Trees were the work, for ship construction, mostly Huon pine (seventy feet high, fifteen around the trunk, impossible to sink or water rot), plus a little acacia, celery-top and myrtle when they found it. Lop the branches and axe the bark, slide them down the hill banks, along perilous narrow paths cut through the forest and lined with smaller logs and a thick carpet of mulch spread around to help the timber move over the boggy ground, though it never worked that well, nothing ever worked that well, they were never so lucky. Then roll the logs into the shallows when they got to the bottom, chain the lengths together, push them out into the water (up to your neck in it) towards the boats, row the pine rafts across the harbour, then loose them, float them over, drag them up the slipways with hooks and handspikes, tons at a time, for the shipwrights to work. Everything, every day, every week, month, year, on a breakfast of nothing much.

Nothing much, so you wouldn’t run. Nothing much because the walls of an empty stomach were harder to breach than walls of stone and iron bars. Nothing much because there wasn’t much of anything anyway, except rain.

But it was easy to get away, if you were desperate enough, the forest like diving into a deep green sea. Everybody tried, at least once or twice.

John Myer lasted six days the first time, until finally he was going around in circles. Every path forged ate him up and spat him back the way he’d come. Deep rushing rivers cut him off, cliffs loomed, the rain never stopped. Twisted, spiky growth tall as horses reared on him, and distant mountains made him cower in the shadows of their impossible foothills.

He ate a fish raw. He chewed leaves, roots, until he was sick with stomach cramps. They caught him curled up and sweating a fever on a bed of moss by a creek, a small waterfall behind throwing silver mist and glistening the trees.

Sentenced to one hundred lashes and six months’ hard labour in a work gang. Sentence remitted (fifty lashes) by Commandant John Cuthbertson.

Cuthbertson had reviewed the prisoner’s record and contrived the remittance. Here in this brutal wilderness, at the edge of the world and lacking assets, the legal precedents and conventions were null and void. Reality was enough to shift abstract perspectives. New orders were required and so evolved. Cuthbertson was a drinker, but he knew how to read the swirly script in any given situation. He needed more guards, for Christ’s sake. And convict constables when he couldn’t get them.

‘Bring me Myer,’ he said.

The guard brought John Myer to see the commandant after his wounds from the flogging had been treated (soaked rags) and he was able to stand and walk again. Fifty lashes, not so bad: John Myer’s back had hardened some time ago.