Reminiscences of Early Hobart Town, 1804-1810

John Pascoe Fawkner arrived in the Derwent with David Collins' party in February 1804, and watched the birth of the settlement and its fight to survive during its e arly years. More than sixty years later he returned to Hobart Town to interview its early pioneers and to prepare his memoirs of those times.Fawkner's memories were not always accurate (he was a boy when he arrived), and some of his accounts of events were based on hearsay or oral history. Nevertheless, his memoir is a valuable historical record, containing much information not found elsewhere. Unlike most other surviving accounts of early Hobart Town, it is written from the perspective of the free settler, and provides an insight into many aspects of daily life: encounters with Aborigines and bushrangers; fire, starvation and other hard ships of life on the land.It reflects what ordinary people thought, felt or believed, and adds a valuable human dimension to the scanty official records of the period.