Lucy Frost has assembled a fascinating collection of unpublished and intimate letters and diary entries by th irteen women in 19th century Australia. Women wrote to keep in touch with their old lives and to make some kind of private sense of the new. Their experiences varied widely - from Annie Baxter whose writing sustained her through a miserable marriage to a military man and failed farmer, and Ann Williams who kept a vivid account of a journey with wagon and bullock team from beyond Queanbeyan to the forests of Moruya, to Ellen Morgan writing from Adelaide to tell her parents that three of her four young children had died of starvation on the voyage out. All would have agreed with Annie Baxter, however, when after being bled with a penknife, she wrote to her friend, `Oh! ye nervous ladies, never come to the bush!...