Excavating a childhood: ‘The Framing’ by Fernanda Dahlstrom
For the first couple of chapters of this memoir, I felt like I was in the centre of an archaeological dig, surrounded by bits of rock and shards of broken pottery, none of which fitted together. The narrative jumps forwards and backwards in time, it is peopled by characters I found hard to sort out with odd nicknames or pseudonyms. None of it made sense.
I almost gave up. But I persevered and I am very glad I did.
I realised that, deliberately or not, the author has told the story of her remarkable, fraught childhood in a way that reflects its chaotic, mixed up nature. Through her writing, she has excavated her early life and especially the relationship with her mother, bit by bit, memory by memory, rather like an archaeological dig. What she found was often a jumbled mess…reaching clarity in adulthood as she worked through the memories, slowly dealing with the legacy of those early years.
By any measure, her trajectory was startling. Her mother Margaret was charged with multiple offences to do with fraud, theft, burglary and even stalking (of Judith Durham of The Seekers), but steadfastly maintained her innocence, insisting that she had been framed by police with a vendetta against her.
So Fernanda spent much of her childhood on the run, moving between states, cities, towns.
Super-bright, she was reading philosophers and literary novels in primary school. She began university study in her mid-teens. She spent chunks of time in boarding houses, living with foster families, even looking after herself in an isolated rural house her mother had built. She organised her own travel by plane, taxis and trains to see her mother during her periods of incarceration.
All this, while believing her mother was innocent and a victim of ‘the system.’
What struck me as especially sad was the chasm that opened up with family members – including grandparents – who could have stepped in to provide a loving, more stable environment for a child.
Her narrative did two things for me. I felt enormous admiration for young Fernanda, for her fierce loyalty to her mother and her resourceful approach to the many challenging situations she found herself in. She certainly presents an argument against the somewhat over-protected bubbles that children tend to live in nowdays, at least in wealthy Western countries.
I also felt enormous sadness for the little girl growing up without the guardrails and stability that we might assume are the birthright of every child.
This excavation of a childhood makes for a gripping narrative that raises many deep questions about who we trust and why; about how the systems set up to protect the vulnerable can harm as well as help; and about how each of us must decide for ourselves the value of our own experience and the things we are told about our past.
The Framing was published in 2026 by Melbourne University Press.
My thanks to the author for a copy of the book to review.The human cost: ‘The Mushroom Tapes’ by Helen Garner, Chloe Hooper & Sarah Krasnostein
The subtitle of this book sums up the authors’ intent: Conversations on a Triple-Murder Trial.
It’s not a blow-by-blow of the whole trial, nor of the crime itself. That sort of true-crime writing is not really my cup of tea, nor is it the kind of approach that the three authors are, rightly, famous for.
Rather, it’s a collaborative exploration of their personal responses to what they see, hear and think during this very famous trial in Victoria’s Gippsland region in 2025.
Especially, it is an examination of the very significant toll on those involved: the human side of the headlines, the speculation, the theories. The crime is only the first part of a process that affects every individual who is somehow connected to a trial like this.
I probably would not have been inclined to read this book, except that the three women who wrote it are authors whose previous works I have admired. They tackle their subjects with respect, humility and a very honest vulnerability. These qualities are reflected in this, a collection of conversations they had together while driving and from to the small town where the trial was held, and in between hearing days.
The result is not a forensic examination of the evidence, or the legal arguments, so much as how all of this made them feel – about the accused, about the victims, about the residents of a little country town that will be forever changed. The legal teams, the journalists covering the trial. The families of the dead.
They debate long and hard about their reasons for wanting to attend and write about this particular trial. Are they, in the end, like those who see it as an opportunity to make a quick buck from a book, podcast or film? Are they just curious sticky-beaks wanting a vicarious glimpse into unimaginable trauma? They share their thoughts about those reasons; here is part of their answer:
Helen: Basically what we’re doing is bearing witness…We’re bearing witness to a rent in the social fabric and how the law is going to deal with it.
Sarah: You can do two things with [evidence in a trial]. You can digest it into content that people come to ogle out of shadenfreude, or you can say ‘Oh God, I know that feeling…I know what shame is, and I know what rage is,and I know what it is to be islolated and desperate.’
ebook pp 23-24 of 249Of course mushrooms feature throughout, death cap mushrooms being the medium by which the killer delivered the poison to her victims. The authors muse on the ways in which mushrooms could be seen as metaphors: for indications of personality, relationships, intent. This book also had me thinking about fungi in general and its place in our environment.
I love the way these women write, and I loved ‘hearing’ their voices throughout this book: unadorned, unedited, honest.
The Mushroom Tapes is unlike any ‘true-crime’ book I’ve come across previously. In their exploration of this particular trial and the crime that brought it about, the authors have much to say about us all.The Mushroom Tapes was published by Text Publishing in 2025
Travels With my Ancestors #32: The Roberts Family, Chapter Two, part 3
A Coach to Windsor/Poster & ticket to 4-Horse Coach to Windsor & Parramatta
Source: Mitchell Library https://collection.sl.nsw.gov.au/digital/AjJaA4LexvlEkThe continuing story of the lives of the Roberts family. Chapter One began here. The first parts of Chapter Two are here and here.
In the last post, Elizabeth Greenwood had gone to work for the widowed Thomas Roberts and his five children as housekeeper, around 1844 or 1845. The story followed the birth of their three children, the death of Elizabeth’s own son Henry, and the death of Thomas himself in 1858.
This last part is about Elizabeth’s life, ‘after Thomas.’After Thomas
The year 1858 delivered a double blow to Elizabeth. In late May, six weeks after burying Thomas, her mother Mary Ann died.[1] They had been sent together on that convict ship, separated as Mary Ann served her sentence, then reunited. Now the Greenwood matriarch had gone.
But in December that same year, Elizabeth married again, to Richard Rainsden (sometimes spelt Rainsdon), who was about thirteen years her senior.[2] He had arrived in NSW in 1834 on the convict transport Henry Tanner, just two months before the Greenwoods,and served a seven-year sentence for stealing poultry. When he married Elizabeth he was working as a fruiterer, then a rent collector, living in Sydney’s Glebe district, which was then home to a burgeoning population living in small homes on subdivided land from the former church estate of Bishopthorpe.[3] It was a working-class locality where people of modest means could buy or lease property.
Atlas of the Suburbs of Sydney 1886-1888. By Higinbotham & Robinson
Source: City of Sydney ArchivesAlthough she’d been left a lifetime interest in ‘Woodbine Cottage’ at South Creek by Thomas, and funds to support their three children until they reached adulthood, she may have felt a need for support and companionship in her middle and later years. She was by then in her late thirties; Richard was fifty.
Had she received notice that her first husband Anthony had died, or was she hoping that he would not re-appear to cause her trouble, when she married again?
Her new groom was one of many ex-convicts who’d left a spouse and child behind in England when he was transported.[4] He described himself as a widower on their marriage certificate. Either his first wife had died, or he was hoping that the previous marriage would go unnoticed. Colonial authorities tended not to bother chasing up people back in Britain. With vast oceans and several months between an emancipated convict and their first spouse, it hardly seemed worth the expense and effort, and only the wealthy could afford to travel to NSW to find an errant partner.
She spent the next thirteen years with Richard in the Glebe district, firstly on Mitchell Street. Their circumstances here were modest after the relative luxury of the Roberts household, but she had known a humbler life before that. The comforts of a smaller home and stable circumstances are sometimes enough, after a tumultuous childhood and youth.
~
Source: Sydney Morning Herald 27 Oct 1871 p8 Family Notices All three of her children with Thomas had married and left home by the time she died. Amelia married and became Mrs Tucker in 1862; Louisa married Joshua Curby five years later. They both settled in Sydney with their growing families.
Albert, the youngest, reached his majority of twenty-one that same year, which meant he also came into his inheritance of £500 from Thomas. This would have allowed him to establish a small farm or set himself up in a business or trade.
Albert was the one who provided the required information for his mother’s death registration. He either didn’t know about, or chose to ignore, Elizabeth’s first marriage to Anthony Shaw. In the section for ‘Marriage’ there are two listed: one in 1845 (which was around the time her de facto relationship with Thomas began) and the other to Richard Rainsdon (the date incorrectly given as 1859, not 1858). I wonder if Elizabeth and Thomas had discussed their de facto status with Amelia, Louisa and Albert. Perhaps they’d been content to allow the children to believe that their marriage had been formalised.
Albert gave his maternal grandfather’s name as George Greenwood, an understandable mistake, given he had never met Elizabeth’s father.Albert eventually moved to Queensland with his wife, Emma, and died there in 1922, aged seventy.[6]
Richard died in 1876 and was buried beside his wife at the Pioneer Memorial Park in Norton Street, Leichardt. [7] Formerly Balmain Cemetery, it was closed in the 1940s and its headstones and memorials (but not the bodies) removed, turning it into a public park.
Legacy
Thomas and Elizabeth had begun life in such different worlds: he was a son in a wealthy emancipist family; she from the slums of London. He felt loss and sorrow in his youth, certainly, but never wanted materially for anything. She experienced the injustices of transportation despite her own free status. Fate brought them together when she came to work for the Roberts household, caring for a widowed father and his motherless children. Romance bloomed. More children arrived.
What they did have in common were the tight bonds that kept their respective families together. Thomas and his siblings demonstrated fierce loyalty to each other and to their mother, with shared interests and activities throughout their lives. Elizabeth’s family endured the trauma of their voyage and a difficult start in the colony. After enforced separations, they re-united as soon as they could and stayed part of each other’s lives.
Elizabeth herself is a quiet example of the remarkable trajectory that colonial lives could follow. In her fifty-one years she experienced so much: a childhood in poverty, a journey across the seas, three relationships, four children and the loss of her firstborn; life and work on a prosperous farm; finally, breathing her last in a bustling city, across the seas from where she began.
The Roberts family story will be continued…
[1] NSW Death Registration for Mary Ann Greenwood, reg no 5056/1858
[2] NSW Marriage Registration for Elizabeth Shaw & Richard Rainsdon, reg no 973/1858
[3] Gould Genealogy; South Australia, Australia; New South Wales Government Gazettes, 1832-1885 1863 p1241; Sands Directories: Sydney and New South Wales, Australia, 1858-1933 1876 p 448; England & Wales, National Probate Calendar (Index of Wills and Administrations), 1858-1995, Jan 1878. Via Ancestry.com, accessed 8 June 2026
[4] Australian Convict Transportation Registers – Other Fleets & Ships, 1791-1868, Class: HO 11; Piece: 9. Via Ancestry.com, accessed 8 June 2026; State Archives NSW; Series: NRS 12188; Item: [4/4019]; Microfiche: 692. Via Ancestry.com, accessed 8 June 2026
[5] Sands Directories: Sydney and New South Wales, Australia, 1863 p232 Via Ancestry.com, accessed 28 May 2026; Death Registration for Elizabeth Rainsdon, reg no 1838/1871.
[6] Qld Death Index 1920-1924, Albert Roberts, reg no 4172 p1392. Via Ancestry.com, accessed 28 May 2026
[7] Australia and New Zealand, Find A Grave Index, 1800s-Current for Richard Rainsden 1876
Weasel words of past & present: ‘Unsettled’ by Kate Grenville
I had been waiting for this book, from the moment I first heard about it.
Kate Grenville’s earlier work, The Secret River (published 2005) has become something of an Australian classic. It’s fictionalised account of her ancestor Solomon Wiseman’s life as a convict, then a wealthy settler on the Hawkesbury River sparked discussion of the realities of the interface between white and black histories of this country.
Since then she has written several other works of historical fiction, and some non-fiction, inspired by or about the lives of her ancestors and their times.
Now she has turned her sharp analysis to the question of ‘What does it mean to be on land that was taken from other people? Now that we know how the taking was done, what do we do with that knowledge?’
Subtitled ‘A journey through time and place’, Unsettled is her account of a pilgrimage of sorts, in which she travels through the places of significance in her family stories, passed on to her by her mother. She is searching for the hidden side of those stories, the people deliberately or carelessly written out of history: the First Peoples with whom her ancestors would have interacted.
In my research and writing about my own family history I have struggled with these questions and the silences of the past. What part did my ancestors play in the dispossession of the First Nations of this land? Were they perpetrators of any of the many acts of violence towards Aboriginal people that took place in colonial and later times? How would I feel if I discovered evidence of this? What would I do with that knowledge?
Like Ms Grenville, I came to the conclusion that all of my ancestors were, in some capacity, complicit in the long act of dispossession since 1788. Many (like the convicts sent here on the transport ships from England and Ireland) unwillingly so. Others (like Grenville, I have ancestors who ‘took up’ land as squatters, benefiting enormously from what was essentially a free-for-all land grab in the early years of white settlement) did so very willingly indeed. Later generations lived (as I do today) in country that was stolen, unceded land.
It is a difficult truth to stare in the face and one that, for generations, white Australians preferred not to see.
Hence the weasel words used to describe the acts of stealing land and the people who stole it (taking up land, opening it up, squatting, land grants, settlers, pioneers, explorers) and ones that were used about the people from whom the land was stolen (blacks, savages, nomads, going walkabout, as examples.) The latter demonstrated a supreme lack of understanding of the subtle and sophisticated worldview and culture of the First Peoples, while the former justified the wholesale robbery of the land and all it contained by the invading colonists.
This book is all about seeing things differently:
Now that I think about it. That’s the thing – I’m thinking about things differently now, rather than sliding along on the well-lubricated surface of unremarkable words. Thinking in a way that allows a whole other story to be glimpsed. No, not even a story, just a suggestion of a suspicion, embedded so far below the surface it’s easy to pooh-pooh it as ridiculous.
Unsettled p35This is a very personal journey and a very personal story. But Grenville’s skill as a storyteller weaves a tale that is both individual and general to all Australians. While imparting her unique responses to the places she visits, the experiences she has on her travels and what she finds in her research, the questions she poses are for us all to consider.
Her comments about the popularity of family history resonate with me, and I think are meaningful on a bigger scale as well:
we…need to be asking questions about our forebears. Not to reassure ourselves, and not to make any claims for ourselves, but to learn how we really fit – and the ways we don’t fit – into the story of being here.
Unsettled p206I could not agree more.
Here is Kate Grenville discussing the impulse that set her on the journey of exploration that resulted in Unsettled.
Unsettled was published by Black Inc Books in 2025
What stories tell us: ‘Finding Eliza’ by Larissa Behrendt
Euahleyai / Gamillaroi author, filmmaker, lawyer and academic, Larissa Behrendt writes both non-fiction and fiction which illuminate aspects of Australia’s history from an indigenous perspective. Her writing is always thought-provoking and perceptive, and Finding Eliza is no exception.
The book takes as its starting point the power of stories to teach, explain, and create beliefs and attitudes. She takes the well-known historical event of the 1836 shipwreck of the Sterling Castle on an island off Australia’s east coast. The only woman among a handful of survivors, Eliza was kept alive by the Butchulla people of the island called K’gari (later named by the English after the ship’s captain – and Eliza’s husband – Fraser Island). She spent several weeks there, separated from other white people, after witnessing -according to her account – her husband’s death after being speared by a Butchulla man.
This story has been told and retold many times since then, including by Eliza herself after her rescue and return to England. There have been so many versions that it is difficult to know what parts are based on real events and what has been changed, embroidered or created.
The author’s focus, however, is how the stories that grew up around Eliza’s experiences, illustrate the themes and motivations of those telling them. There are elements needed for a story to work, both for those telling and hearing the story. Eliza had to be ‘good’ and the Aboriginal people ‘bad.’ She must conform to the Victorian-era stereotype of the virtuous, middle-class, loyal wife. It was commonly believed by Europeans at the time that the Australian ‘natives’ were savage, unpredictable, and prone to cannabalism – therefore, to be feared and seen as inferior.
So it is not surprising that Eliza and the Butchulla were represented accordingly in the tales that grew up around her experiences.
The Butchulla people had their own world view and beliefs. They were not just a silent backdrop to the adventures of a white woman, nor were they an undifferentiated source of threat. But in order to provide the tension necessary in Eliza’s story, they had to be portrayed in this way. The truth is that without their assistance and care, Eliza would have most likely perished on the island before she could be rescued.
…{Eliza’s} survival of the shipwreck is not the climax of this story; it is just the beginning. The heart of her story unfolds when she makes contact with the Aboriginal people who populate this land, and it is her alleged captivity by these ‘brutal’ and ‘cannabalistic savages’ and her eventual rescue that gives her tale its compelling drama.
Finding Eliza, ebook version, location 7%
The author takes this a starting point, to then explore a range of aspects of colonialism in Australia.
These include: the ‘Enlightenment’ ideals of the nineteenth century viewed alongside the dispossession and savagery of occupation and colonisation; black / white relations including sexual relations, sexual slavery and prostitution; the silence about the contribution of Aboriginal women to the colonial economy; the control over Aboriginal lives wielded by the colonists; why the trope of cannabilism held such power among whites; cultural appropriation, and how positive stereotypes can be as damaging as negative ones.
As Ms Behrendt concludes:
In… stories, we learn much more about the coloniser than we ever learn about the colonised, but by looking at them through different lenses and different perspectives we begin to appreciate the complexities and nuances of our own history.
FInding Eliza loc 89%
This is a book that made me think, review my own preconceptions about the past and the stories I grew up with. It is as relevant today as when it was first published by University of Qld Press, in 2016.
Sibling trouble: ‘My Father’s Suitcase’ by Mary Garden
I reviewed NZ-born Mary Garden’s biography of her aviator father, Oscar Garden, back in 2021. In it, she referred to the unsettled, troubled family in which she grew up.
My Father’s Suitcase takes this several steps further. It opens with a physical attack on Mary, apparently out of the blue, by her younger sister Anna when they were both in their fifties. We know immediately that things are still not right in the Garden family.
This time the narrative centers on an all-too-common but often overlooked issue: sibling abuse. Another manifestation of the troubling problem of family violence, it has not received the (thankfully increasing) attention that has been directed at intimate partner abuse. But Mary’s story makes clear that the lasting effects of family violence, no matter who is perpetrated by, can be debilitating.
It also raises questions about family inheritances. Are genetics primarily responsible for mental ill health in families? Did a legacy of instability, depression and anxiety originate from Oscar’s bipolar disorder, his emotional repressiveness and oppressive behaviour towards his wife and, to varying degrees, their children?
All of the hallmarks of abuse are outlined in this book: the unpredictability of violent outbursts, gaslighting, a failure to intervene appropriately by those who should do so, scapegoating. And for the victim of the abuse? Shame, depression, guilt.
Having had my own experience of someone who (I’m now certain) suffered from an undiagnosed bipolar disorder, and experiencing many of the hallmarks of an abusive relationship, I felt a great deal of sympathy for the author while reading this book.
There were moments when I was shocked at her own responses to the situations she found herself in, but by her own admission, she too was acting out of a desperate and unstable mental state, the result of an intergenerational trauma that was then (in the mid-twentieth century) unrecognised and rarely, if ever, discussed.
Although much of this story took place in her birthplace of New Zealand, there are striking similarities between that country and Australia in the decades she describes. Conservative, relatively isolated nations, with little understanding and even fewer resources to help people deal with trauma or depression. Mental health services that by the 1990’s relied on programs in the community, leaving many sufferers isolated and uncared for, and their families increasingly desperate. A rejection by the post-war ‘baby boomer’ generation of the values and choices of their elders; a turn towards Eastern spirituality and/or counter culture in a search for something different. Tumultuous times indeed.
This memoir shares questions in common with memoir writing generally: Whose truth is being told? What version of events and people do we receive? Family disputes are always messy and usually damaging. Does it help to air them in public?
I would often answer ‘no’ to this question. But this memoir offers more than one’s person response to events. In her brutal ‘warts and all’ honesty, the author has highlighted some important and timely issues that we all need to understand. And she certainly is not painting an image of herself as a passive victim, acknowledging and questioning as she does her own behaviour and the family legacy of such:
Even though somewhere deep down I knew I was making a fool of myself and behaving erratically, I kept going. In that I was like my father. People had thought he was mad, too, when he flew from England to Australia in his second-hand Gypsy Moth. He did not give up. It was a miracle his little plane did not break down on his 19-day flight. He was determined to survive. Luck was on his shoulder. Luck was on mine also.
My Father’s Suitcase p204When her sister publishes a book about their father’s career hot on the heels of Mary’s own, very successful biography, it raises issues of plagiarism and copyright law, complicated matters which teams of lawyers deal with regularly. Even so, it made me wonder how much plagiarism goes undetected in published works.
This candid account of the ‘weird, crazy Gardens’ is a gripping story that finishes on a hopeful note: of recovery, of different choices leading to better health and a happier life. As such it offers some insight into what people can do to move on from the legacy of mental ill health and family abuse.
My Father’s Suitcase is published by Justitia Books in May 2024. My thanks to the author for a review copy.
Practical advice: ‘Before Dementia’ by Dr Kate Gregorevic
Dementia hit the headlines this week, having achieved the dubious honour of becoming the biggest cause of death in Australia, surpassing heart disease. This guide to what we can do to prevent, prepare, cope and understand the illness is very timely.
Dr Kate Gregorevic is a geriatrician who works at a Melbourne hospital, and the book is peppered with real life anecdotes from her research and practice.
Twenty questions frame the book’s structure and content, including:
What is dementia and are you at risk?
What are the symptoms?
What causes Alzheimer’s?
What is life like for a person living with dementia?
Do people with dementia have the capacity to make decisions?
Can improving diet help to avoid dementia?
How do we live well with dementia?Most people have been touched by dementia in some way: we have a loved one who lives with the disease, or we know a workmate, neighbour or friend who has been diagnosed, or who cares for someone who has been. So, these very practical questions and the wealth of information included are welcome and useful guides to the illness and what we can expect as it progresses.
There were sections that resonated strongly with me after watching my mother’s decline with the condition. For example, the insidious way it often begins, creeping up slowly at first, often confused with ‘normal’ age-related memory loss:
The onset of dementia is so insidious that it often takes something really obvious, an example of memory loss that is so stark, so unforgiving, that it is impossible to look away. This is often when the reframing begins, when all the little things that were so small in themselves start to coalesce.
Before Dementia pp23-24Other points that especially resonated with me because of my own experience included the nature and role of delirium, the phenomena known as ‘sundowning’, the creation of false memories, and the sometimes-catastrophic effect of hospital admissions,
There is a fair bit of technical information in the chapters to do with the causes and types of dementia. I admit I glazed over a little here. However, I appreciated the author’s desire to translate the latest thinking and discoveries in what is still a contested field, into language that can be read by a non-medical person.
Ethical challenges are presented openly, and it is up to each reader to decide where they stand on issues such as the capacity of a person with dementia to make decisions about their future care and living arrangements, consent for sexual activity, the right to autonomy and independence. A point that strikes me as a tricky but interesting one, is what Dr Kate terms the ‘dignity of risk’:
Living well with dementia means accepting the dignity of risk. Many people with dementia will be able to live independent lives, but they may not be perfectly safe.
Before Dementia p295I appreciated the plea made in this book for adequate funding for aged care services, for recognition of the disadvantages faced in all areas of life by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders in Australia, and for the value of putting into place as many protective measures as possible as early as possible: improved diet, regular exercise, giving up smoking and excessive alcohol consumption, social and cognitive activity.
If I were a patient or a family member, and lucky enough to be a patient of Dr Kate, I am sure that I would value her humanist and person-centred approach to living well with dementia.
While I’m certain that most of us would much prefer NOT to have to think about this disease, and just hope that we or our loved ones won’t ever have to deal with it, I can highly recommend this book. It tackles a difficult subject in a helpful, practical way that removes the ‘overwhelm’ and allows the reader to learn from the experts.
Before Dementia is published by HarperCollins in February 2023.
My thanks to the publisher for a review copy.
Colonial immigration scheme: ‘Single and Free’ by Elizabeth Rushen
When we think about immigration to Australia, what springs to mind is sailing ships carrying the first white immigrants: convicts and their military guards. Next, we might think of the huge post-war influx of people from war-torn Europe, followed by successive groups of refugees from other war affected regions: Southeast Asia, the Middle East, Africa.
Easily forgotten in this mix are the brave, resilient and (for some) desperate women who chose to be part of an early colonial scheme administered by the London Emigration Committee in the 1830’s.
Historian and author Elizabeth Rushen has written a fascinating account of the way the scheme was established, the women who volunteered, and their fates once they arrived in the colonies of New South Wales and Van Diemen’s Land (now Tasmania.)
There were fourteen ships altogether, which carried nearly 3000 single women from Britain and Ireland over a four-year period from 1833 to 1837.
Why did the colonial government invest time and money in such a scheme?
The main reason was the extreme gender imbalance in the colonies at the time. Male convicts and settlers outweighed women by over three men to each woman. This resulted in a shortage of female labour for the strictly gender-segregated jobs of domestic servant, governess, nurse, and agricultural roles such as dairy maid.
Also, the behavioural strictures and preoccupations of the period required women’s ‘moral’ influence to temper the behaviour of men. Not surprisingly, the applicants to the scheme needed to provide evidence of good behaviour and ‘respectability’.
Why would women volunteer for such an enormous, life-changing step? They left behind their homes, families, friends and communities, to face numerous perils and discomforts on a months-long voyage to an unknown place, where safety and decent employment could not be guaranteed.
Rushen’s research shows that, although the scheme initially aimed at recruiting poor women, there were in fact a mix of backgrounds of participants. Some of the women were indeed poor, desperate for an opportunity to make a living. Others were from educated middle class backgrounds. Some were simply up for a challenge, or a new life away from the constraints of their homeland.
The mismatch between the original aims and the realities of the scheme meant that the responses to the new arrivals were also mixed: ranging from welcome and support from some settlers to outright hostility from those who regarded the bounty immigrants as unfair competition for jobs, husbands, and homes.
The book is a deep dive into the scheme itself, the ships that brought the women to Australia, and especially, the women themselves. Who were they, why did they come, and what happened to them once they reached the colonies?
It’s a fascinating account of an often-overlooked episode of colonial history; and as Rushen concludes:
The vast majority of these women…made the voluntary decision to emigrate, their expatriation improving the quality of their lives…These were adventurous and courageous women who embraced the challenges of colonial life. (p176)
Single and Free: Female Migration to Australia 1833-1837
They contributed to the development of the colonies as domestic and agricultural workers, their enterprises as dressmakers, midwives and teachers, as wives and mothers of the rising generation. (back cover)I have written before about the Good Girl Song Project and the musical production Voyage, which is based on the research and stories in this book. If you haven’t yet checked it out, do have a look at the website. It is a moving and entertaining portrayal through music and drama, of the experiences of some of the women who took part in this early colonial immigration scheme.
Single and Free: Female migration to Australia 1833-1837 was published by Anchor Books Australia, 2016
Friendships and memory: ‘True Friends’ by Patti Miller
Upon opening Australian author Patti Miller’s latest book, I immediately began thinking about my own friends, past and present. I have been fortunate to have experienced sustained, deep, nurturing friendships throughout my life, but of course there have been some that have fallen away as the years went on – mostly gradually through changed life circumstances, but one or two abruptly and somewhat painfully.
True Friends is an exploration of friendship but also of memory: when considering the people and events in our past, what Patti Miller calls the ‘questionable vault of memory’ will inevitably get things wrong, or in a muddled order. Tightly linked with memories are sounds, smells, tastes, places, feelings; even if we get some facts wrong, these things bind the event or moment to the memory and help to bring it alive once again.
First there is the original experience, but even at that stage, before interpretation or memory, so much is unobserved, unrecorded. A few moments of colour and sound are partially registered and then all that is left are the neurotransmitters floating from axon to dendrite, hopefully creating a neural pathway. The lovely, faulty, biochemical science of friendship.
True Friends p167She describes the epic poem Gilgamesh, written on clay tablets up to two thousand years before Homer’s Iliad or Odyssey were written, as the first story – and it is, essentially, all about friendship. The need for connection, contact and understanding with another is a fundamental trait from the deep past of humanity right through to modern times. Thinking about this, I wondered why there have not been many more non-fiction books on the topic of friends.
This book is about friendships generally, and the author’s friendships specifically, but it is told through the framing device of one friendship in particular which did not last, and which ended in a way that left her feeling bewildered and hurt. She describes the period of time during which she struggled to recognise the end of the relationship as ‘the long bewilderment.’
I’m certain that many reading this book will recognise the pain of this.
Overall, though, the book is a hymn to friends and the richness they add to our lives, in all their complexities and challenges:
For me, loving friendship is not a fusion with another, but it is a rickety swing bridge to a separate being, and even though I know it can fall away in to the abyss, the urge to step onto it is always there…when I am with a friend, I am woven into the human mystery.
True Friends p279I have enjoyed every book by Patti Miller that I have read, and this one is no exception. It is a book to savour, one that made me laugh and sigh in recognition, and that I continued to think about long after I’d closed the cover.
True Friends is published by University of Queensland Press in 2022.
My thanks to the publishers for a review copy.
A gripping true tale: ‘Three Sheets to the Wind’ by Adam Courtenay
Three Sheets to the Wind is a re-telling of the amazing true story of shipwrecked sailors who, in 1796, walked 600 miles through uncharted territory from the far southeast coast of Australia, almost to Sydney Town, before being rescued.
Adam Courtenay has placed this event in the historical and social contexts of its time: a new (and struggling) colony on the edge of the known world, run by a succession of English governors who tried, mostly unsuccessfully, to weaken the firm hold over its economy by the group of military officers known as the ‘Rum Corps.’
Alternating chapters allow the reader to follow the voyage of the ship Sydney Cove from its origins in Calcutta, to its wreck just off Tasmania. Its cargo was purely commercial: goods to be sold at a profit to the settlers in New South Wales – and most prized of all was the alcohol loaded into the ship’s hold, especially the 7,000 gallons of rum. This liquor had become an unofficial currency in the colony, to the detriment of all aspects of daily life, and its trade was monopolised by the Rum Corps, despite official efforts to discourage and/or control its import and sale.
You may have read Rum by Matt Murphy, published in 2021. If so, you will know the network of corruption and cronyism that the control and sale of this liquor encouraged and enabled.
Into this heady environment, Campbell & Clark, the Scottish owners of the Sydney Cove sent their cargo, hoping for a tidy profit and to establish a trading presence in the colony. The monetary value of the alcohol helps to explain why the ship’s master, Hamilton, and the ‘supercargo’ (responsible for its safe delivery) William Clark, went to such lengths to preserve the cargo when the ship foundered.
Courtenay gives us gripping account of the shipwrecks – plural, because after escaping the sinking ship in the longboat, the crew endured a second wreck while crossing Bass Strait, the often turbulent stretch of water that divides mainland Australia with the smaller island of Tasmania. (Keep in mind that at this point in time, Europeans did not know for sure if Tasmania, or Van Diemen’s Land as it was then called, was an island or if it was joined to the mainland. They were literally in uncharted waters, because even the renowned English explorer and cartographer James Cook had not thoroughly investigated this area on his earlier voyage.
Seventeen survivors set out on the trek north to Sydney. They were a mix of European and Indian-born sailors, known as ‘lascars’. (The treatment of the lascars by the Europeans is a story in itself.) The journey was recorded by Clark in a pocket notebook he carried with him. Gradually the seventeen became seven, then reduced further until only three were finally rescued just south of Sydney.
What is most notable about this story, I think, is the account by Clark of the group’s interactions with the First Nations people they encountered along the way. They passed through the country of at least six Indigenous clans and experienced both generous assistance and firm warnings from them. If it had not been for the local people, the travelers would have died from starvation or exposure many times. They were given food, shown shortcuts, and sometimes helped across rivers on canoes. On other occasions, though:
Clark soon realised their actions were a warning to keep off certain tracts of land – they were not there to kill the foreigners but rather to protect their country. Clark and his men weren’t being guided through these lands: they were being forcibly marched through them.
Three Sheets to the Wind p184There is much to both admire and deplore about this story. The party of sailors demonstrated enormous personal courage and strength to endure the trials they were subjected to. Clark’s account appears to hint at his changing view of the First Australians he met: from ‘barbarous hordes’ to generous and kind individuals. The observations by Clark and others of numerous seal colonies and plentiful seams of coal instigated the environmental disasters of the sealing, whaling and coal mining industries. And the voyage and subsequent trek north inspired more exploration, by George Bass and Mathew Flinders, among others – which both opened up more territory for the settlers and spelt the end of the sovereignty and sustainable lifestyles of First Australians.
Three Sheets to the Wind is a detailed and thought provoking account of an amazing story from our history. And I love the clever title: three sheets to the wind being a nautical term that also alludes to drunkenness.
It is published by HarperCollins Publishers in June 2022.
My thanks to the publishers for a review copy.
