Notes on the Journal of Captain Charles O'Hara Booth, sometime Commandant of Port Arthur.

A document of considerable importance has recently been presented to the Royal Society of Tasmania under circumstances which are not without a touch of romance. Perhaps it would be more correct to say that a copy of part of a very human document has been so made available for the use of the Society. The original manuscript is the private journal kept by Captain Charles O'Hara Booth, for some years Commandant of the Penal Establishment at Port Arthur, and afterwards Superintendent of the Queen's Orphan School, male and female, at New Town.
Charles Booth was born on the 30th August, 1800, at Basingstoke, Hampshire, where his parents occupied a house of some importance in that neighbourhood.
The journal was, of course, a private family record. There were parts of it which were of a purely personal nature. But other parts, those, for instance, dealing with the years spent as a Commandant at Port Arthur, surely might be of some historical value for all in Tasmania who cared for such things.