'A Long Farewell': The British Experience and Colonial Fate of Juveniles Transported to Australia in the first half of the 19th Century

Anna Davin, in discussing her research of childhood history, offers an intriguing example of how she pieced together information about the step-cleaning girls of London in the late nineteenth century from a series of written fragments. She calls this the 'jigsaw strategy' and that is a useful term to describe the method that has been used here.
This research is as much concerned with making a contribution to the history of working class childhood in the mid-nineteenth century as it is with contributing to the history of juvenile transportation to the Australian colonies. The juveniles who are the major focus of the work are these from Great Britain and Ireland who were sentenced to transportation and despatched to New South Wales and Van Diemen's land in the eighteen-thirties and eighteen-forties. One aim of the investigation was to discover how those juveniles found themselves in that particular position at that particular time.