The true story of twelve-year-old Susannah Noon and the women of the convict ship 'Friends'. On 8 April 1811 the ship 'Friends' sailed from England carrying 101 female convicts bound for the penal colony of New South Wales. Their crimes ranged from pick-pocketing to murder, but most of them had been convicted for theft. Susannah Noon, not yet in her teens, had tried to steal four pairs of cotton stockings, worth ten shillings, from a shop in Colchester. It earned her a sentence of transportation for seven years 'beyond the seas'. It was a sentence that reverberated throughout her lifetime; she never returned to England. Instead Susannah and her shipmates found themselves living in a new land as members of a new and unique society. Their only shackles were the vast ocean and their fear of the unknown.