Convict Arrival

The narrative poem “The Convicts Arrival” or a “Convicts Lament on the Death of Captain Logan”, written by famous poet Francis MacNamara. The poem that was written around 18 October 1830 reveals Francis MacNamara’s values, perspective and the context of Australian experience by using multiple techniques throughout the poem that include metaphors, repetition and rhyming and many more. The purpose of “The Convicts Arrival" is to put the harsh realities that the convicts faced after being transported from Britain into perspective. Francis MacNamara aims to get the readers to feel sympathy for the convicts, who were forced to leave their homeland and start a new life in an unfamiliar land. The audience for The Convicts' Arrival is for people

This allows the viewers to read with more compassion and see the text as more of a story. This formal style is expressed as a poem that needs to be taken seriously. MacNamara includes a range of other techniques in this text similar to context, metaphor,repetition and rhyming. He uses historical context to describe the transportation of convicts to australia. MacNamara takes advantage of repetition in the quote “Leave those tyrants far, far behind”. The use of this technique is to advance the emphasis and emotion of the desperation of wanting to get away. The second technique is the use of the metaphor, "to trace from heaven the morning dew" that is used to express the daily routine of waking at the break of dawn, continuously being forced or coerced into a full day of hard labour and graphic environment. This is followed up by two lines after; “Our daily labour for to renew.” meaning that they have to continue the labour. Rhyming is another familiar technique used in this text. Although there is no traditional rhyme scheme, it’s still used to evoke emotion for the audience like empathy, compassion and sorrow to give the reader a pleasurable reading experience about the convicts being able to start anew in a new land where everyone is equal. The context is the British Empire using Australia to decrease the overcrowding population of the British prisons and using Australia to punish and reform them by isolating them from society. Francis MacNamara has used all of these techniques to make an overall emotive, detailed and historically accurate poem to read. This text allows us to gather a small perspective on how convicts and himself were treated, as well as how they felt during that