Convict-era Port Arthur

“This is a book for the convict era afficionado, who wants to know everything from the number of lashes dispensed each year, to the productivity of Port Arthur’s coal mine. There are figures on agricultural yields and the workings of the hospital. It’s a book that takes you through the time, using mostly comments and thoughts of its time. Too many authors overlay their own feelings of retrospective disgust to places like Port Arthur. Cameron holds off intelligently, preferring to let the words and descriptions of the era work for themselves.” –Adam Courtenay, The Australian

David W. Cameron received his PhD in biological anthropology in 1995 at the Australian National University and is a former Australian Research Council QEII Fellow at the Department of Anatomy & Histology, University of Sydney. He has conducted fieldwork in Australia, Europe, the Middle East and Asia. He is the author of several books on Australian military history and primate evolutionary biology and has published over 60 papers in internationally peer-reviewed journals. He lives in Canberra.