Wetenschappelijke uitgave van het dagboek van Annie Baxter Dawbin die in Australië met haar man een cattle station probeert op te zetten.

In July 1858 Annie Dawbin and a man she had rashly married a year before rode north from Portland in Victoria to Sinclair, where they would try to run a successful cattle station. Annie wrote her hopes into the journal in which, as a flamboyant woman of decided opinions and considerable charms, she had been chronicling her version of British settlement in Australia since 1834.
Thirty-two volumes of the handwritten journal survive, a remarkable achievement unmatched in colonial Australian letters. Only extracts from the journal have previously been published. The present volume presents the full text of its most vital period, 1858 - 68, together with full annotation, biographical notes, maps, and historical and editorial introduction.

Annie recorded the daily life of station work, which she relished. A lover of story, she delighted in local gossip, however malicious, and set down in het notebooks the private lives of some the the Western District’s most public figures. Unluckily, her own story was not the longed-for romance in which she could centre herself as heroine, but rather a humiliating descent into bankruptcy.

Forced off the station in 1862, the Dawbins rented a house near Melbourne. While her husband drifted listlessly and then returned, alone, to England, Annie worried over daily expenses, looked for work and rebuilt her social world. Living first with a family and then in a boarding house, she details the city’s life as seen from the vantage point of a woman dangerously close to the edge of respectability.