The Terrible Truths. SYNOPSIS

   The Terrible Truths is third in a trio of tales of the people who, over a handful of generations, created an entirely new ethos, a new culture.

   The first white Australians were convicts, pickpockets, thieves, forgers and other petty criminals despatched from bulging British gaols. In 1788, the ancient continent of Australia became the biggest prison in the world.

   Letitia Munro, first in the trio, told the true tale of those who in witless ignorance as they landed on the naked shores of Botany Bay, began transforming a wilderness into a land of free enterprise and pride.

   To Plough Van Diemen’s Land told of their children and introduced a second generation of convicts arriving to marry the sons and daughters of the first that together, they might not only carve further into the land but carve further notches in the new culture being unwittingly developed.

   The Terrible Truths takes the reader by the hand into the hearts, firstly of parents of the then next generation, then on the traumas of their children once the world did an about-face on convictism, declared it a mistake, insisted the dark truths be hidden from society so newborns might grow up ignorant of the stigma that attached to their parents.

   What the authorities, including an untruthful education system were in fact demanding, was that further Australians be denied knowledge of how the very foundation of the Australian ethos was spawned.

   Australia’s convict forebears were essentially British in culture, staunchly British in allegiance yet the axiomatic sense of freedom in their descendants was inherited not from British freedom but from British oppression. It was the very ignominy of servitude that cast their blood and guts dignity and bred in them their irrefragable support for the underdog, determination of purpose, the very essence of brotherhood in mateship and their flippant attitude to all forms of authority. Conventions of class distinction became a barrier to be bested as they cleaved their several paths out of adversity, grasping any chance to create opportunities of not only easing pain but laying foundations for an honourable future.

   Should parents, then, be withholding such gems of character from their children, hide from them the cultural trends of the self-reliance, doggedness and obstinacy of purpose their parents learned from hard knocks, those that left chain-scars on their wrists and scars of whip-lashes on their backs?

   Yet society values changed as new, free immigrants arrived. Only those without such stigmas in their bloodline could hold heads high in the modern society Australia was joining.

   Some families genuinely held that the values learned by examples set for their forebears, those of whips and chains that perforce encouraged overt outlooks and bluntly expressing forthright opinions, should not be denied their children. Others held that their children could only find a secure sense of being if unconscious of such a class distinction as existed in the unique circumstance of convictism.

   So a great dilemma was visited upon the people to create havoc within families. But could the stigmas of having convict blood flowing though one’s veins, remain forever buried?

   In The Terrible Truths, Letitia Munro’s descendants in this true tale of an Australian family, struggle to find answers.