Letters from Australia to family and friends at home

Introduction

This is the story of some of the men, women and children who left their homes in Brighton over a century and a half ago to embark on new lives at the other side of the world. They were by no means the first, and certainly not the last, Brightonians to cross the seas in search of a better life, but those who left around the year 1850 are of particular interest as emigrants bound for Australia, and specifically for Melbourne, Victoria. At this time, and for several years during the 1850s, the Brighton Gazette and other local newspapers published regular items of Emigration News which included letters received by families and friends of two large parties which left the town in 1849 and 1852. The first of these ― the “Juniper and Wood Party”― sailed together on the Harpley, arriving at Port Phillip for Melbourne in January 1850. A much larger number of emigrants (probably around 200) left in 1852 on board the Statesman and several other ships. The letters written home by people from both parties form the core of this account but there is a further invaluable source of information about the experience of the Brighton emigrants to Melbourne. Among those who left with the earlier group was the Chandler family ― father, mother and four children, the eldest of whom was John, then ten years old. John never returned to England, and in 1893, when he was in his fifties, he wrote a detailed account of his life and this was published under the title Forty Years in the Wilderness. His memories, together with the letters recording fresh impressions of recent experience, enable us to follow the emigrants’ reasons for going, what happened on the way and what lay ahead for them in their future lives.