Attempting to identify the genesis of a novel can be a fool’s errand. Inspiration is as often unconscious as conscious; our imagination is stirred by myriad events, beliefs, and philosophies, by art and music and film, by travel and family history. It wasn’t until I’d finished writing The Exiles that I realized I’d twined together three disparate strands of my own life history to tell the story: a transformative six weeks in Australia in my mid-twenties; the months I spent interviewing mothers and daughters for a book about feminism; and my experience teaching women in prison.
When I learned, as a graduate student living in Virginia, that the local Rotary Club was sponsoring fellowships to Australia, I leaped at the opportunity. I’d been obsessed with the place since my father, a historian, gave me his marked-up copy of Robert Hughes’s 1986 book The Fatal Shore: The Epic of Australia’s Founding. (He spent a year teaching in Melbourne when I was in college.) Only one chapter in Hughes’s six-hundred-page book, “Bunters, Mollies and Sable Brethren,” specifically addressed the experiences of convict women and Aboriginal people. This was the chapter that interested me most. I wanted to learn more.
As one of four Rotary “ambassadors” to the state of Victoria, I toured farms and factories, met mayors and minor celebrities, and learned Australian folk tunes and slang. I fell in love with the wide-open vistas, the offhanded friendliness that seemed to be a hallmark of the culture, and the vividly colored birds and flowers. The Aussies I met were happy to talk about their national parks, their pioneering spirit, and their barbecued shrimp, but seemed reluctant to discuss some of the more complicated aspects of their history. When I did press them to talk about race and class, I was gently, subtly, rebuked.
Several years later, in the mid-1990s, my mother, Christina L. Baker, a women’s studies professor, worked on an oral-history project at the University of Maine in which she interviewed so-called second-wave feminists who’d been active in the women’s movement in the 1960s, ’70s, and ’80s. I’d recently moved to New York City and met a number of young women who identified themselves as third-wave feminists, literal and figurative daughters of my mother’s subjects. My mother and I decided to write a book together: The Conversation Begins: Mothers and Daughters Talk About Living Feminism. The experience became a powerful lesson for me in the value of women telling the truth about their lives.
Some years later, after learning about the limited resources available to women in prison, I created a proposal to teach memoir writing at the Edna Mahan Correctional Facility for Women, an hour from my house in New Jersey. My class of twelve maximum-security inmates wrote poems, essays, songs, and stories; it was the first time many of them had shared the most painful and intimate aspects of their experience. They were terrified, relieved, and searingly honest. When I read aloud a Maya Angelou poem that contains the lines “You may trod me in the very dirt / But still, like dust, I’ll rise,” more than one inmate wept with recognition.
As a novelist I’ve learned to trust a particular tingle, a kind of spidey sense. Until I stumbled on the little-known historical fact of the orphan trains, I had little interest in writing about the past. But the minute I heard about the American social experiment to send two hundred and fifty thousand children on trains from the East Coast to the Midwest, I knew I’d found my subject. The research I did for the novel Orphan Train laid the groundwork for another novel about rural life in early-to-mid twentieth-century America: A Piece of the World, the real-life story of an ordinary woman on the coast of Maine who became the subject of Andrew Wyeth’s painting Christina’s World. These leaps of time and place inspired me to pursue an even more ambitious story, this time a century earlier and half a world away—one that would address those questions I’d had about Australia’s complex past that were never answered to my satisfaction twenty-five years earlier.
As I began to delve into the topic, I found the website of Dr. Alison Alexander, a retired lecturer at the University of Tasmania who has written or edited thirty-three books, including The Companion to Tasmanian History; Tasmania’s Convicts: How Felons Built a Free Society; Repression, Reform & Resilience: A History of the Cascades Female Factory; Convict Lives at the Cascades Female Factory; and The Ambitions of Jane Franklin (for which she won the Australian National Biography Award). These books became primary sources for this novel. Dr. Alexander, who is herself descended from convicts, became an invaluable resource and a dear friend. She gave me a massive reading list and I devoured it all, from information about the prison system in England in the 1800s to essays about the daily tasks of convict maids to contemporaneous novels and nonfiction accounts. On my research trips to Tasmania, she introduced me to experts, took me to historic sites, and answered question after question, providing vital clarification and insights. She and her lovely husband, James, hosted me for dinner in their Hobart home on numerous occasions. Most of all, she read my manuscript with a keen and expert eye. I am grateful for her rigor, her encyclopedic knowledge, and her kindness.
Notable among the contemporary books I read on the subject of convict women are Abandoned Women: Scottish Convicts Exiled Beyond the Seas, by Lucy Frost; Depraved and Disorderly: Female Convicts, Sexuality and Gender in Colonial Australia, by Joy Damousi; A Cargo of Women: Susannah Watson and the Convicts of the Princess Royal, by Babette Smith; Footsteps and Voices: A Historical Look into the Cascades Female Factory, by Lucy Frost and Christopher Downes; Notorious Strumpets and Dangerous Girls, by Phillip Tardif; The Floating Brothel: The Extraordinary True Story of Female Convicts Bound for Botany Bay, by Sian Rees; The Tin Ticket: The Heroic Journey of Australia’s Convict Women, by Deborah Swiss; Convict Places: A Guide to Tasmanian Sites, by Michael Nash; To Hell or to Hobart: The Story of an Irish Convict Couple Transported to Tasmania in the 1840s, by Patrick Howard; and Bridget Crack, by Rachel Leary. Books I read about Australian history and culture include, among others, In Tasmania: Adventures at the End of the World, by Nicholas Shakespeare; 30 Days in Sydney: A Wildly Distorted Account and True History of the Kelly Gang, by Peter Carey; The Songlines, by Bruce Chatwin; and The Men that God Forgot, by Richard Butler.
A number of articles and essays were useful, especially “Disrupting the Boundaries: Resistance and Convict Women,” by Joy Damousi; “Women Transported: Myth and Reality,” by Gay Hendriksen; “Whores, Damned Whores, and Female Convicts: Why Our History Does Early Australian Colonial Women a Grave Injustice,” by Riaz Hassan; “British Humanitarians and Female Convict Transportation: The Voyage Out,” by Lucy Frost; and “Convicts, Thieves, Domestics, and Wives in Colonial Australia: The Rebellious Lives of Ellen Murphy and Jane New,” by Caroline Forell. I found a wealth of information online at sites such as Project Gutenberg, Academia.edu, the Female Convicts Research Centre (femaleconvicts.org.au), the Cascades Female Factory (femalefactory.org.au), and the Tasmanian Aboriginal Centre (tacinc.com.au).
Nineteenth-century novels and nonfiction accounts I read include Life of Elizabeth Fry: Compiled from Her Journal (1855), by Susanna Corder; Elizabeth Fry (1884), by Mrs. E. R. Pitman; The Broad Arrow: Being Passages from the History of Maida Gwynnham, a Lifer (1859), by Oline Keese (a pseudonym for Caroline Leakey); For the Term of his Natural Life (1874), by Marcus Andrew Hislop Clarke; Christine: Or, Woman’s Trials and Triumphs (1856), by Laura Curtis Bullard; and The Journals of George Augustus Robinson, Chief Protector, Port Phillip Aboriginal Protectorate, Volume 2 (1840–1841).
As I researched Mathinna’s story, I found the following resources especially valuable: The Last of the Tasmanians: Or, The Black War of Van Diemen’s Land (1870), by James Bonwick; Dr. Alexander’s biography of Jane Franklin (mentioned above); Wanting, a novel by Richard Flanagan; Tunnerminnerwait and Maulboyheenner: The Involvement of Aboriginal People from Tasmania in Key Events of Early Melbourne, by Clare Land; “Tasmanian Gothic: The Art of Tasmania’s Forgotten War,” by Gregory Lehman; “Extermination, Extinction, Genocide: British Colonialism and Tasmanian Aborigines,” by Shayne Breen; “In Black and White,” by Jared Diamond; and “From Terror to Genocide: Britain’s Tasmanian Penal Colony and Australia’s History Wars,” by Benjamin Madley. I was inspired by excerpts from the Bangarra Dance Theatre’s performance of “Mathinna,” choreographed by Stephen Page.
I am grateful to Dr. Gregory Lehman, Pro Vice-Chancellor of Aboriginal Leadership at the University of Tasmania and a descendant of the Trawlwulwuy people of northeast Tasmania, for critiquing the sections about Mathinna and the history of the Tasmanian Aboriginal people.
I strove to be historically accurate as much as possible, but ultimately The Exiles is a work of fiction. For example, while Mathinna’s family history is factual, her real-life counterpart was five years old, not eight, when the Franklins brought her to Hobart Town. The question of whether free settlers dropped handkerchiefs at the feet of the convict women is disputed; I chose to include it. The novel was fact-checked by Dr. Alexander, Dr. Lehman, and others; the few changes I made to the historical record were done consciously and in service to the story.
Today, about 20 percent of Australians—a total of nearly five million people—are descended from transported British convicts. But only recently have many Australians begun embracing their convict heritage and coming to terms with the legacy of colonization. I was lucky to research this book when I did; a number of historic sites and museum exhibits are new. Though descendants of convicts now make up three quarters of Tasmania’s white population, when I first visited the island several years ago the convict museum at the Cascades Female Factory was only three years old. The permanent exhibitions showcasing Aboriginal history, art, and culture at the Tasmanian Museum & Art Gallery had opened two weeks earlier. In addition to these places, I visited Runnymede, a National Trust site preserved as an 1840s whaling captain’s house, in New Town, Tasmania; the Hobart Convict Penitentiary; the Richmond Gaol Historic Site; the Maritime Museum of Tasmania; and convict sites and museums in Sydney and Melbourne.
I am lucky to have an editor, Katherine Nintzel, who is willing to read and critique multiple drafts and engage every nuance, no matter how slight. With this novel she was like a personal trainer for my brain, motivating me to dig deeper and work harder than I ever have before; I can’t overstate how grateful I am for her wisdom and patience. Thanks also to the rest of my team at William Morrow/HarperCollins for their unstinting support: Brian Murray, Liate Stehlik, Frank Albanese, Jennifer Hart, Brittani Hilles, Kelly Rudolph, Kaitlin Harri, Amelia Wood, Molly Gendell, and Stephanie Vallejo. To Mumtaz Mustafa for the stunning cover. To Lisa Sharkey for sage advice. Eric Simonoff at WME, Geri Thoma at Writers House, and Julie Barer at The Book Group have been trusted advisors.
Bonnie Friedman read every page of the manuscript more than once and engaged with me so deeply that I felt I had a true ally, a reader who understood what I was trying to do as well as if not better than I did, and inspired me to get there. Amanda Eyre Ward dropped everything to read when I needed a pair of fresh eyes (and quickly saw that Mathinna’s story should begin the book). Anne Burt, Alice Elliott Dark, and Matthew Thomas provided welcome insights. Carolyn Fagan was an invaluable support at every stage.
Writing a novel can be a lonely enterprise. I am grateful for the camaraderie of the Grove Street Gang, a writers’ reading group that includes Bonnie, Anne, and Alice, as well as Marina Budhos and Alexandra Enders. Kristin Hannah, Paula McLain, Meg Wolitzer, Lisa Gornick, Jane Green, Jean Hanff Korelitz, Maureen Connolly, Pamela Redmond, Laurie Albanese, John Veague, and Nancy Star have been true writerly friends and allies. Thanks to my stalwart Montclair Writers’ Group and the NYC-based novelists’ group Word of Mouth (WOM), as well as MoMoLo and KauaiGals (you know who you are!).
My sisters—Cynthia Baker, Clara Baker, and Catherine Baker-Pitts—mean everything to me. They read early drafts, helped to hash out storylines, and are my fellow adventurers in life. I am grateful for moral support from my father, William Baker, his partner, Jane Wright, and my mother-in-law, Carole Kline. My three sons, Hayden, Will, and Eli, bring me endless joy. And what is there left to say about my husband, David Kline, who has been with me at every step and makes my life richer in every way?