“You can buy for yourself a tin hook pot to hang on before the fire in the Gally to boil tea at times when it is required.* And a few Oranges and lemons for the Sea Sickness* or any thing you please.
“Dear Wife this is a fine Country and a beautiful climate it is like a perpetual Sumer, and I think it will prove congenial for your health, No wild beast nor anything of the Sort out here,* fine beautiful birds and every thing seems to smile with pleasure Cockatoos as plentiful and common as crows in England Provisions of Every kind is very cheap you can buy Beef at 1d penny* per lb flour 1½d per lb tea 2s per lb and Sugar at 2d per lb and other things as cheep, but this is every poor mans diet. Wages is not so very high out here not so much as they are in England.* I have Nothing more to Say at Present more than this is just the country where we can end our days in peace and contentment when we meet.”
original spelling
* This piece of advice came from the heart. On convict transports such pots were worth their weight in gold, as William Moy Thomas later explained to readers of Household Words through a sobering tale: see Criminal Justice.
* That is to say scurvy, not motion sickness.
* Apart from a few eastern brown snakes, tiger snakes, funnel-web spiders, redback spiders and scorpions, that is. But perhaps these do not count as ‘wild beasts’ in the way that tigers and lions do.
* The word ‘penny’ is superfluous as the abbreviation d means ‘penny’ (literally, denarius). The letter s in this sentence is short for ‘shilling’ and lb stands for ‘pound’. The figures 1½d are spoken as ‘a penny ha’penny’, and 2d as ‘tuppence’.
* The writer manages to use ‘wages’ as a singular noun and also as a plural noun in the same sentence; the plural form is more common nowadays.