There's convicts and there's convicts.

During our time in Australia we've been learning and reading a bit about how in the early 1800's the British "establishment" rather fancied thinning out the rabble that were clogging not only their jails and courts but also causing their posh neighbourhoods and green parks to look somewhat untidy. Fully staffed with all the servants they needed, it was time to clean up the streets, cut incarceration costs and numbers, while also addressing petty crime. But in reality, they just wanted to thin out the rabble.

And so was born the world's first first form of subsidised public transportation.

The "First Fleet" of seven hundred and fifty one merely desperate and starving who got busted for lifting the odd carrot or a crust or two found themselves whisked off on an early P&O (Prisoners and Officers) Southampton to Sydney cruise where the recently found continent had been lying since Cook's day, waiting for the Brits, who, having nailed their colours to it, had been struggling to come up with an idea of what to do with it.

Colonisation through "Transportation" was a stroke of genius. An ideal solution, killing a number of birds with one relatively inexpensive stone. And so was born Australia with penal colonies dotted around the eastern seaboard. The light fingered found themselves in the likes of Sydney and Brisbane. The real bad guys got the alternate cruise to Port Arthur in Tasmania and it's from here we write.

After hanging out in Eden for two weeks we finally caught a northerly and knocked off the four hundred and something miles in two and half days, one of them a fine darts score of one hundred and eighty taking us down into the Roaring Forties. No roaring as yet. Just a good breeze blowing us south and more of that current. Quite how we get back uphill I don't know.

Meanwhile, it's a tour of the colony, preceded by.........wait for it........a boat trip round the bay.

Another $10 well spent.

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