STREWTH, IT'S ROUGH DOWN UNDER!

SEND for the cat nuns - I've developed a terrible case of seasickness.

After watching Mary Bryant and Co tossed around on every stretch of ocean between here and Oz on Sunday and Monday night, I can hardly walk in a straight line myself!

The Incredible Journey of Mary Bryant (ITV1) was a special Easter holiday drama, telling the supposedly true tale of a Cornish lass, who was arrested for trying to steal goods to help feed her starving family in 1786.

The girl, played by an actress with the exotic name of Romola Garai, was then transported to Australia with a shipload of fellow convicts to form the nucleus of a new colony at Botany Bay.

On the journey she meets future husband Will Bryant (Alex O'Loughlin), also a prisoner, and takes the eye of a stiff upper lip officer, Lt Ralph Clarke (Jack Davenport).

Almost drowned below deck during a storm, she is nursed back to health by Clarke in his quarters, only to be ostracised again when he finds out she had been pregnant since boarding the ship. Before reaching the shores of Australia, she gives birth to daughter Charlotte and ensnares the captivated Will, whom

she marries once the party are settled on dry land.

The Aborigines look on, as the newcomers make a mess of trying to set up the colony, probably thinking:

"Are we lumbered with these useless Poms forever now?"

Within months Mary has delivered another mouth to feed, baby Emmanuel, and then starts worrying about the possibility of the colony facing starvation. She hatches a plan to escape by stealing a boat and sailing thousands of miles across the ocean to the Dutch colony on the island of Timor.

In order to do this she has to hoodwink Clarke into believing she has left her husband for him, so that Will and the small band of conspirators can take the opportunity to steal the provisions and instruments needed to make the voyage to Timor.

The plan bears fruit, leaving us to suffer yet more shots of folk suffering near death on the ocean waves.

By this time, I was reaching for the seasickness tablets. So imagine my discomfort when, having managed to arrive on Timor, the intrepid fugitives were recaptured, thanks to vengeance-seeking soldier

Clarke on his way home to Blighty.

Having summarily dispatched poor Will to a place where, hopefully, there are no more sea voyages, Clarke then marched Mary, her children and the two remaining prisoners on to his ship for the journey to an English court and retribution.

As if it was not enough to be tossed around across the ocean again, we also had to witness the demise of little Charlotte and the frozen in time baby Emmanuel (surely he should have been a toddler by this point?) through some unnamed tropical illness.

After leaving a trail of death and destruction behind her, stretching across the known world, the feisty (though some would say stupid) woman and her fellow runaways escaped the gallows and were released to suffer another day. One of the men even opted to return to New South Wales - now that's what I call a glutton for punishment!