Australian Voices - Glimpses of Our Pioneering Past Through Diaries, Letters and Recollections from the First Fleet to the Great War

'I think I hear you saying, "Where the De--ce is Sydney Cove"...? Australian Voices begins with a letter written to his brother by one of the men who sailed with the First Fleet in 1788. It ends with a message from a grief-stricken mother whose son had enlisted to fight on the other side of the world in the Great War of 1914-18

In this evocative anthology, the inhabitants of colonial Australia speak to use directly in their own voices, through letters, diaries, and reminiscences. In doing so, they reveal their hardships and pleasures, their cynicism and hope ... and there developing sense of being 'Australian'.

Australian Voices is in essence a time capsule of a world that ended almost a century ago. Sometimes humorous, often moving, always fascinating, it reaches back into our pioneering past and brings the people who lived there - Aborigines, convicts, bush settlers, farmers, gold miners, slum-dwellers, city larrikins - vividly back to life