Ard Mhacha is indulging in hyperbole when she claims that "...Van Diemen's land and other hell holes were worse than slavery for the poor unfortunates." As someone who both lives in Tasmania and has read Robert Hughes' excellent book 'The Fatal Shore' I can assure you that this is nonsense unless you were silly enough to buck the system and get yourself sent to Macquarie Harbour. We all know that people were trasported for absurdly trivial offences but it was only the real hard cases who ended up in places like the harbour and Norfolk Island, which was the worst hell-hole of all.Keep your nose clean and serve your time and you could end up not only free but prosperous in the new colony. Convicts also had some limited rights and were protected by law when they were sent out as labour to farms etc - Hughes shows convicingly that the well known cases of abuse were well-known precisely because they were uncommon. Comments like Mhaccha's are in danger of trivialising the absolute unrelieved horror of slavery.