The Adventures of Ralph Rashkigh (Jonathan Cape, 7s. 6d.) is
the story of a convict sentenced to transportation in 1825, of how he served part of his sentence, and the adventures he had before the remainder was remitted. He was the only convict in the Australian penal settlement on Emu Plains ever known to have won a case against an overseer. His adventures include a spell in the coal mines at Newcastle, a month or two among the lime-burners, innumerable floggings, some weeks as cook to a gang of bushrangers, four years living among the aborigines, the rescue of two castaways, his pardon and honourable death in a civil career. The whole story of brutality and wild cruelty, at a time when Great Britain was foremost in the - attempt to suppress the slave trade, is a monument to the inconsistency of human nature, and unfor- tunately the more revolting parts are extremely well docu- mented, so that, though we are permitted to doubt the authen- ticity of the personal narrative, the record of convict life at the time must be taken as literally true. Lord Birkenhead contributes a preface in which he makes the surprising, but typical, remark that the system "'worked admirably on the whole."
(Continued on page 1029.)
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