What is “protest”? Who is a protester and who is not? This is a problem that has bothered me ever since I began, about ten years ago, to try to sort out the social and political protesters from the rest of the convicts transported to Australia from the late 18th century to the 1860s. To some this is no particular problem at all. Criminologists and writers on crime and punishment - such as Leon Radzinowicz, J. J. Tobias and Nigel Walker (to cite the most recent) - have tended to place protest, when they have dealth with it at all, under such omnibus labels as crimes against property and crimes against persons. Others have eluded such refinements altogether and have argued that if protest is a social phenomenon, so is crime, and how can one sensibly draw a distinction between the rebel against society and the man whom society drives, or appears to drive, to crime? So it has been claimed that all convicts, whether they were transported or hot, were the victims of a society that left them out in the cold; and there is some justice in the claim (was it made by the Hammonds?) that in a society like Britain's in the early nineteenth century there was a large measure of culpability in common between the cattle-maimer or urban thief and the magistrate or High Court judge who sent them to a penitentiary at home or to the convict-jails of Van Diemen's Land or Sydney Cove.