Mrs Macarthur’s secret diary

Some time ago, during the renovation of an historic house in Sydney, a tin box, sealed with wax and wrapped in oiled canvas, was found wedged under a beam in a roof cavity. The house was Elizabeth Farm, where Elizabeth Macarthur, wife of the notorious early settler John Macarthur, lived until her death in 1850. The box – jammed with hard-to-read old papers, cross-written to save space – was put away and forgotten until recently … The contents turned out to be her long-hidden memoirs … hot outpourings, pellets of memory lit by passionate feeling. This is her story…

The pains came on me as we were making our way to Chatham Barracks, from whence we would sail to Gibraltar. We did not get anywhere close to Chatham, though, before it was obvious that the child was on its way, and we fetched up in some disarray at a poor inn on the wrong side of Bath.

I had begun to weep when the pains started, because with the first sharp pang I was obliged to believe what I had until then not truly believed, that there was no going back. Started weeping and did not stop. All the