MORE ABOUT THE NOVELS

“CAROLINE” and “WILHELMINA” are Australian Historical Novels. They are set in the period of the development of the colony of New South Wales, a penal colony of so called criminals established to relieve the overcrowded prisons in England, to a land of free settlers.

Many of the convicts, those who had heard the dreaded words, “You are sentenced to seven years beyond the seas, to be served out in the penal colony of New South Wales”, were convicted on such crimes as may be equivalent to a driving conviction today. Shooting a rabbit on the major’s park, (poaching) was the ‘crime’ of my own great grandfather, who was transported in this era. Many never returned to their homeland.

This was the period when the young Queen Victoria reigned in England. Of the Irish famine. It was the period when in Europe, there was political unrest, social upheaval, uprisings among the factory workers, and turmoil in the church, a period of instability. It was a period only fifty odd years after the French Revolution, which had rocked the world.

Many Europeans came. Brave, courageous big hearted free settlers, with little to lose in their homeland, saw opportunities in the New World, and leaving everything familiar and dear, ventured across the seas to try to build a new life in freedom. Many came from the German states, escaping the religious persecution, to a place where they could worship in freedom.

This was a period when big opportunities existed for the daring, the brave hearted, and the settler who would use his brain and muscles in hard work. Many free settlers and former convicts made good, rising to heights that would never have been possible in the ‘old country’. Some gave up the fight.

There were government arranged schemes to help immigrants, assisted passages, employment in New South Wales arranged, accommodation. Assistance was available to former convicts, small grants of land and the finance to begin a farm. These all helped in the provision of trained people with skills necessary for the colony, and for the production of food for the population.

Life for women in the new land was not easy. Those who went to life on small properties with their husbands, had little comforts, at least in the beginning years, and made homes in bark huts. They bore children with often no one to assist but a distant friend or a friendly Aboriginal woman with whom they had had contact. Certainly few in the country had the luxury of a doctor at a birth. My grandmother, Wilhelmina’s daughter, born in this period, was in adult life a midwife of this kind.

Women who went to more isolated but vast expansions of the great unexplored, untried lands, whose husbands were fired with the zeal to ‘go out’, to become Kings, left all the trappings of civilisation behind. The responsibility to maintain a standard of living, of conduct, of principles, of Christian belief- the responsibility to create a stable, happy home , fell almost entirely on them. They had to be wife, mother, teacher, nurse, encourager, with often over a hundred miles to the nearest white woman, medical help vastly further away, and communication slow in the extreme, letters having to be taken by hand. Supplies would be ordered and delivered by bullock waggon perhaps twice a year.

There are many testimonies to the exploits, achievements, contributions of men, to the development of the early Australia. There are few to the women who worked beside those men, who bore their children, who fed and clothed them, and who kept them from ‘going native’. I hope my novels may in some small way, help to make us more aware of the contribution of those women.

The setting and historical background of these books is authentic socially and historically. Facts of government attitudes, conditions and schemes have been meticulously researched. Many were familiar, my ancestors all coming to Australia in this period.

Stories such as these novels, abound in families whose ancestors were among those early settlers. These things could and did happen.