W. S. Hill–Reid John Grant's Journey 1803-1811

Recently Mr. Hill-Reid discovered, in a trunk in the vaults of a London bank, the journal and letters of John Grant, an educated young man sentenced in 1803 to life transport-ation for a crime passionnel.

The story that emerges from these papers is as astonishing as the circumstances of their discovery. In a fit of thwarted love for the daughter of Lord Dudley and Ward, Grant had wounded the family solicitor 'in the hams'.

He was sentenced to death, but while he was in Newgate his sentence was commuted and, taking his harpsi-chord and a copy of Racine on board, he survived (as many did not) the voyage to New South Wales.

Grant had charm and good looks and could have easily endeared himself to the officials—and the wives of the officials—but his strongest friendships were with two people who became his good and evil genius Bridget Doulan, an Irish widow, and Sir Henry Hayes Brown, the flamboyant Irish baronet and convict who was a constant thorn in the side of the authorities.

Under Sir Henry's promptings Grant's sense of social injustice became inflamed and he embarked upon a disastrous series of protests against the barbaric conditions in the colony, which ended with his receiving twenty-five lashes on the penal settlement of Norfolk Island.

After further sufferings for his ideals which almost broke his spirit, Grant received a pardon through the offices of Admiral Bligh and returned to England in 1811.

This is the story of an exceptional man in exceptional conditions. Grant was a poet and a lover of equity: he found himself, sixteen years after the first shipload had landed at Botany Bay, in a com-munity where the elementary principles of justice were unknown. John Grant's journey records some remarkable first-hand impressions of early Australian life. But its interest is not mainly historical, for above all it recounts the odyssey of one suffering human spirit.

Grant's letters and journals were discovered by W. S. Hill-Reid, a banking historian, in the vaults of a London bank in 1955, where they had lain for some 150 years. They contain first-hand descriptions of prominent identities and of the harsh conditions in the colony between 1804 and 1811. They provide an interesting commentary by a convict on colonial life at the beginning of the nineteenth century.