Been in the colony for a few months. Is warming up, the rain easing off. Days go by when the sun show himself riding high cross a sky that sometimes still turn from blue to grey and back to blue again. And it start not to feel so strange, once I learn to know and name things. Cross the way from the barracks, the trees in the park begin to send out new green shoots. Some with clumps of feathery yellow flowers backra call wattle, and another spiky-leafed shrub covered in red flowers that look like pods with seeds, is called banksia. Tall trees, with bark that shed, turn from red to silver. The slim leaves shimmer in the clear, bright light. Is a funny name them trees, take a while to learn how to say eucalyptus. And all that beauty make me start to think bout what freedom would be like if me and James Smith living outside them high stone walls.

I tell him, ‘From now on we must behave better than good. Make sure the superintendent look elsewhere when him looking for convict troublemakers. Keep our heads down low.’

I think I know all bout the kind of punishments them give out in the colony till a sterling-born convict by the name of Connolly show up. Connolly been labouring in one of the iron gangs out in the bush on the Great North Road. Him so mash up when him got sent back to the barracks, he have to spend a good bit of time in the hospital. But if that bush is anything like the bush we have back on the island, it could be a good place for a man to get lost in. One evening, Connolly end up sitting at the table where me and James is sitting, and when I hear him talk bout this Great North Road, I prick up me ears, listen in good.

‘All round us, everywhere you look is bush and bramble and rock,’ Connolly say. ‘We work from sunrise to sundown, covered in flies, bitten by mosquitoes, breaking rock, building bridges, laying down the road. Armed soldiers looking on. Guards who like to give out punishment.’

‘Where do you sleep, out in the open?’ him mate ask him.

‘I wouldn’t mind that,’ Connolly say. ‘No, we’re chained together inside a travelling hut, a wooden box we have to always pull.’

‘No chance of bolting then?’ him mate ask in a hushed voice.

‘Not a chance in hell. You are always watched, even when you go to relieve yourself.’

‘Think it’s better than three weeks in solitary, with the company of rats, given only bread and water?’ him mate ask.

Connolly just shake him head.

So much for that, I think, and put me mind to finding another way to bolt. A route I would never come up with, if fate not show me the way.