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Paramatta
December 13th 1794
Dear Madam,
I am convinced you will receive with peculiar satisfaction the information of our safe arrival in New South Wales. I shall not soon forget your kind attention and civility shown to me in London, though transported to this distant part of the universe.
I have met with nothing so bad as I might have expected before we sailed from England. Since we arrived in this colony we have been very well provided with all the common necessaries of life. The climate is fine and healthy and agrees very well with my constitution. I have not suffered one single day of sickness since we came here.
The country is very romantic, beautifully formed by nature and will be most delightful when it becomes a little more opened. It abounds with beautiful shrubs and ferns of various kinds. We are settled at Parramatta about 14 miles distant from Sydney where Mr. Johnson resides. There is a fine river which runs up from Sydney to Parramatta and boats continually passing to and fro, so that we can easily visit each other. I have one companion at Parramatta the commanding officer wife (Mrs. MacArthur) a very pleasant agreeable Lady, mother of three fine children. At Sydney there are several Ladies so that we have some respectable society. Upon the whole my situation is far more comfortable than I expected to find.
I experience a great loss of Religious Society. Our general conversation in company is very different from what I have been accustomed to in England. It all turns upon worldly affairs. Religion is seldom a subject of conversation excepting to ridicule its doctrines or professions, never to edify one another. There appears humanly speaking little prospect of doing good - however I do not despair for the work is not man's but the Lord's. I trust we are not forgotten at a Throne of Grace by the faithful in England. The Lord had some grand design in sending his gospel to this dark benighted part of the world and therefore this consideration should resign us to his Dispensations who worketh all things according to the Counsel of