Short answers, pulled from the story.
The British Government began transporting convicts to Australia in 1788 when the First Fleet arrived at Botany Bay on the 20th of January 1788. This marked the start of a system that continued until 1868, during which time about 162,000 convicts were sent from Great Britain and Ireland.
Great Britain chose Australia as the site of a penal colony after trans-Atlantic transportation ended with the start of the American Revolution. Authorities sought an alternative destination to relieve overcrowding in British prisons and hulks while seeking to pre-empt the French colonial empire from expanding into the region.
Between 1788 and 1868 the British penal system transported about 162,000 convicts from Great Britain and Ireland to various penal colonies in Australia. Transportation to New South Wales temporarily ended in 1840 under the Order-in-Council of the 22nd of May 1840, by which time some 150,000 convicts had been sent to the colonies.
Convicts who misbehaved were often sent to a place of secondary punishment such as Port Arthur or Norfolk Island where they would suffer additional punishment and solitary confinement. The Macquarie Harbour penal colony on the West Coast of Tasmania was established in 1820 to exploit valuable timber and almost no fugitive convicts escaped successfully.
The official end of transportation occurred on the 10th of August when Jubilee festivals in Hobart and Launceston celebrated 50 years of European settlement with the arrival of the last convict ship named St. Vincent in 1853. The final transport of convicts to New South Wales occurred in 1850 after the Australasian Anti-Transportation League was formed in 1850 to lobby for permanent cessation.