A Parcel of Gold for Edith: Letters from Australia 1853-1875 - Softcover

Stevens, Joyce

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1873855362 ISBN 13: 9781873855362

Publisher: John Owen Smith, 2001

Synopsis

This is the story of one of Australia’s Pioneer Women, who spent most of her life in the gold fields of Bendigo.In 1841, aged only 19, Ellen Suter fled poverty and squalor in the back-streets of Portsmouth and set off alone to live in the new colony of Victoria on the other side of the world.In Melbourne, she met and married James Read, a settler from Ipswich, Suffolk, more than twenty years her senior. Over the next 20 years she bore him fourteen children, only five of whom survived.Her story has been pieced together from the accidental discovery of seven letters written between 1853 and 1875 to her brother, William Suter, a papermaker in Headley, Hampshire.

About this title

Synopsis

Written on wafer-thin blue paper, folded, creased and faded, the first letter was in places difficult to decipher, but the very first sentence alone spoke to me over a gap of more than one hundred years. "My Dear Sister, Weary is the task to me to address another letter to you, for so hopeless seems the prospect of my receiving any answer." Who was this woman crying out in despair from the other side of the world to her unnamed sister? The accidental discovery of seven old letters in a bureau started Joyce Stevens on a thirty-year search. What had happened to her great-great-aunt Ellen, who emigrated from Portsea to Australia in 1841? Here we see the results of that search.

Edition details

• Publisher: John Owen Smith
• Publication date: 2001
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1873855362
• ISBN 13: 9781873855362
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 104