One of a series of meticulously researched, historical novels in which each book is written in the form of a fictional diary of a young person living during an important event or time period in Australian history. Lizzie Harvey, a convict transported to Sydney Cove, is starved and overworked. She has to fetch water, mend clothes, please her master, care for his china-doll daughter and tiptoe around his moody soldier son. She can barely find time to dream about the way things used to be, let alone write in her diary. But write she must. It is her only hope of reaching out to the home she has left behind, all those thousands of miles across the sea.