A Journey Without Intention

This book began with a journey we did not know we were taking.

In 1988, my family emigrated from England to Australia. Like many who arrived during that period, we came without any awareness of how closely our own family history was entangled with this country’s colonial past. Australia was not a destination shaped by inheritance or intention; it was simply where life carried us.

Years later, my father, Clive Hobbs, began tracing our family line. His work was careful, patient, and driven not by ambition but by love—an instinct to understand where his family came from and what had shaped them. As he moved steadily backwards through parish records and local histories in England, one absence became impossible to ignore: the death of his fourth great-grandfather, Thomas Hobbs.

There was no grave. No record of death. No clear ending.

For many years, my father searched for Thomas Hobbs where one would reasonably expect to find him. He did not search convict records. There was no assumption of criminality, no expectation that Thomas would be there. Only after exhausting other possibilities did he turn, reluctantly, to the archives of transportation.

It was there that Thomas Hobbs was finally found.

Thomas had been transported to Australia for stealing a pig and a bale of hay—acts committed not in malice, but in desperation, to feed his family in White Waltham, England. He was forcibly removed from his wife and 7 children, including his eldest son, John Hobbs, who remained in the United Kingdom and became the protector of the family left behind.

We are descendants of those children.

Our line does not descend from the transported man, but from the son who stayed—the boy who grew into a man carrying responsibility that should never have been his. This book is written from the lineage of those who were left behind, not those who were sent away.

As Thomas’s life in Australia slowly came into focus, another realisation followed. After receiving his ticket of leave, Thomas arrived in Port Phillip. The place where he first stepped onto this continent is the place where I now live—the Bellarine Peninsula. A geography we thought was accidental was, in fact, a return.

Through the recovery of one man’s life, we began to understand far more than our own family story. Thomas Hobbs became a doorway into the mechanics of colonial power, punishment, land, labour, and silence. By learning who he was, we were forced to learn how this nation was built—and at whose cost.

This book is not an attempt to redeem empire, nor to excuse the systems that shattered families and reshaped continents. It is an effort to restore a human life to the historical record, and to trace how personal history and national history are inseparable.

Where the archive speaks, it is allowed to speak for itself. Where it is silent, interpretation is carefully grounded in context rather than invention. In telling the story of Thomas Hobbs, this book also tells the story of those he left behind, and of those who unknowingly returned generations later.

In finding Thomas Hobbs, we did not simply recover an ancestor.  We learned how history moves through families, how silence is inherited, and how the past waits—sometimes for centuries—to be recognised.