It had come as a surprise to Hazel that a Victorian English lady could have so much sparkle. She’d always imagined the people from that century to be as fusty as they looked in pictures. And she must have been intrepid: almost two months in a cramped steamer, with three hundred other passengers, one of them her own child, barely a toddler, to keep amused and safe. That would have taken a lot of mettle. Then there was the making of a new life in a new land, from scratch. Finding a house and equipping it. Picnics at St Kilda and Brighton; a boat trip up the River Yarra; evening strolls around the Botanical Gardens. These things she described in her diary, but at this point the notebook was filled. Hazel searched through everything in the bundle for the next volume, but there wasn’t one. Perhaps Alice was too busy in her new life to keep a journal; or perhaps she had continued to record what happened, but the diary was lost. Among the papers was a clipping from a newspaper, on which the names Dr and Mrs Edward Nolan had been circled. Theirs were among a long list of those present at a wedding in Toorak, beneath a headline: ‘Belle of Melbourne weds son of famous English novelist’. Hazel read on. ‘On Saturday the marriage took place between Alfred d’Orsay Tennyson Dickens of Wangagong Station and Augusta Cassie Devlin, of Melbourne. Among those in attendance were …’ This column of yellowing paper had brought a smile to Hazel’s face, for it meant that despite Alice’s status as a divorced woman, she had not been shunned in Melbourne society. Toorak had always been a fancy neighbourhood.