A Marathon of Misery

One brick for every Australian convict: how a small town’s footpath brings history to life

Last Christmas, my partner and I travelled to Tasmania, the island state off the southern coast of mainland Australia. We visited many of its cities and country towns, and one stop, in particular, left a lasting impression. In the main street of Campbell Town, we stumbled upon something unexpected: a brick, laid flat in the pavement, bearing the name Henry Anthony, aged 19. The surname caught my eye immediately, as Anthony is my family name. I have not yet been able to establish whether this young man is directly related to me, but in that moment, the distance between past and present seemed to shrink. It was a reminder that these were not just anonymous names. Each brick marks the outline of a life, and occasionally, perhaps, a link to our own.

An example of one of the bricks on the Convict Trail that records the name and basic details of a transported convict..

Last Christmas, my partner and I travelled to Tasmania, the island state off the southern coast of mainland Australia. We visited many of its cities and country towns, and one stop, in particular, left a lasting impression. In the main street of Campbell Town, we stumbled upon something unexpected: a brick, laid flat in the pavement, bearing the name Henry Anthony, aged 19. The surname caught my eye immediately, as Anthony is my family name. I have not yet been able to establish whether this young man is directly related to me, but in that moment, the distance between past and present seemed to shrink. It was a reminder that these were not just anonymous names. Each brick marks the outline of a life, and occasionally, perhaps, a thread to our own.

It is one thing to read that 160,000 to 170,000 British and Irish convicts were sent to Australia between 1788 and 1868. It is another to imagine walking past each of their names.

So I did a thought experiment. What if we laid one convict brick for each transported person, end to end? How far would that stretch? By our estimate, a brick is about 22 centimetres long. That means a path of 170,000 bricks would extend roughly 36 kilometres (about 22 miles). In other words, a full marathon.

And so I imagined that: a marathon of misery. A path lined with the barest outline of lives uprooted and sent across the world, most never to return.

Of course, these stories are not all the same. For some, transportation brought hardship, humiliation, and poverty. For others, it offered opportunities they never would have had back in Britain or Ireland. But the scale of it, the sheer number of lives, can easily be lost when spoken of in round numbers or historical summaries.

Walking that imagined line of bricks, reading name after name, the abstraction disappears.

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Historical Note

Between 1788 and 1868, the British government transported approximately 162,000 convicts to the Australian colonies. About 75,000 of these were sent to Van Diemen’s Land (Tasmania). The bricks in Campbell Town were laid as part of a local heritage project to honour individual convicts, using data from historical records. More information about this project can be found at the Campbell Town Convict Brick Trail.