High Seas and High Teas Voyaging to Australia

High Seas and High Teas : Voyaging to Australia
ISBN: 9780642278852
Publication Date: 1 March 2016

'The rats I frighten away by throwing books or anything hard at the spot at which they commence their gnawing.'

Emigrant Janet Ronald wrote this in the journal she kept on board one of the ships transporting free settlers from Britain and Ireland to Australia in the nineteenth century.

On journeys lasting more than 100 days, non-stop, our forebears endured raging seas, the dazzling heat of the tropics and freezing temperatures as ships journeyed far into the southerly latitudes. They also formed social communities, putting on plays, developing sometimes lasting relationships and taking part in wild nautical rituals.

Using diary entries and shipboard newspapers, author Roslyn Russell gives a vivid sense of what it was like to leave one life for another and sail across the world into the unknown. In the foreword, Kerry O'Brien writes about his Irish ancestors' perilous voyages to Australia in the nineteenth century-as both free settlers and guests of Her Majesty.

About the Author

Roslyn Russell is a historian, editor and museum curator. She is the author and editor of a number of books on Australian and Caribbean history and heritage, including Literary Links: Celebrating the Literary Relationship between Australia and Britain (1997), One Destiny! The Federation Story: How Australia Became a Nation (with Philip Chubb, 1998) and Ever, Manning: Selected Letters of Manning Clark 1938-1991 (2008). She co-edited Plantation to Nation: Caribbean Museums and National Identity with Alissandra Cummins and Kevin Farmer (2012), and has published an illustrated book on the history and heritage of Barbados, Barbados: More than a Beach (2011).

Roslyn was awarded a doctorate by the University of New South Wales in 2011 for her...