HEARTS IN CHAINS: A photo of convict Emma Mayner and her children with a letter to her grandson and a hand-sewn "forget-me-not"
Maureen Upfold was a child when she piped up with the classic existential query, "Dad, why are we here?" Behind the question was not a spiritual crisis but puzzlement over why so many pale-skinned people like herself dwelled in a country once solely occupied by Aborigines. "I think our ancestors were convicts," her father, Thorvald, told her. "Let's find out." So began an investigation that led Upfold first to some basic Australian history and then to the story of her great-great grandmother, Anne Dunne, an Irishwoman convicted of stealing linen and sentenced to seven years in the penal colony...
