I’m lucky that I’ve never had to fight for my freedom in the extreme way that many of the characters in this series are forced to do. Everyone in this book is searching for their own kind of freedom, and not everyone finds it. However, through my work as a refugee advocate setting up the Tasmanian Asylum Seeker Support and as a TAFE teacher, I’ve met many people from all over the world whose lives have tested them in this way, and their stories were what inspired me to write this series of books.
In real life, the choices that are laid out in front of us are more blurry, more unpredictable, and more complex than those shown in this series. (And real people don’t have the option of flipping back a few pages and trying a different choice!) But I hope that it will lead you to think about what freedom means to you and how far you might go to achieve it – and to think about how the people you see all around you are, in fact, Freedom Finders.
Because humans are Freedom Finders – that’s just what we do. That’s why we migrate, why we begin new jobs or families or relationships, why we try new things, or have dreams, or reach out to others. That search for freedom often plays an important role in why we make the choices that we do. We are all searching for whatever makes us feel free in our hearts.
I hope that you enjoy the journey.
EMILY CONOLAN, 2018
CONTENTS
PROLOGUE
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
37
38
39
40
41
42 – EPILOGUE
FACT FILE: SMALLPOX
FACT FILE: PICKPOCKETS
FACT FILE: CHILD LABOUR
FACT FILE: PRISONS
FACT FILE: TASMANIAN ABORIGINAL PEOPLE
FACT FILE: WHAT HAPPENED TO WAYLITJA’S PEOPLE?
FACT FILE: CONVICTS IN VAN DIEMEN’S LAND
FACT FILE: MATTHEW BRADY
FACT FILE: IRISH POLITICAL PRISONERS IN VAN DIEMEN’S LAND
DID THAT REALLY HAPPEN?
WORLD MAP
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
You squeal with delight. You are three years old, it is 1815 in Kilkenny, Ireland, and it’s the first time you’ve sat astride a horse. You feel her hot, wide body breathing beneath you.
‘Shall we make her walk, then?’ asks Da.
Just then a shout comes from the master. ‘Ryan! That’s my finest mare! What the hell do you think you’re doing?’
Da slips you down from the horse’s back and sends you running home to Ma, for he doesn’t want you to see him be whipped by the master. He doesn’t want you to know, yet, that this is the way things are for Irish folk like you.
YOU’RE SEVEN, AND Da’s working for a different master now. One golden afternoon, he brings home a horse: an old mare, whiskery around the mouth, that he’s talked the master into letting him keep now she’s considered useless.
Your ma curses your da’s lack of sense – ‘Where are we going to keep her? How will we afford the food?’ – but you and your older sister, Erin, will love this mare till her dying days. You will plait her tail and check her hooves for stones like Da shows you, and learn to ride bareback, and you will cry for days when she reaches the end of her life a year later and goes to horse heaven.
YOU’RE TEN YEARS old. Erin would have turned eighteen, but she died last year in childbirth. The baby died too. Most Irish families are large, but your ma had ‘women’s troubles’, and now you’re the only child left.
Da is away a lot. You’re not sure why; he’s secretive about it. But then one night he has a bit to drink, and he tells you everything: how he fought in the Irish Rebellion of 1798, and how he’s now working on forming a new secret society of Irishmen to free Ireland from English rule. ‘We’ll be our own masters!’ he tells you. He’s a hero in your eyes.
IT IS 1825 and you’re thirteen years old. Last year, Da was caught setting fire to an English government ship. Soldiers took him away to a prison hulk somewhere on the River Thames in London. His case still hasn’t been heard in court.
After he was taken, you and Ma also left dear, green Ireland for the crowded, cobbled roads of London. Even now, a year on, you watch the horses clopping by, their carriages carrying fancy Englishmen, and you miss Ireland, and Da, and the horses terribly. You miss the sweet grassy smell of horse-breath, and the bright-blue skies.
You and Ma found a one-room hovel in a London slum. The rats are fatter than you are. The idea of freedom for Ireland seems a distant, shiny, imaginary thing, like a soap-bubble carried on the wind. You can barely keep it in sight – but you know that you must. For Da.
Go to scene 1.
There’s a clatter and a scream. A wooden crack splits the air, and everyone in the narrow street whips around as if a musket’s been shot. You see it all in an instant: a carriage with a snapped axle, tilting dangerously to one side; the carriage-driver, bruised and bloody, thrown to the ground; and amid the chaos, wild and angry as a giant, the horse, rearing up on his back legs and neighing in panic.
Mothers snatch their babies away, and little boys in braces and caps run out of their houses to look. Someone is helping the carriage driver to press a towel to the wound on his head, but no one knows how to settle the horse; a couple of people are shouting and waving their arms, trying to frighten him into submission, but they are making things worse.
You don’t know what you’re going to do, or how – you only know that this is your moment to act. That big wild beast
