No Place for a Nervous Lady – Voices from the Australian Bush

‘We had no house or hut of any kind of our own, nor had we even fixed on one particular spot to erect any – A friend of our’s & a Bachelor, (what excellent persons this poor neglected despised race are!) offered us his cottage until we should have our own – so to it we went -Very soon after we pitched our slab hut on a pretty flat, close to a creek of fresh water -‘ (Annie Baxter, 1840)

Lucy Frost has assembled a fascinating collection of unpublished and intimate letters and diary entries by thirteen women in nineteenth century Australia.

Women wrote to keep in touch with their old lives and to make some kind of private sense of the new. Their experiences varied widely – from Annie Baxter whose writings sustained her through a miserable marriage to a military man and failed farmer, and Ann Williams who kept a vivid account of a journey with wagon and bullock team from beyond Queanbeyan to the forests of Moruya, to Ellen Moger writing from Adelaide to tell her parents that three of her four young children had died of starvation on the voyage out.

All would have agreed with Annie Baxter, however, when after being bled with a penknife, she wrote to her friend, ‘Oh! ye nervous ladies, never come to the bush!’