Assignment

About

Van Diemen's Land, 1832. Eliza Coyne has years left of a seven-year sentence for receiving stolen cloth, but a ticket-of-leave is close enough to count in months if her conduct remains clean. Instead, she is taken from the Derwent's King's Reach station and assigned to Blackwood Farm, where every dawn, loaf and hour of labour belongs to Thomas Rede. Thomas is a widower with a failing mortgage, a neighbour serving as magistrate and enough decency to understand the obscenity of owning the woman he desires. Decency does not release her. One complaint from him can erase years. The complaint may already have been written. Nance Vale, Eliza's sole friend from the transport Arabella, has exchanged a statement about an escape plan for a recommendation toward her own ticket. The plan was genuine. Eliza's name stands beside that of bushranger Silas Venn, and the magistrate holding the paper also wants Thomas's river frontage. To survive the inquiry, Eliza needs the woman who betrayed her, the master whose protection is another form of possession and Maryanne Quinn, a former convict made free by servitude who runs Blackwood's dairy and keeps a private wage book for work the law calls Thomas's. Maryanne can offer Eliza paid hours and an unlocked door, but only by risking the certificate that makes her free. Assignment is a long-form adult historical drama about penal labour and the terrible intimacy of permission. A flogging ledger records punishment as neat arithmetic. Letters entrusted to the post rot unopened in a magistrate's press. A pregnancy alters a sentence without making the pregnant woman safe. Bushrangers sell freedom back to convicts at the price of somebody else's name. Beyond the farm fences, palawa dispossession is present as policy, theft and living consequence, never picturesque scenery. Eliza may protect her conduct, expose the machinery around her, accept a marriage that cannot undo assignment, build a life with Maryanne at irreversible cost, run with the woman who informed on her or discover that official truth is merely the statement power chose to file. Ten consequential choices lead to seven materially different endings. None promises that love can make ownership innocent.

Cast

• Eliza Coyne protagonist; seven-year transportee assigned as a farm servant
• Nance Vale Eliza's shipboard friend; informer promised a ticket-of-leave
• Thomas Rede widowed settler; legal master of Eliza's assigned labour
• Maryanne Quinn former convict free by servitude; manager of Blackwood dairy
• Gideon Wale neighbouring settler and district magistrate; buyer waiting on Blackwood's debt
• Amos Barlow convict overseer at King's Reach; Nance's coercer and keeper of the flogging return
• Pehra palawa woman from the Oyster Bay country; displaced guide and witness to the farm's boundaries
• Silas Venn absconded convict and bushranger; author of the escape route Nance sold