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Samuel Speed
The Conversation:
Samuel Speed was the last living Australian convict. He was transported to Western Australia in 1866 and died in 1938, just short of his 100th birthday. ...
Speed was born in Birmingham, England in 1841. He had one brother and one sister, but little else about his family or early life is known. He was in his early twenties when he was tried in Oxfordshire in 1863 for setting fire to a haystack. Homeless and begging for food, he had committed arson in order to get arrested and spend some time in a warm cell. He was sentenced to seven years of convict transportation to Australia.
References and Links
The Conversation article, source of the above.
Image from the article, attributed to The Mirror, 1938.
Hill, Anthony 2021, The Last Convict, Penguin.
This page incorporates material from Garry Gillard's Freotopia website, that he started in 2014 and the contents of which he donated to Wikimedia Australia in 2024. The content was originally created on 13 February, 2018 and hosted at freotopia.org/people/speed.html (it was last updated on 14 January, 2024), and has been edited since it was imported here (see page history). The donated data is also preserved in the Internet Archive's collection.