A Land that You do not Know

Many of Australia's first European settlers were convicts transported across the seas from the British Isles. There were also free immigrants. They included entrepreneurs, farmers, soldiers, mariners, miners, and clerical and industrial workers. While online databases have made it possible for today's Australians of European descent to trace their ancestry and acquire an understanding of the outline of their family trees, amateur genealogists usually confront baffling questions. What events led to criminal transgressions that deserved exile in a distant penal colony? How did convicts win their freedom and earn an ostensibly honest living in unfamiliar surroundings? Why did men and women leave urban slums and industrial occupations for rural lives on the other side of the world? How did their progeny - the sons and daughters of convicts and free settlers alike - fare as the decades unfolded?

Partly inspired by Patrick White's 'The Tree of Man', David Morisset's novel, 'A Land that You do not Know', imagines the lives and times of Hugh Wadkin, an English convict, and Maggie Kintyre, a Scottish free settler. Both became residents of the Hawkesbury District on the outskirts of Sydney - although Maggie arrived seventy years after Hugh had first trudged along the Windsor Road on his way to the fertile banks of the Hawkesbury River. Their circumstances were dramatically different. They brought with them sharply contrasting expectations. Eventually, their Australian family trees would intertwine.

David Morisset is the pen name of an Australian writer who grew up in the Hawkesbury District, at Riverstone, west of Sydney. After roaming the world, first as a diplomat and later as an economist, he published several novels as well as collections of short stories and poems. His poem, 'Persian Princess', was commended in the John Shaw Neilson Poetry Award (2009 Fellowship of Australian Writers National Literary Awards).