Convict-era Port Arthur

This is a book for the convict era afficionado, who wants to know everything from the number of lashes dispensed each year, to the productivity of Port Arthur’s coal mine. There are figures on agricultural yields and the workings of the hospital. It’s a book that takes you through the time, using mostly comments and thoughts of its time. Too many authors overlay their own feelings of retrospective disgust to places like Port Arthur. Cameron holds off intelligently, preferring to let the words and descriptions of the era work for themselves.

Adam Courtenay, The Australian

Cameron, a distinguished historian, who has also published several books on military history, does not sugar-coat the facts in this weighty tome. Cameron has drawn on a huge variety of records ... This is not light reading, but it probably pulls together the most authoritative record of just how Australia's most notious ... and miserable ... penal settlement functioned. Five stars.

Jennifer Somerville, Good Reading Magazine

It’s little wonder that Port Arthur continues to haunt the national psyche like a recurring nightmare. That’s the way it emerges from Cameron’s highly detailed study, a journey into the heart of Australian colonial darkness in which not only assigned prisoners were brutalised but in which the Indigenous population was subjected to now well documented, systematic genocide. A well-documented, often vivid picture of a man-made Hell.

Steven Carroll, The Sydney Morning Herald