Canadian Exiles Memorial Print Page

The monument commemorates 92 exiles transported from Canada to Van Dieman's Land. The vast majority of the exiles from Canada were American patriots. The memorial was unveiled by the Canadian High Commissioner in 1995.

In 1837 in an ill-starred attempt to spread the message of Independence, a Patriot army launched an invasion of Canada, hoping to provoke a general uprising. It failed to light the fires of rebellion and the British captured 92 mostly American citizens, members of the American Patriot Army fighting with Canadian republicans for independence from Britain.

Military courts smartly and highly illegally banished them in 1839 to Britain's remote and wild new island colony of Van Diemen's Land, now the State of Tasmania. The American freedom fighters were mostly civilian recruits and family men farmers, carpenters, clerks, ploughmen, merchants.

Unlike the general convict population and the Irish political exiles with whom much of the Tasmanian population was in sympathy, the Canadians were reviled and treated with disgust by everyone. Yankee republicanism was viewed as the ultimate disloyalty. Most of the Canadians weren`t criminals and were from reasonably well -to-do families, unused to hard labour and poor living conditions.

They were virtual slaves at penal posts on the island for up to 10 years, and 14 Patriots died as convicts. Some escaped on American whalers. When finally pardoned, the Americans were let loose to find their own way home. A few never did. They married free settler and convict women and remained in Australia. The Patriot convicts sent to Tasmania were the first Americans imprisoned overseas and the first political prisoners.

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