Beneath the Southern Cross

In 1783, nineteen-year-old Thomas Kendall is sentenced to transportation for attempted theft. He is lucky. If he hadn’t been so young at the time and obviously led astray, the judge would not have taken pity on him. He would have been dangling by the hangman’s noose instead of rotting in Norwich Goal awaiting the next convict ship to who knows where. Several years later he finds himself bound for Australia and who knows what fate. But far from breaking his spirit, the experience moulds this once unquestioning lad into a resourceful and resilient man. Through hard work, a keenly learned sense of justice and the help of his loving wife Mary, Thomas first earns his freedom and then sets about creating the transport and property empire which will make him a very wealthy man. He is a little eccentric by the standards of the day, preferring to live in Surry Hills, close to the city he loves, rather than out Parramatta way where the successful and influential have built their sprawling mansions. He even befriends a local Aboriginal elder, Wolawara, learns his language and, much to the horror of the hoi polloi, bequeaths a parcel of land in Parramatta to him and his kin. But his idyll would not last. The next generation, brought up with the comforts and privileges of wealth would forge a irreparable rift that would echo down through the family for some 170 years; his Aboriginal friend and his family are forced off the land and Thomas dies bewildered by a world gone mad and troubled by a cryptic accusation that somehow it is all his fault.