Birdsong by Sebastian Faulks
The Boulevard du Cange was a broad, quiet street that marked the eastern flank of the city of Amiens.
Girl at the Lion d’Or by Sebastian Faulks
In those days the station in Janvilliers had an arched glass roof over the southbound platform as if in imitation of the big domes at St Lazare.
Boleyn Traitor by Philippa Gregory
In the hammered silver of the mirror, we look like two headless ghosts, our black hoods hiding our faces.
Catherine Meyrick 
I was looking through your blog for the story you posted some time ago of your ancestor who was deported from Britain and then from Australia and finished up in Hobart. The story both amused and informed me. I’ve just been to Tasmania and visited some of the penal colonies there as well as visiting Hobart and I would like to reread it having visited Sarah Island in the Macquarrie Penal colony and also Port Arthur. Your account may be more meaningful having visited some of these places. Thanks.
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You are possibly thinking of my post on Henry Woods. I haven’t written in detail on any of the others but they are mentioned in other posts. Even Henry’s post doesn’t go into a lot of detail about his movements other than life on Mount Wellington. I actually have seven, possibly eight convicts in my tree, five (or 6) men and two women. Four of the men spent time at Port Arthur and one at Maria Island. We only visited Maria Island three years ago. I hadn’t realized just how remote it really was, especially in the days of horse and cart. It would have been such an alien environment for them too. No wonder so many left Tasmania as soon as they got their Freedom. I’ll stop, I’d win gold for Australia if there was a Boring About Family History olympics.
This is the blog about Henry Woods, father and son.
This post, about his wife Elizabeth Robinson, has some a little more about him.
I had a look at your blog last night, your paintings and drawing are beautiful and I think capture the place perfectly.
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Thank you for that Catherine. I dont think I read the first article you cite, it was the second and is even more interesting now I have been to Tasmania. The Port Arthur site you mention is very imposing.
It seems it was a difficult task untangling the lives of your forebears, especially when it includes someone as slippery as old Henry.
The reason why we went was that my wife read a trilogy by Bryce Cortenay – the first one being the Potato Factory and how one of the protagonists is deported from Britain and their time in Tasmania I think it ends up in Gallipoli in the third book.
There was a lovely memorial park in Hobart near the botanic gardens that has a tree for every person killed in WW1 from the area with a plaque with some personal details. Some of the trees have been replaced when the original one died.
Some of the men were wounded in Gallipoli, treated in UK and then sent to France where they died. In one instance two brothers were killed by the same shell.
I’m sorry I didnt get to Mount Wellington, the view looks well worth the climb.
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Henry Woods wasn’t the worst of them. A maternal great-great-grandfather took three people working over sixty years to work out who he was. It was DNA that finally identified him. He had changed his name, said he was from Montreal when he was from Prince Edward Island, claimed he was single… There seem to be some almost larger than life stories. I think it is partly that, even into the latter part of the 19th century, we weren’t a settled society and people came for all sorts of reasons other than the hope of making a better life for themselves.
Mount Wellington is certainly worth a visit if you are here again. I’ve only ever been up by car or bus. I had a gentle walk organized for 2020, mainly downhill from the Springs to Ferntree where there is a nice pub. But we all know about plans and 2020. We visited Soldier’s Walk last time I was in Hobart. My paternal grandmother’s uncle is commemorated there – Albert Arthur Reader. He joined up in August 1914, was at Gallipoli, and then to France. He was killed in action at Borsies on 8 April 1917. He received a posthumous MM for ‘bravery under heavy fire as a stretcher bearer’ along with several other stretcher bearers. I am planning to write about him for Anzac Day this year. He was the son of a convict who entered the system in 1845. The sheer numbers of dead, and the horrors the soldiers faced, are so hard to fully grasp at this distance. I think that almost every family was touched by it in some way here, it was worse in Britain, especially for those places where all the young men from a village enlisted together.
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It seems very brutal to have survived the horrors of Gallipoli and in many cases been wounded there – to then be sent off to the Western Front. I look forward to your account of Albert Reader’s campaign.
Having said that, I have a photo of my great grand father and mother with their seven sons in 1918 – all the sons in uniform, having survived the war. One of the daughters, my grandmother, then saw three of her four sons go off to war in 1939/45 and all return – the luck of the Irish.
Thanks.
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They were truly treated as cannon fodder.
It’s seems almost miraculous that seven brothers would survive. I have wondered how those who survived felt seeing their sons go off a mere twenty years later. And, as the final line of the song ‘The Green Fields of France’ says, ‘…it’s all happened again / And again and again and again and again.’
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