Caroline Woolmer Leakey (8 March 1827 – 12 July 1881) was an English writer, whose poetry and only novel (The Broad Arrow, published using the pen name Oliné Keese) were influenced and based on her experience living in Van Diemen's Land (now Tasmania) for five years between 1848 and 1853.
She was the sixth child of a large religious family of eleven children: her parents were James Leakey, an artist, and Eliza Hubbard Woolmer.
[1][2] In 1847, she sailed to the British colony of Van Diemen's Land, to join her sister Eliza, who had migrated to Hobart Town several years earlier with her clergyman husband, Reverend James Medland.
The novel, The Broad Arrow: Being Passages from the History of Maida Gwynnham, a Lifer, was published under the pen name of "Oliné Keese".
[4] The Broad Arrow is considered a significant social document, and as one of the earliest novels to feature a convict as the main character, was a forerunner of, and influence on, the more well-known For the Term of His Natural Life by Marcus Clarke, who used Leakey's novel as a reference for his book.