Shared Stories: Keeping in Touch

Keeping in touch - The Fennell letters

Richard Fennell emigrated to Australia in 1833. We don’t know why he left a comfortable life and family business in England for the ‘desert wilds’ of Australia.

The Fennell family eventually settled at what is now known as Fennell Bay. Their homestead no longer exists: it was demolished to allow the construction of the first Fennell Bay bridge.

Richard’s letters have survived.

Fennell kept in touch with family in England. He wrote home regularly. The letters record Fennell’s emotional highs and lows and the difficulty of life in the early colony. An 1851 letter written from Lake Macquarie expresses Fennell’s desperation. Catastrophic flood events led to Fennell’s cattle dying of bovine pleuropneumonia. News of his mother’s death had reached him. Richard was not mentioned in her will.

The letters were kept by the recipient’s descendants in Yorkshire for more than 125 years. Fos Strudwick, a descendent of Richard Fennell, visited England in 1976 and was given the letters.

The original text is difficult to read. The crossed lines of writing used less paper and also saved on postage costs. The letters were deciphered by Fos and Olive Strudwick.

Local Studies collected these letters digitally. The originals remain with the family.

All the Fennell letters and the Strudwick transcriptions can be found here

This work by Lake Macquarie City Library is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License