Babette Smith
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Babette Alison Smith was an Australian colonial historian, mediator and business executive. She wrote books about the convicts transported to Australia.
Babette’s first book, A Cargo of Women, grew from this discovery that her great-great-grandmother, Susannah Watson, was a convict transported to Australia in 1829. A Cargo of Women is a work of great originality, combining Susannah’s story with the lives of 99 other prisoners on the Princess Royal.
Scholarship and narrative flair are the hallmarks of Babette Smith’s work. For her, convict women were neither whores nor society’s victims, but individuals doing their best in very tough times. In Australia’s Birthstain she examined the role of homophobia in attitudes to male convicts; in The Luck of the Irish she followed a cohort of male prisoners.
