Port Arthur Sketchbook
Condition: SECONDHAND
This is a secondhand book. The jacket image is a photograph of the exact copy we have in stock. This image shows the condition of this book. Further condition remarks are below.
Condition remarks:
Book: Good
Jacket: Very good
Pages: Good
Few places in the Southern Hemisphere carry the weight of human suffering and colonial ambition quite like Port Arthur, Tasmania — and Port Arthur Sketchbook renders this haunting history with both visual majesty and narrative depth. Arthur Phillips' evocative drawings bring the crumbling sandstone ruins, brooding coastlines, and ghostly penitentiary structures to vivid life, while Patsy Adam Smith's accompanying text grounds each image in the rich, often brutal history of one of Australia's most notorious convict settlements, established in 1830 as a place of secondary punishment for the most hardened of British colonial prisoners. Together, Phillips and Adam Smith craft a work of remarkable cultural resonance, presenting Port Arthur not merely as a relic of penal history but as a symbol of Australia's complex national identity — one forged from hardship, isolation, and eventual redemption. Adam Smith, a celebrated chronicler of Australian working-class and pioneering history, brings her characteristic warmth and scholarly rigour to the text, ensuring the human stories behind the stones are never lost. Published by Rigby Limited, this sketchbook format sits in a proud tradition of Australian pictorial histories, and leaves the reader wondering what other silenced voices still echo through those limestone walls.
Author: Arthur Phillips (Drawings); Patsy Adam Smith (Text)
Format: Hardback
Genre: Australian history
Condition remarks:
Book: Good
Jacket: Very good
Pages: Good
Few places in the Southern Hemisphere carry the weight of human suffering and colonial ambition quite like Port Arthur, Tasmania — and Port Arthur Sketchbook renders this haunting history with both visual majesty and narrative depth. Arthur Phillips' evocative drawings bring the crumbling sandstone ruins, brooding coastlines, and ghostly penitentiary structures to vivid life, while Patsy Adam Smith's accompanying text grounds each image in the rich, often brutal history of one of Australia's most notorious convict settlements, established in 1830 as a place of secondary punishment for the most hardened of British colonial prisoners. Together, Phillips and Adam Smith craft a work of remarkable cultural resonance, presenting Port Arthur not merely as a relic of penal history but as a symbol of Australia's complex national identity — one forged from hardship, isolation, and eventual redemption. Adam Smith, a celebrated chronicler of Australian working-class and pioneering history, brings her characteristic warmth and scholarly rigour to the text, ensuring the human stories behind the stones are never lost. Published by Rigby Limited, this sketchbook format sits in a proud tradition of Australian pictorial histories, and leaves the reader wondering what other silenced voices still echo through those limestone walls.