A convict melodrama is a type of melodrama set in Australia during the convict era. They normally revolved around stories of innocent people wrongly accused of a crime who were transported to Australia as convicts. The best known work in this field was the novel For the Term of His Natural Life , which was adapted into various plays and films. [1]
These melodramas were highly popular in novel, theatre and film form in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. They had their origins in novels such as Les Misérables . [2]