Thomas Bushell (c. 1834 – 12 September 1865) was a convict transported to colonial Western Australia. He was hanged in 1865 after attacking a warder.[1]
Thomas Bushell was born in Ireland around 1834; nothing is known of his early life. At the age of twenty-two he was an unmarried, semi-literate soldier serving at Malta, with a bad army record, when he struck a superior officer and was sentenced to life imprisonment and transportation. Assuming normal procedure, he would have spent the first two years of his sentence in England, the first nine months of which would be spent in solitary confinement.