The Roving Party is a 2011 novel written by Tasmanian author Rohan Wilson. Wilson's first book, it is published by Allen & Unwin. The Roving Party won the 2011 Vogel Award. The novel was also shortlisted for the 2011 Victorian Premier's Literary Awards Vance Palmer Prize for Fiction. Plot summary John Batman, ruthless, singleminded; four convicts, the youngest still only a stripling; Gould, a downtrodden farmhand; two free black trackers; and powerful, educated Black Bill, brought up from childhood as a white man. This is the roving party and their purpose is massacre. With promises of freedom, land grants and money, each is willing to risk his life for the prize. Passing over many miles of tortured country, the roving party searches for Aborigines, taking few prisoners and killing freely, Batman never abandoning the visceral intensity of his hunt. And all the while, Black Bill pursues his personal quarry, the much-feared warrior, Mannalargenna. Historical basis for novel Black Bill and Catherine Kennedy The novel is based on the life of William 'Black Bill' Ponsonby, of whom little survives in the historical record. What is known of William Ponsonby is that he was raised by James Cox of Clarendon, near Nile, in Northern Tasmania. It is unknown how Cox came by an indigenous child but the practice of child abduction was common at the colonial frontier in Tasmania. At some point Ponsonby was baptised and he appears to have worked on Clarendon farm, and became a capable farmer. A man who is highly likely to be Ponsonby is mentioned as a witness to a sexual assault at a farm near Freeman's Reach on the South Esk River in December 1825 and the next mention of him is in his assistance in capturing the Bushranger Thomas Jeffries in December 1826, with local settlers John Batman John Helder Wedge and John Charles Darke. It appears that around this time Ponsonby took up with John Batman as an employed hand. William Ponsonby went on to assist John Batman with his commission to capture remnants of the Indigenous clans who were attacking settlers in the Ben Lomond district. On September 7, 1829, Ponsonby, in a party of assigned men and mainland Aboriginal men, attacked an indigenous encampment at the Break O'Day Plains (near modern day Fingal) capturing members of the plangermaireener clan as well as killing and wounding several others - the incident described in