Another volume
p. 94 · Read in the full issue
on Sydney Cove
SYDNEY COVE 1791-1792, like its two predecessors, Sydney Cove 1788 and Sydney Cove 1789-90, tells its own story. The large volume of over 360 pages plus index, describes life in the early convict settlement through extracts from letters, journals, books, documents and despatches arranged in the form of a diary by John Cobley.
The story in this volume is of the near starving colony, left to its own resources in an inhospitable land through the failure of the British Government to back-up the first settlement with supplies. It tells also of droughts, bush fires and floods— inseparable from Australian life even 170 years later but almost over whelming to these earliest migrants.
But there is progress as well.
Sydney Town begins to take shape and there is a dispersal from the area around Farm Cove to farming land at Rose Hill.
The author is a member of the medical profession who has always had an interest in early Australian history. The three books he has pro duced stemmed from a study com menced in 1960 when he began to search contemporary records to find how the first settlers lived, (SYDNEY COVE 1791-1792. Angus and Robertson. 65/-.)