I’ve said it many times, much as I
admire the women who were full of spirit and gumption in the past, there is no
way I would like to share their lives other than in my books. I have often
thought it would be great fun to be a time traveller so that I could return to
the ages I have written about, just to be sure it really was as horrible, nasty
and unhygienic as the historians tell us it was. But be sure, I am glad I live
in a time when we have mod cons and the niceties in life.
When commenting on my historicals
and time-travels I have always stressed my admiration for the women, especially
those who had to endure tremendous hardships as the wives of the early
settlers, regardless of what continent or time period. Even today, there are still
women who have to endure all kinds of deprivation in certain countries where
they have no running water or sanitation.
The inspiration for book one in my
Settlers Series came from a book I happened upon at the library. This gem contained
letters sent home to the country of their birth by women who, whether by choice
or circumstance, were forced to follow their menfolk into what must have seemed
like the gates of hell to them. Most of these women left comfortable lives in
Britain, brought up in genteel households that possessed, if not running water
and heating at a touch, in some cases housemaids to pander to their needs.
Elizabeth Hawkins sent letters home telling of the journey across unfriendly
seas and then the trek in 1822 across the Blue Mountains west of Botany Bay to
a fledgling Bathurst, where her husband was to take up a position as
Commissariat Storekeeper. This family were the first free settlers to cross the
barrier of the mountains. They travelled with eight offspring aged from I to
12, and Elizabeth’s 70-year-old mother. If you read Mystic Mountains, you will
see just why I hold women like Elizabeth and her mother in such high esteem. On
top of enduring the constraints of a corset in much hotter weather than they
were accustomed to, there was the lurking threat of snakes and venomous
creatures they would never have encountered in their homeland.
Love, as the song goes, is a many
splendoured thing. It convinced many women to get on a sailing ship that would
take them and often their children to a far off country on the other side of
the world. Apart from the odd snippet garnered from newspapers or the like, of
the conditions in this New World, they had sparse knowledge of what awaited
them. I’ve seen enough movies set on sailing vessels in the 1800s to understand
the horrendous conditions aboard a ship that took weeks upon endless weeks to
reach its destination. I recently viewed “To the Ends of The Earth” a series on
TV with Benedict Cumberbatch. As a naïve young gentleman, his character is on
his way to take up a Government post in Australia. This movie brought home more
than some just how horrendous the conditions were aboard a sailing vessel, even
if you were a man of substance assigned a cabin of your own.
Life in the fledgling colony was
horrendous for the women who were transported, in some cases for petty crimes,
such as stealing a loaf of bread to feed their children or perhaps taking a
fancy to a strip of ribbon or a bauble of little value that wasn’t theirs to
take.
My third book in this series starts
in 1840 when certain improvements had been made, but even so, conditions were
still unsanitary. My characters take off from Sydney Town on a trek to seek out
adventure in a new colony recently settled down south in Port Phillip. The
journey took a month—that’s four weeks travelling over a barely surveyed land on
horseback. The threat of escaped convicts turned bushrangers lurked, even the
scattering of inns along the way were ill prepared for travellers. Forget
bathrooms or hot and cold running water. Then there was always the other
inconvenience shared by young women—imagine a life with no sanitary products.
My heroine appreciates the
magnificent achievements of the earlier settlers and her wish is to do
something similar with her life. Women such as Caroline Chisolm, who recognised
the need for assisting migrant women who arrived in Sydney but could not secure
employment. Apart from sheltering many new arrivals in her own home, she took
groups of them out to the bush where they easily found work with the settlers.
By 1846 when she returned to England she had helped about eleven thousand
people to either find work or establish themselves as farmers in outback New
South Wales. Without her assistance, many of these women would have been forced
to walk the streets as prostitutes in order to survive.
I guess my admiration for strong
women stems from the high regard I hold for two special women in my life. Our
mother reared ten children through two world wars and depressions, without the
help of a washing machine, or any of the other appliances we take for granted
these days. She struggled daily to make ends meet but always put a meal on the
table for her children and our father, probably surviving herself on a mouthful
or two. I rarely heard her complain—women just ‘got on with it’ in those days. The
other woman was my dear sister whose life I have written about in “Crying is
for Babies.”
Could be the reason why I have
little patience for people who moan about their lot in life, as they chatter on
their mobiles—or drive about in their cars.
