Botany Bay - James Normann Hall, Charles Nordhoff

A novel by American authors about the first settlers of Australia at the end of the 17th century, who are sent as state criminals on ships across distant seas to settle an unknown continent and subdue the wild nature.
Among the deportees were both real criminals - thieves, murderers, prostitutes - and rebels against the oppressive order of life in the British colonies, as is the story's narrator, Hugh Tallant, who remembers the incident as a distant youth.