Mary Bryant : The Impossible Escape

Black dog books’ award-winning history series The Drum uses first-person accounts and non-fiction to bring history roaring to life.

1788. At 20 years old, Mary Bryant was sentenced to death for highway robbery, and left to rot in prison. Eventually she was transported to the wilderness of New South Wales.

When the First Fleet arrived at Sydney Cove in 1788, a life of misery and servitude awaited her. Three years later Mary escaped.

This is Mary Bryant’s story. It is an English story. It is an Australian story. It is one of the most daring escapes in history.

About The Author

Craig Scutt is a freelance writer. He spends most of his life typing words into a computer. Most of the rest of his life he spends talking to amazing people who tell him about their amazing lives so he can type words describing their amazingness into a computer. The remainder of the rest of his life is his personal life, which is a secret because it's personal.

Mary Bryant is Craig’s first book. He has written other stuff but nothing as cool as Mary Bryant. That’s because Mary is the coolest. For a while it seemed that writing this book took up every second of Craig’s life but it was worth it because of Mary's extraordinary “coolaciousness”, which is a made-up word meaning “coolio”, which is another word that isn’t supposed to exist but it does.