'The rats I frighten away by throwing books or anything hard at the spot at which they commence their gnawing.'

Emigrant Janet Ronald wrote this in the journal she kept on board one of the ships transporting free settlers from Britain and Ireland to Australia in the nineteenth century.

On journeys lasting more than 100 days, non-stop, our forebears endured raging seas, the dazzling heat of the tropics and freezing temperatures as ships journeyed far into the southerly latitudes. They also formed social communities, putting on plays, developing sometimes lasting relationships and taking part in wild nautical rituals.

Using diary entries and shipboard newspapers, author Roslyn Russell gives a vivid sense of what it was like to leave one life for another and sail across the world into the unknown. In the foreword, Kerry O'Brien writes about his Irish ancestors' perilous voyages to Australia in the nineteenth century—as both free settlers and guests of Her Majesty.