The Exiles

This is a full-length historical novel by Christina Baker Kline, author of Orphan Train; the original English title is The Exiles. Set in the mid-nineteenth century, it interweaves the fates of three women between England and Australia. Evangeline, a young governess in London, is seduced by her employer's son, driven from the house after becoming pregnant and then charged with theft and imprisoned in the notorious Newgate Prison. Months later she is sentenced to transportation to "the land beyond the seas," Van Diemen's Land (present-day Tasmania). Aboard the Medea, an old slave ship converted for convict transport, she meets Hazel, a Scottish girl sentenced to seven years' transportation for stealing a silver spoon; Hazel is a skilled midwife and herbalist who trades her medical knowledge for favors of all kinds on the voyage. Meanwhile, Mathinna, an Aboriginal girl of Van Diemen's Land and the orphaned daughter of a chieftain of the Lowreenne people, is adopted by the new governor and his wife and becomes an experiment in the colonizers' "civilizing" of Aboriginal people. Through the eyes of these three women, the novel presents the crowding and disease aboard a convict ship, punishment and labor in the colony, white settlers' frontier life and the dispossession of Aboriginal people, while also depicting the bonds of mutual support among women in desperate circumstances and the possibility of redemption and freedom.