|summary=Two women of very different class backgrounds meet on a convict ship from London to Van Diemen's Land, where their lives as mothers will become enmeshed in crime and melancholy. A somewhat bleak, but still distinctive and well-drawn, character study.
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Fourteen-year-old Miriam Booth is a Romany gypsy from the Newcastle slums who, like the titular waif in [[:Category:Charles Dickens|Charles Dickens]]'s ''Oliver Twist'', is an orphan who lives by her wits but becomes drawn into a ring of house-breaking crime. In 1842 she is caught and sentenced to seven years' transportation to a convict colony in Australia.