Where did they come from and how old were they?

Most of the First Fleet convicts were citizens of London. On later fleets many Irish people were transported.

The average age of a convict was around twenty-seven years. The oldest male was Joseph Owen, who was in his early sixties; the youngest was a nine-year-old chimney sweep called John Hudson, transported for seven years for stealing some clothes and a pistol. The youngest female was Elizabeth Hayward, a clog-maker who stole a dress and a silk bonnet. She was thirteen. The oldest woman was Dorothy Handland, who hanged herself from a tree at Sydney Cove in 1789 at the age of eighty-four.