Cirrus@Austlit

'In 1852, a book was dedicated to “our most gracious and beloved Queen.” It professed to be a “simple chronicle of nine years passed in one of Her Majesty’s most remote colonies.”  The book was My Home in Tasmania, During a Residence of Nine Years and its author was Louisa Meredith, an English woman who had emigrated from Britain to the Australian colonies with her husband Charles, thirteen years earlier. The Merediths intended to live in the colonies for five years, before returning “home” to Britain, something they never did.Charles Meredith had lived in the Australian colonies since 1821, and when Lieutenant-Governor Arthur denied Charles a land grant in Tasmania, he moved to New South Wales (NSW). He returned to England in 1838, and sailed back to the colonies the following year, married to his cousin Louisa, who was expecting their first child. After spending her first years as a colonist in NSW, Louisa Meredith dismissed Sydney as hot, glaring and dusty, and thought its inhabitants pretentiously imitated British social customs. She understood emancipists to be wealthy, but lacking taste and education, and said convicts struggled with alcoholism, while the indigenous population was savage and brutal. In short, she was unimpressed and welcomed the family’s move to Tasmania in 1844. Meredith found more visual reminders of the English landscape there, and the building of new cultural institutions offered settlers uncontested areas for cultivating a replica of English society, which endeared the colony to her.'  (Introduction)