The author’s objective is to explain, describe and evoke wonder about those people who chose to leave family and friends forever and sail half way around the world in a small vessel in order to emigrate to a remote place they had little knowledge about. In order to understand this story the reader needs to know what it was like in the colonies in the nineteenth century, how the home and colonial governments felt about emigration/immigration, what was involved in emigrating, the reasons why people emigrated, who decided to emigrate, what the emigrant vessels were like, what the emigrants experienced on this long sea passage and the experience on arrival.

Researched and written over a period of some eight years the book draws on a large number of original and old documents, manuscripts, monographs, letters, journals, diaries, ships logs and newspaper articles and a considerable amount of old and contemporary published material found in a number of the major Australian Libraries. The research work included investigating the vast amount of material copied onto microfilm as part of the Australian Joint Copying Project by the National Library of Australia and the State Library of NSW. As a result of this research the book includes many quotations from letters, diaries, newspaper articles and old documents to illustrate points and bring a nineteenth century perspective. The use of personal stories also adds interest and reality for the reader.