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Dec. 17th, 2008 09:53 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
xenithEvery token tells a story
When convicts received a sentence of transportation to NSW, usually the alternative was being hanged. Some prisoners even expressed a preference for the gallows, because in the 1790s most people assumed that it was a one-way trip to Port Jackson and they'd never be seen again. Convicts awaiting transportation in jail or in the prison hulks often gave love tokens, fashioned out of defaced copper pennies, as farewell presents for their sweethearts and families.
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After 18 months of negotiations, the National Museum of Australia in Canberra has just bought the world's largest collection of convict love tokens, spanning the period from 1780 to 1856.
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"These keepsakes were wrought by hand for convicts to leave at home with the people they loved while they were sent halfway round the world. Instead of being numbers, they begin to appear as real people to us, with their own loves and attachments that were irrevocably fractured by transportation, the 18th-century equivalent of being sent to the moon."
More: The Australian, December 13, 2008
When convicts received a sentence of transportation to NSW, usually the alternative was being hanged. Some prisoners even expressed a preference for the gallows, because in the 1790s most people assumed that it was a one-way trip to Port Jackson and they'd never be seen again. Convicts awaiting transportation in jail or in the prison hulks often gave love tokens, fashioned out of defaced copper pennies, as farewell presents for their sweethearts and families.
...
After 18 months of negotiations, the National Museum of Australia in Canberra has just bought the world's largest collection of convict love tokens, spanning the period from 1780 to 1856.
...
"These keepsakes were wrought by hand for convicts to leave at home with the people they loved while they were sent halfway round the world. Instead of being numbers, they begin to appear as real people to us, with their own loves and attachments that were irrevocably fractured by transportation, the 18th-century equivalent of being sent to the moon."
More: The Australian, December 13, 2008
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Date: 2008-12-17 12:55 am (UTC)You seen those machines (I think they only have them in the US) where you sitck in a 1c coin and it gets flattened & stamped with some other image (e.g. San Francisco trams)
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Date: 2008-12-17 04:05 pm (UTC)