'In a poignant and focused reexamination of the First Fleet, Holden has told the story of the approximately fifty children who accompanied the 1500 adults who were the foundation of European settlement in Australia...With a sharp eye for the surviving shreds of evidence and with an imaginative power to construct and infer individual stories from contemporary published sources such as treatises, official reports and novels, Holden builds a story of broad social context while inferring much about individual experience...an important redress to a lapse in our historical memory and a coda to the painful story of Australia's foundations on the pain, tears and sweat of its convict settlers.' John Thompson, Australian Book Review