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Date and Time:
Sun, July 8, 2018 1:30 PM –
3:30 PM AEST
The Launch is FREE but you
need to register
on Evenbrite https://www.eventbrite.com/e/book-launch-the-stony-ground-tickets-46705445244
Location:
Hawkesbury Regional
Museum 8 Baker Street
Windsor, NSW 2756
Michael Crowley is a UK based
poet and playwright
whose debut novel, The Stony Ground
(Waterside Press) tells the story of Cornish
farmworker James Ruse, reprieved from
the hangman’s noose and transported to
Botany Bay on the First Fleet in 1788.
Ruse, commemorated as a
pioneer in his adopted country, was
reputedly the first prisoner ashore,
carrying an officer on his back. Eventually
pardoned, at Experiment Farm he became
Australia’s first settled farmer, the first
ex-convict to be granted land and the first
settler to become self-sufficient, bringing
him into conflict with indigenous people.
In this gripping historical
novel the life of Australia’s most symbolic
convict is described in Ruse’s own voice.
In 2016 Smokestack Books
published Michael's poetry collection
First Fleet, a sequence of narrative
verse in the voices of convicts, marines and
Aboriginal people of 1788.
As a dramatist Michael has
written for stage, screen and radio. He was
previously writer in residence in a young
offenders institution in Lancashire and
continues to work in UK prisons often
running session with prisoners on the penal
settlement at Sydney Cove.
He has written a textbook on
creative writing and rehabilitation,
Behind the Lines published by Waterside
Press.
*Advance
Notice:
FELLOWSHIP OF FIRST FLEETERS
Annual
General Meeting
will be
held on Saturday 27th October
2018
at a
location in Southern Sydney ( to be
confirmed)
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