Adam-Son of Gurrewa. Synposis

To found White-Australia, Britain in 1788 emptied its gaols of pickpockets, forgers, poachers and horse-thieves, in fact of all petty-crime convicts, to deposit them under military guard on the naked shores of Niew Holland in the South Pacific. Thus created, was the biggest prison the world has known.

At Botany Bay, in January of that year, they planted Britain’s flag and declared the land, the British Colony of New South Wales.

Gurrewa told of Australia’s settling through the eyes of a convict lad learning about life, people and values. It was the first novel telling the terrible truths of Australia’s convict history told from the convict point of view, since Marcus Clarke’s renowned For the Term of His Natural Life published in 1870.

For two hundred years, right up to Australia celebrating its bicentenary in 1988, the education of Australians was clouded in half-truths in respect of what really happened; the whole truth had brought only shame on the authorities of the time. Gurrewa was my way of emptying the vacuum cleaner with which modern Australians are at last cleaning under that carpet of concealment

ADAM-Son of Gurrewa highlights the truths of how the convict stigma influenced the social structure through the next generation—those who were born to the First Fleet convicts. It is the story of a young man questioning, then discovering values essential to finding meaningful satisfactions in the unique climate of a prison society. Its telling paints the lives and experiences of real, significant people in that generation of Australia’s history.

Adam’s life’s experiences were truly representative of those who, over succeeding generations, contributed to Australia earning its reputation of both Lucky Country and Land of Opportunity.

This is the story of growing up in a truly unique environment. On the one hand convicts laboured in chains, redcoat overseers ready to wield the lash on any pretext; on the other, immigrant farmers strove to carve out a living, reluctant convicts, their only available labour. Life for the children of convicts was a matter of not only grasping but creating opportunity—only to discover as free settlers began to arrive, that the Terrible Truths of their parents’ sins were beholden on them.

If they were to hold their heads high in their changing society, they must adopt the guises of subterfuge, camouflage and the evasion of truth.

Adam knows only that his father ‘went bush’ to live with Aborigines. It was kept from him that his father had been a convict bolter, killed by redcoats in a frontier skirmish.

The sorry hand of fate most-times visits only hardships on a developing community yet occasionally some pawns in the game of life, find Lady Luck intercedes to lend a hand.