Another Cheated Heir? Unravelling a Tasmanian Mystery: The Story of Sammy Cox, alias 'Samuel Emanuel Jervis'

Abstract

Modern Australia has inherited many colonial period tales of alleged early victims of injustice, involving both exile and disinheritance. Many of them, like the Tichborne affair, were deliberate fabrications created to claim estates in the 'Home Country'. Touristic Tasmania still boasts such an instance in the publicity associated with the island's north. Yet the truth of this particular tale is that it was a convenient, if startling, screen for predatory behaviour rather than a poignant attempt to inherit one's proper wealth and station.