Book reviews: Douglas E. Darbyshire, In time for Lunch, Fremantle Arts Centre Press, Fremantle 1991, pp.108, $19.95 pb./Henry Richardson, A Pleasant Passage: The Journals of Henry Richardson, Surgeon-Superintendant aboard the convict ship Sultana, Fremantle Arts Centre Press, Fremantle 1990, pp.211, including illustrations, $16.99.

摘要

These two books, with the more lavish The Voyage Out (1991), represent a new and commendable initiative from Fremantle Arts Press: the publication of archival sources which must otherwise have remained beyond the public gaze. All three reproduce the flavour which perhaps only first-hand narrative can give to accounts of sea travel, with the two texts reviewed here both dealing with specific episodes of government-assisted migration - forced and voluntary - to Western Australia from Britain. The unwilling' and willing emigrants are, on the one hand, a group 224 convicts transported to Western Australia in 1859; on the other a group of young single women given colonial government assistance to travel to the colony at the height of the 1890s gold bloom, to enter domestic service.