The journals of Robert Deveraux, one of the leaders of the revolutionary Young Ireland group of 1848, have lain undiscovered for more than a century on a hop farm in Tasmania. Uncovered, they tell the story of a highly unusual rebel.
Devereux and his colleagues are from the Irish gentry: activists who believe so passionately in Irish freedom that they are prepared to hazard their lives of privilege in its cause. Paradoxically, they know little at first hand of the ordinary people they champion, who are ravaged by the Great Famine.
A panicked British government, fearing an armed rising led by Devereux, and disturbed by his celebrity status in Europe, convicts him of sedition. He is shipped out of Ireland, and what follows is an enthralling account of espionage, violence and a lone man’s defiance of a subtle and oppressive foe. Sent first to a prison hulk in Bermuda, Devereux is then exiled to Van Die man’s Land, the British Empire’s most far-flung colony, where he joins other Young Ireland leaders. Political prisoners, they are never actually imprisoned: the colony itself is their prison.
In Van Dieman’s Land, Devereux enters into a life that greatly changes him, falling in love with a young Irish convict woman, and through her, coming to know the people he’s long romanticised. He also buys a farm, in partnership with an enterprising train robber who has been his convict servant. But his cause, and the life he has lost, will not let him go.
