This film is a pioneering documentary series that fuses history, genealogy and dramatic reconstruction to reveal for the first time, the stories of these forgotten women and their experiences in the strange and harsh new world of Colonial Australia. The series is the first to deal with the establishment of the enterprise that would give birth to the Australian nation and the roles that Irish females, both women and girls, played in its formation. CONVICT WOMEN AND ORPHAN GIRLS rescues their stories from the obscurity of the museums and archives, these founding mothers of modern Australia.