The Broad Arrow; Being Passages from the History of Maida Gwynnham, a Lifer is an 1859 novel published by the English writer Caroline Woolmer Leakey under the pseudonym Oliné Keese.
[3] The novel tells the story of Maida Gwynham, a young woman lured into committing a forgery by her dishonest lover and wrongly convicted of infanticide.
The novel describes the sea voyage to Australia and life in Hobart Town and Port Arthur for both convicts and free settlers.
She began writing The Broad Arrow in 1857 and it was published in two volumes in London in 1859 and in Hobart in 1860, illustrated with etchings by Auguste Hervieu.
[5] Some literary historians have suggested that the timing of the first edition – it appeared just seven years after transportation of convicts to Tasmania ended – dampened popular enthusiasm for the book, as there was little appetite to revisit that "gloomy phase of colonial life".