In the early nineteenth century, amidst public anxiety about the threat to public order and respectability posed by juvenile offenders, over two thousand boys who had been eking out a living on the streets of Britain’s towns and cities were transported to the Point Puer Boys Establishment in Van Diemen’s Land. There they were to be turned into productive colonial workers.

Despite the rhetoric of reform, most of the boys endured unrelenting punishment and maltreatment. For some, transportation to Point Puer became a death sentence, with one in thirty dying there.

Those who survived Point Puer were released into the colony semi-skilled at best, to be confronted by an unwelcoming society anxious to put its convict origins behind it.

This is their story.