G'day BSeed,

I just stumbled into this thread to see what had you higher'n a kite. Sounds like a wonderful session.

BTW: Your Aussie singer would have been singing about "Pierce the Cannibal" a compulsive escapee from the convict prison at Macquarie Harbour on the west coast of Tasmania. Although it is wonderful country to us today, it was a bleak gale-wracked hell-hole to convicts sent there on second or third offence ... resentenced for not knuckling down under the regime.

They worked in remote camps, felling the precious Huon Pine, perhaps the best boat builing timber ever - fine, strong and resistant to almost all marine pests - and building boats for the British Navy or Mercahant Marine. There was no real "Prison" because escapees were faced with impenetrable forests where they could scarcely make 2 or 3 miles a day ... then where could they go - to Hobart a 100 miles east south east - and still a prison camp at the end of the world?

Many prisoners escaped to be free from the lash for some short time - and, if they were lucky, to be hanged and free for ever more. Before the prison reform of the Quakers and others in the mid-1850s, convicts were viewed as a threat to the wealthy - best removed as far away from decent English society as humanly possible and worked to death for some small profit for the establishment, just as they had been been in America until the revolution.

Regards,

Bob Bolton