Convicts in Australia Magwitch, a main character of Charles Dickens' 1861 novel "Great Expectations". The most famous convict novel is Marcus Clarke's "For the Term of His Natural Life" (1874), followed by John Boyle O'Reilly's "Moondyne" (1879). "The Broad Arrow" by Caroline Woolmer Leakey was one of the first novels to depict the convict experience, and one of the only to feature a female convict as its protagonist (Marcus Clarke drew on Leakey's book in writing "For the Term of His Natural Life"). Thomas Keneally explores the convict era in his novels "Bring Larks and Heroes" (1967) and "The Playmaker" (1987). Convicts feature
Convicts in Australia heavily in Patrick White's take on the Eliza Fraser story, the 1976 novel "A Fringe of Leaves". Convictism is canvassed in Bryce Courtenay's "Australian trilogy": "The Potato Factory" (1995), "Tommo & Hawk" (1997) and "Solomon's Song" (1999). The title character of Peter Carey's 1997 novel "Jack Maggs" is a reworking of Dickens' Magwitch character. Many modern works of Tasmanian Gothic focus on the state's convict past, including "Gould's Book of Fish" (2001) by Richard Flanagan, a fictionalised account of convict artist William Buelow Gould's imprisonment at Macquarie Harbour. Kate Grenville based the novel "The Secret River" (2005) on the life