Tony Moore will not give Hughes a run for his money in popularity, but his Death or Liberty does something that few previous books on convict Australia attempt: it gives due weight to the reasons why convicts arrived in Australia in the first place. Not all of them, of course – only a few thousand out of 160,000-odd transported were convicted of what he justifiably presents as political crimes. But Death or Liberty spans an epic saga of dramatic courtroom confrontations, legal skulduggery and bloody rebellion and repression. It begins with the exile of the radical Scottish Martyrs of 1793, whose pure-minded appeal for liberty collided with the British government’s paranoia over revolution, and ends with the daring escape of the last transported Fenians, who in 1876 boldly escaped from Fremantle to a waiting American whaler (probably the last occasion when whaling and progressive politics made common cause). Moore offers a judicious mix of background analysis, political homily and the personal stories beloved of readers today.

Not that transportation to Australia invariably meant arrival in hell. Though it often entailed privation, floggings and brutality, many convicts found the antipodean prison an easier place than the Britain from which they had been exiled. Moore quotes one agrarian protester, Richard Dillingham, writing to his parents in the 1830s that as an assigned convict in Van Diemen’s Land he enjoyed meat every day and ‘plenty of fruit puddings’. He was able to better his condition through transportation than as a rural labourer. Moore’s story is infused by commitment, passion and the terrible sacrifices made for political principle, but he only names Dillingham. He fails to tell us who he was or where he came from. Hughes tells us more – he was a Bedfordshire ploughman – a revealing difference between the two books.     Convict history can be seen as occupying a spectrum, from the sensational stories of The Fatal Shore through Lloyd Robson’s solidly empirical The Convict Settlers of Australia (1965) to the analytical subtlety of John Hirst’s Convict Society and its Enemies (1983). Moore, a former journalist, publisher, broadcaster and ‘political activist’, is now acting head of Monash University’s National Centre for Australian Studies. His Death or Liberty is commendably ambitious in its range; closer tonally to Hirst while seeking to tell the individ-ual stories that made The Fatal Shore so palatable and popular.

Death or Liberty is really five books in one. Its parts detail the stories of the Scottish Martyrs, the Irish rebels of 1798, labour activism in a changing England, the Canadian rebels of the late 1830s, and the nationalists of Young Ireland and the Fenian Brotherhood of the 1840s and 1960s. It connects the political history of Britain, Canada and Australia over seventy years of turbulent economic, social and political change. Indeed, one of the great virtues of Moore’s approach is that it explicitly reminds us that ‘Australian’ history cannot simply begin with arrival in Australia – a spirited defence of the value of ‘transnational’ history.

The number and range of the popular movements whose leaders and adherents filled the convict transports is striking. They included 660 Irish rebels from 1798, more than five hundred followers of ‘Captain Swing’, the mythical figure inspiring the ‘last peasants’ revolt’ of 1831, and more than a thousand rural protesters transported from Ireland over forty years from 1815. The smaller groups transported include fourteen of the surviving Pentrich rebels, nineteen radical Scottish weavers, forty-two Luddites, and fifty-eight mainly French-Canadian ‘patriotes’, convicted of rebellion in 1838. The struggle for parliamentary reform delivered more than one hundred Chartists, while some sixty-eight Fenians arrived in Western Australia, with some happy to stay.

What seems to be missing from this impressively synoptic survey is as full an account of what happened to political convicts at the other end. What happened to the five Cato Street conspirators transported in 1820? Moore doesn’t say. While his chapters on Irish rebels in early colonial New South Wales are detailed and nuanced, his chapters on most groups’ time as convicts and after are often frustratingly brief.

We have to accept that he is not that kind of historian. In fairness, Moore’s domain is the broad-brush of movements, rallies, rebellions and trials, not the slogging work in local collections working elbow-to-elbow with genealogists, when the sheer mass of widely dispersed convict, local and family records would daunt even the most diligent researcher. But where other scholars have traced the fate of political convicts in Australia, he gratefully and faithfully uses their work. This, I think, raises the problem of tone in a popular history, because Moore has unwisely decided to parade his authorities. Ironically, Moore at one point invokes Jane Austen’s Mr Collins and his obsequiousness towards his patron, Lady Catherine de Bourgh. But Moore’s own diligent acknowledgments of his colleagues’ work verges on imitating Collins’s sycophancy.

Moore keeps one eye on academic colleagues and counterparts, calling upon his precursors; but unduly so, and none more than George Rudé. Ireland after 1815 ‘Rudé characterises as a military occupation’. As it surely was – but what does Tony Moore think? Again and again he defers to Rudé, a pioneering historian of popular protest and its consequences, but the effect is to detract from the force of Moore’s own insights and to make him appear to be merely a populariser. The Welsh Newport riot of 1839 was, ‘according to Rudé’, the last of the bloodbaths of working-class protest in Britain. It certainly was; but why does Moore need his endorsement? Moore has a considerable gift for synthesis. He ought to feel more confidence in his own voice, relegating due acknowledgment to endnotes.

The past has the power to evoke and inspire, and Moore’s history is an admirably engaged one. He repeatedly draws parallels between the history with which he deals and events more in his readers’ ken. The movement to free the Tolpuddle labourers from their unjust sentences resembled, Moore writes, campaigns readers may remember and may even have joined: to free Nelson Mandela and David Hicks. Analysing the fervour of the American ‘patriots’ who sought to liberate their Canadian neighbours from a largely congenial British ‘yoke’, Moore makes a pointed critique of ‘evangelism for the US version of democracy’ to remind readers of other ill-fated political adventures: the Bay of Pigs, Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan. He compares the shock of finding Fenians transported in the late 1860s to be serving soldiers with the ‘“home-grown” British-born Islamic terrorists’ of this decade, and likens Port Arthur to Guantánamo Bay.

Indeed, Moore seems to have made an effort to craft his language to a modern readership. ‘Swing’ leaders in Hampshire, for instance, are described as having been disciplined, keeping ‘on message’. At a Grand Meeting protesting against the sentences awarded to the Tolpuddle labourers, Robert Owen ‘headlined’; George Arthur ‘fast-tracked’ deserving convicts into easier assignments. Writing about the ‘media’ in the 1830s or about Thomas Meagher ‘heading up’ (instead of ‘commanding’) a Union regiment in the American Civil War seems to expose the risks of forcing ‘relevance’. Is the technique valid? At least Moore is thinking of his readers, something too many authors do too little.

Though lacking individual servings of fruit puddings, Death or Liberty helps to rescue from undeserved obscurity real heroes of the Western (and not just the Australian) democratic tradition, connecting an important aspect of Australian colonial history with grand themes in the narrative of our political heritage.