• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

William’s sentence dragged on under the threat of the lash and the press of the pulpit. In unwavering attempts to reform convicts through religion, Oatlands’ chief magistrate required even Ticket of Leave holders’ attendance at church, posting this notice:

Chief Police Magistrate.

POLICE OFFICE, OATLANDS.

District of Oatlands Tickets-of-Leave.

ALL male prisoners holding the above indulgence,

and residing within two miles

from the Court-house, are ordered to attend

church muster in future every Sunday.

Also those residing upwards of two miles,

and not exceeding five miles, are ordered to

attend church muster, the first Sunday in every month.4

Benefiting from its location midway between the island’s chief ports because of its growing wool trade, Oatlands in 1835 had a free population of 598, plus 695 convicts. It had expanded from twenty dwellings to more than two hundred over the past eight years.5

Still, Oatlands remained an outpost marked by contradictory components. The construction of convict-crafted Georgian homes and tree-lined avenues conveyed the superficial appearance of a civilized society. Yet the fringes of town defined its true outlaw flavor. Wide-open country offered fertile ground for marauding bandits who rustled cattle, robbed travelers on the lonely roads between Hobart Town and Launceston, and battled one another in the brutal fashion from which many legends were born.

Notorious bushranger Richard Lemon defined the settlement’s early history before its link to other towns, encouraged after a visit by the governor of New South Wales in 1811. Exploring the northern jungles of Van Diemen’s Land on horseback, Governor Macquarie proposed a road linking Hobart Town to the settlement he named Oatlands because it looked similar to an area that grew oat crops in his native Scotland.6

Until then, Richard Lemon, the leader of the first well-known bushranger gang, had terrorized the area. Between 1806 and 1808, Lemon ran wild and was the namesake for Oatlands’ Lemon Springs and Lemon Hill. Living his mocking creed “a short life and a merry one,” the ferocious murderer hid in a bark hut along the shores of Lake Tiberias until another ex-convict delivered his head in a sack and collected a bounty from the island’s Governor Collins.7

Following Lemon’s marauding lead, escaped convicts held hostage large tracts of the island’s interior, still largely untamed and teeming with indigenous wildlife. Local herdsmen battled with carnivorous marsupials stealing from their flock, including the nocturnal Tasmanian devil and the thylacine (Tasmanian tiger), nicknamed for its stripes.8

A different form of wildlife congregated on the fringes of the settlement, outside the order and control of the wardens and the church. Sly-grog shops, “notorious haunts of vice and immorality,” opened in secluded shacks and barns in the bush.9 Inside these treasured haunts, convict women and men re-created the working-class entertainment of their homeland, as they swapped tall tales, smoked tobacco, drank rum, played cards, gambled, and danced with reckless abandon. A lifeline to personal identity and good old-fashioned fun defined the after-dusk subculture from which convict solidarity prospered and dissidence brewed. In remote, predominantly male outposts like Oatlands, bare-knuckle boxing matches and cockfighting also filled the dark recesses of popular underground entertainment, which may have also filled the dark holes in many a lonely heart.10

The petite renegade named Agnes McMillan had no trouble adapting to this rustic lifestyle, though she never forgave Superintendent Hutchinson for assigning her to the middle of nowhere. Despite the occasional gunshots and bushranger sightings, it was a rather boring town, with more sheep than settlers. The former street urchin, accustomed to big-city bustle and excitement, found little amusement in this dreary outpost until a certain William Roberts crossed her path.

Twelve years into his sentence,