Babette Smith’s, The Luck of the Irish: How a Shipload of Convicts Survived the Wreck of the Hive to Make a New Life in Australia (Allen & Unwin) is a fascinating portrait of colonial life in the mid-nineteenth century that reveals how the Irish helped lay the foundations of the Australia we know today. It is the story of the 250 Irish convicts who survived the sinking of their ship, the Hive, off the New South Wales coast in 1835.