Australian Stories from our Past

Send us Fan MailNine weeks on the road and the Murray finally slips behind them, but Bendigo still doesn’t feel real. We pick up our 1852 overland trek right where the party crosses into Victoria, a colony gripped by Australian gold rush fever, and we track the next month of slow, stubborn progress through Mallee scrub, sandhills, swamps, and half-formed bullock dray tracks that barely resemble...

Send a textA river in flood can be a teacher and a judge. We open on the Murray–Darling Basin’s split personality—winter-and-snowmelt-fed Murray versus summer-storm-fed Darling—to explain why our 1852 trek met a swollen Murray while the Darling ran lower. From there, the story flows to Gundagai, a town mapped neatly between a big river and an anabranch despite Wiradjuri warnings. Earlier floods...

Send us Fan MailA newborn in a spring cart, a flood-swollen river, and a punt that won’t run on Sundays—our 1852 trek along the Murray is a study in grit, chance, and consequence. We read the original diaries aloud and sit with what they reveal: Regent parrots blazing over saltbush, lost stockmen saved by First Nations know-how, and the stark reality of cattle drowning as they “ring the water”...

Send us Fan MailA flooded river, a stubborn pony, and a crooked border set the stage for a journey that refuses to fit neat lines on a map. We follow our hardy party from Lake Bonney through sand and scrub toward Lake Victoria, rebuilding their path from terse diary entries and hard choices made under rain-heavy skies. What some call Freeman’s Creek aligns with Ral Ral, and distances snap into...

Send us Fan MailA river can be a map, a memory, and a meeting place all at once. We follow the Murray’s sweep from Charles Sturt’s gruelling 1830 voyage and the collapse of the inland sea myth, to Joseph Hawdon’s cattle drive that carved the overland stock route, and then into the gritty detail of our 1852 party wrestling a stubborn Timor pony through sand toward Overland Corner and Lake Bonney....

Send us Fan MailA desert boundary, a flooded creek, and forty bullocks that won’t stop heading home—this is the uneasy start of a family’s 1852 push from Kooramoora to the Bendigo goldfields. We open with the puzzle of Goyder’s Line, the fenceless border where rainfall drops, Mallee yields to saltbush, and the dream of cropping often turns to stone ruins. Then we set our wheels on the Upper...

Send us Fan MailBankruptcy to gold fever—William Henry Neale's remarkable journey captures the essence of Australia's 1850s transformation. After two financial collapses, including a £6,000 debt in England (equivalent to $1.8 million today), Neale found himself working at South Australia's famed "Monster Mine" in Burra, then the continent's seventh most populated area and largest inland...

Send us Fan MailThe deadly journey to Australia wasn't just about surviving treacherous seas—it was about escaping invisible killers that stalked passengers in the cramped confines of sailing ships. Dr. George Mayo's diary from his second voyage records the heartbreaking reality: "Friday March 15th, aged two years three months, dead."We're joined by a medical expert who unpacks the devastating...

Send us Fan MailDeadly epidemics swept through 19th-century cities with terrifying regularity, leaving medical practitioners like Drs. Watts and Mayo powerless against invisible killers they couldn't understand. What made these diseases so devastating, and how did we finally conquer them? Our medical expert takes us through the horrifying reality of cholera – nicknamed "the blue death" for the...

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