One little complaint. The narrator has strange pronunication of three words I noticed–memoir, impudent, and belying.

AAARR-R-R-R-RGH!!… You’ve been around Bellows way too long.

But I liked it! However, as a general rule of prose… Always avoid alliteration!

The joke, of course, turned out to be on the Brits when Australia, for all its spiders, snakes, crocodiles, sharks, etc. proved itself to be even more benevolent and richer than Br’er Rabbit’s proverbial briar patch; and indeed, they helped so much to build the present country that in at least one heavily ironic case that I can think of, one of Australia’s most lucrative goldfields and thus one of the foundations for the infant country’s early prosperity, was discovered by a discharged, transported felon. More than 1,000,000 ounces of gold was extracted from that discovery alone, only one of many, in only one of many gold-bearing regions. The resulting wealth meant that, for most of the last decades of the 19th century, the state of Victoria alone was the largest export market for British luxury goods, and the sustained tidal wave of hopeful migrants from all over the world quickly diluted the perceived “stain” of convict forebears.