"John Frost was a Chartist who had led an armed attack on Newport in 1839, for which he received a sentence of death, later commuted to transportation for life. He and his two Chartist companions, Zephaniah Williams and William Jones, arrived in Van Diemen's Land in 1840. In his narrative, printed from notes of speeches made after his return to England, Frost describes some of his experiences as a convict during the first three-and-a-half years of his sentence. He was made a police clerk in the office of Commandant Booth at Port Arthur, but after 12 months was removed from his office and placed in a labour gang for between two and three years, due, he claims, to the contents of a letter he had written his wife. While he was police clerk at Port Arthur, Frost read through thousands of cases of breach of discipline by convicts, and bitterly denounces the cruelty and injustice with which the convicts were treated in Van Diemen's Land" (Walsh and Hooton 64).
Source
Walsh, Kay and Joy Hooton. Australian Autobiographical Narratives : An Annotated Bibliography. Canberra : Australian Scholarly Editions Centre, University College, ADFA and National Library of Australia, 1993.
