Two women stepped from the steamship Orient onto Australian soil on a hot December day in 1879. Beatrice Beauchamp epitomises the younger middle-class English woman settler unused to the unpleasant. Yet she combats tragedy, and meets challenge and difference with a level of equanimity not commonly expected from one with a genteel upbringing. We share her despair and her fears as from the first day she must call on a personal strength and resolve previously...