This is the story of one of Australia's Pioneer Women, who spent most of her life in the gold fields of Bendigo. In 1841, aged only 19, Ellen Suter fled poverty and squalor in the back-streets of Portsmouth and set off alone to live in the new colony of Victoria on the other side of the world. In Melbourne, she met and married James Read, a settler from Ipswich, Suffolk, more than twenty years her senior. Over the next 20 years she bore him fourteen children, only five of whom survived. Her story has been pieced together from the accidental discovery of seven letters written between 1853 and 1875 to her brother, William Suter, a papermaker in Headley, Hampshire.