No Privacy For Writing

Most emigrants sailing to Australia in the 19th century travelled in steerage class accommodation. Many kept diaries during what was usually a long and tedious voyage of about three months, recording what they ate, how they were treated by the captain and the doctor, and the social friction of life in their "floating home". They were not the private, reflective diaries of today, but were more like letters, and it was common practice to write up the diary and post it back by the first mail home. Eight diaries form the basis of "No Privacy for Writing". Together they span the main years of mass emigration to Australia by sailing ship and cover the range of experiences of those travelling steerage. There is the sober diary of a single man who punctuates his diary with sentimental and religious verses and that of a 14-year-old writing back home to a schoolfriend. There is the diary of a jaunty young Scot off on an adventure, and that of a man who remains irrepressibly cheery whether he is becalmed or struggling to stand in a gale. Another is a melancholy work recounting the gradual starvation of two of the diarist's children.
The diaries of Mary Maclean and Elizabeth Allbon are, however, the most important in this collection, being extremely rare accounts kept by working women of the voyage out; one writes from the viewpoint of a young female servant, while the second speaks for the many women who were confined in childbirth on board ship.