Bassett Dickson was recorded at Campbell Town, head of a family of six people living in a finished stone residence, all free it is noted. All free?
That made me think that a British penal colony was much like a slave state in the USA, that the 1843 census could even ask the question: "How many of these persons are free?"
It gives one a shudder. It is unimaginable that such a question could be asked on a census in my lifetime. They still ask about religion and Australians blithely, freely, tell the government they are atheist and Jedi and a hundred other possibilities these days.
Yet 50 years after that 1843 census, many of the Tasmanian convicts had made their lives much better, by dint of labour and a desire to be free and get ahead.
Own your own block of land. Put food on the table. Be respected. The newspapers are full of praise for fine orchards, acres of improved pasture and cleared forests. Churches being built. Road trusts operating. The railway going through at great expense. And I think it is not just soldiers who served in war that we ought remember, but also those men and women that raised them, who went on working day after day, even if they lost them.
They married into other families, and more and more, and community networks are apparent in the names repeated over generations in the Country News that we can access now on the NLA Trove. Which was where I started three hours ago, noticing three Dicksons in Country News (20 April 1950, Launceston Examiner, Tas. p. 16. One, of course, was marrying my cousin Brian McCarthy.