Caroline Woolmer Leakey, who was born and died in England, lived in Tasmania between 1848 and 1853. Her time in the colony included a twelve-month stay at Port Arthur where she closely observed the activities and experience of the convict settlement. She used this experience to write her fictional account of female convict life The Broad Arrow, published in 1859 under the pseudonym Oline Keese. Leakey’s keen insights into the convict condition predated Marcus Clarke’s more famous serial For the Term of His Natural Life by eleven years.
Leakey’s style has been described as sentimental, melodramatic and even priggish. However, she was also one of the earliest writers to capture the social conditions, the convict system, Tasmania’s natural environment, and brutal treatment of the Tasmanian Aboriginal people. The contribution that The Broad Arrow has made as a work of social history and her representation of the daily life of convict Tasmania in the early 1850s has earned Leakey a place in Tasmania’s writing history.
