AustLit

19th-Century Australian Travel Writing

In Five Years' Experience in Australia Felix, writer and artist George Henry Haydon (1822-1891) presented a personal travel narrative that doubled as an emigrant guide. He suggests the work contains reliable and authentic descriptions of life in Australia, justifying his narrative through his residence in the colonies. Haydon argued that despite the library of information written about the colonies, these works were composed by authors who had not travelled to Australia and consequently, emigrant guides misguided the intending emigrant. Haydon was working to rectify this by the production of his guide, which came after five years’ residence in the Australian colonies. The illustrations, drawn by Henry Hainsselin from sketches ‘made on the spot’ by Haydon, are unlike images in other emigrant guides as they are chiefly ethnographic, rather than advertising the development of the urban centres and their buildings. According to the Australian Dictionary of Biography this is a consequence of Haydon’s views towards Aboriginal peoples; Haydon stoutly defended Aboriginal communities against the prejudice of the colonists and studied languages and culture.