The Brand On His Coat: Biographies Of Western Australian Convicts
Australian History Local History Reference Biography Colonial History Genealogy Convict Studies Western Australia History
First-edition copies of Rica Erickson’s 1983 classic, The Brand On His Coat: Biographies of Western Australian Convicts, are now scarce, especially in the tidy, fully-readable condition offered here. Published by the University of Western Australia Press and never reprinted in this exact form, the book is the go-to reference for family historians, teachers and heritage buffs who need reliable, first-hand data on more than 350 men and women transported to the Swan River Colony between 1850 and 1868. Each concise biography lists the prisoner’s crime, sentence, ship, occupation, physical description and post-sentence fate, turning what could have been a dry roll-call into a mosaic of human resilience on the early frontier.
What lifts this copy above library microfilm or later compilations is its completeness: every page is present, the binding is still tight and the only mark is a single neat tick in the index—no ex-libris stamps, no underlining, no dog-eared corners. For collectors of Australian colonial imprints, a 1980s U.W.A. paperback that has survived forty years of sunlight and schoolbags without splitting at the spine is increasingly hard to source, particularly outside Australia.
Beyond rarity, the content itself is unmatched. Erickson spent decades cross-checking prison registers, newspapers, hospital records and family papers to correct the myths that cling to Western Australia’s brief experiment with penal transportation. The result is a book that underpins museum displays, genealogical databases and walking-tour scripts from Fremantle to the Mid-West. Whether you are tracing a convict ancestor, writing local curriculum or building a heritage library, owning the original 1983 first edition keeps the chain of evidence intact and gives you the page numbers every subsequent scholar still cites.
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