Overview

Convicted of stealing a coat in 1832, Benjamin Stanton was sentenced to seven years transportation to Van Diemen's Land. He spent twelve months on the prison hulk, 'Euryalus' and then another four months on the convict transport ship 'Isabella' before arriving in Hobart Town on the 14th of November 1833. In January 1834 Benjamin was one of the first sixty-eight boys to be incarcerated at Point Puer, across the bay from Point Arthur, where a Boys' Reformatory was being established. His years at Point Puer with its deprivations, misbehaviour and severe punishments are examined in detail. With further offences, Benjamin Stanton managed to stretch his original seven years transportation to sixteen years' incarceration at Point Puer, Port Arthur and on a Hobart Town chain gang, before eventually receiving a Governor's pardon in 1849. As a thirty-year-old he left Tasmania and settled in Geelong, Victoria where he took a common law wife and had two sons, Benjamin, and George. Both these boys had large families with intriguing histories of their own. Eventually one of George's daughters, Roseanna Stanton, gave birth to her fourth illegitimate son, Charles William, in 1908. That boy became Charles William Hopkins who was my father.

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9781922912190

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Jeff Hopkins (1950) is a retired schoolteacher. He lives in Western Australia. As the drama master at a private boys' school, he wrote ten original musical plays and produced and directed them at the school.In 1992, he researched and wrote a family history, 'Life's Race Well Run', and after retiring in 2006 he has written twenty-two books: sixteen novels, a memoir, four 'faction' (fiction based on fact) biographies, and a revised version of his family history. Jeff previously maintained he wrote entirely for pleasure and to fill in the long summer months between football seasons. Recently he has admitted that he set himself the task of writing in several different genres as part of a three-year programme to learn about creative writing and self-publishing. That three-year programme has now extended to eight years. He said it was like an undergraduate degree course for which there was a strict budget and work schedule. It has since become clear that the whole experiment was one of the most interesting and absorbing things he had done in his life. He continues to write.

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