'Convict Orphans presents a micro-history approach to understanding the lives of children in Tasmania’s Orphan School, an institution known under different names across time, but which was one of the colony’s most important institutions for children separated from their parents. As Lucy Frost notes, most of the children who passed through its doors were neither convicts nor orphans. Rather, they were children whose parents were unable to maintain custody of their children, or prohibited from doing so. A clear majority – 702 of the 997 children in Frost’s database – had at least one convict parent, and Frost illustrates the ways in which removal of children was used as a punishment for female convicts, as well as the ongoing effects of having been a convict on parents’ abilities to maintain stable family lives after their emancipation.' (Introduction)
