19th-Century Australian Travel Writing
A prolific emigrant guide writer, Charles Haynes Barlee (1822-1882) was the brother of West Australian colonial secretary Sir Frederick Palgrave Barlee, and Ellen Barlee, social commentator and writer. Charles Barlee arrived in South Australia in 1839 before travelling to Sydney and Brisbane. He also worked as a Hansard reporter for the Queensland parliament and edited the Sydney journal Once a Week. This short pamphlet of emigrant papers was intended as a guide for the British working classes. Edited by Ellen Barlee, whose preface explains that the papers are designed to address the ignorant opinion that emigration was "little short of Transportation". In the text, Charles Barlee argued that overcrowded conditions and poverty in Britain could be counteracted by emigrating to Australia where there were the advantages of independence and opportunities to build collateral, especially advocating the potential to acquire wealth in the gold diggings. The work lists the positive outcomes of emigration to Australia. Barlee’s later travel narrative Humorous Sketches was posthumously published in 1893.
