POWERHOUSE COLLECTION

Convict love token engraved by Thomas Tilley

Object No. 87/1494

This love token, a numismatic artefact of the highest importance to Australia, relates to the First Fleet transportee, Thomas Tilley who was sentenced to seven years transportation for theft with force. To achieve a more gracious immortality, Thomas Tilley was untruthful on the token he left for his loved one. On one side is a bird chained from its neck to the ground, and on the obverse is inscribed, 'Thomas Tilley TRANSPORTED 29 July 1785 for signing a note sent the hulks Jan 24 1786'. Vanity perhaps led him to ascribe his own crime to fraud rather than theft with force - a detail suitably sanitised for immortality on a token of love. After languishing in the hulks, Tilley was put on the transport 'Alexander' in 1777, bound for Botany Bay, after which the ship went to Port Jackson and laid anchor in January 1788 at the place that was soon to be called Sydney. The token was possibly made by an itinerant engraver in England as facilities for traders to visit the prisons and hulks for commerce were readily available. There they would have found a ready market for these trinkets, manufacturing the ever popular love tokens to order from smoothed-down coins, the tokens then being left behind in England with loved ones. H P Bolond, 1987