The evidence to the Bigge reports

During the years 1819-1821 commissioner John Thomas Bigge visited Australia and conducted extensive inquiries into its past History. ... [He] was the first well-educated observer to have spent seventeen months in the colony with every source of information open to him. He had been instructed to examine all the laws and regulations of the territory, everything connected with its administration, the superintendence and reform of the convicts, and the state of the civil, judicial and ecclestiastical establishments. ... [His] reports and the evidence given him remain the most thorough contemporary account of the condition of the prison-colony of New South Wales under Governor Macquarie.".