John Devoy was a part of the Irish Republican Brotherhood and Fenian Rising and the mastermind behind the most daring prison escape in Australian history, The Catalpa Rescue. Six Irish prisoners escaped including James Wilson and Michael Harrington.
19 Crimes turned convicts into colonists. Upon conviction, British rogues, guilty of at least one of the 19 crimes, were sentenced to live in Australia rather than death. For the rough-hewn prisoners who made it to shore, a new world awaited. As pioneers in a frontier penal colony, they forged a new country and new lives, brick by brick.
