The 10,000 plus convicts who were sent to Western Australia included my great grandfather on the Corona, and his father in law who had arrived on the Amity in 1826. William Thacker was the only person on that little ship who stayed on, and so becomes the first British settler of Western Australia.
There are so many descendants of the 10,000. Many seem to have had some success in marrying female migrants and free settlers. While we are now inundated with stories of the hard lives of aboriginal citizens, little consideration has been given to the lives of the convicts, dragooned from a thriving European society, and left in a strange land without the support of family or society. Descendants of the convicts, who are proud to claim their ancestry, have risen to the highest honours, and of wealth and political power.
