulligan, or Ludlow Tedder thought and exactly what they did. The author fills this in with her own speculation, and this serves to make the book read like a novel not a dissertation. At the very end, the story becomes a little less about the persons and a bit more about the events in a historical sense--I felt I was reading about the past, not experiencing it with the women as I did in the greater part of the book. It's a good read for someone to learn about "herstory" and especially so because injustice and cruelty towards women, and indeed those considered lesser humans, is still with us today.
What do You think about The Tin Ticket: The Heroic Journey Of Australia's Convict Women (2010)?
good scholarship, well told storyline; learn something you didn't know!
—sarah
Non-fictional account of women transported to Tasmania in 1830s.
—mehmeh
an interesting subject but a rather jumbled and overwrought book
—keshant
In places the writing is clunky, but a really interesting book.
—IColeman07
