Asia-Pacific News

Jul 31, 2008, 8:06 GMT

Research reveals Rudd's convict stain

Sydney - One of Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd's ancestors was a London street urchin sentenced to death for stripping another girl and stealing her clothes. Another was sent out to Australia in 1801 on a convict ship for minting her own coins, researchers revealed Thursday. A family history presented to the 50-year-old prime minister told of a Thomas Rudd being sent to the penal colony to serve a 7-year sentence for 'unlawfully acquiring a bag of sugar.' Rudd's paternal fifth great-grandmother, Mary Wade, was banished to Australia in 1789 for the clothes-stealing episode after having her death sentence commuted to transportation in London's Old Bailey court. She was later joined in Sydney by another Rudd felon, Catherine Lahey, who forged currency to pay the rent. Rudd himself had inauspicious beginnings, his father dying when he was a boy and the family being evicted from their Queensland sharecropper farm.

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