THE first families to emigrate to Australia came from Dorset.

That may not sound remarkable in the abstract. When I was researching the story of my ancestress Mary Pitt, who was one of those early free settler migrants, her story didn’t seem that remarkable to me either until I delved deeper into the context.

Mary, a widow in her 50s, emigrated from her home in the village of Fiddleford, near Sturminster Newton, to New South Wales in 1801, along with her five children aged 13 to 27.

In 1801 the colony was barely 13 years old, the vast majority of the European population were convicts and it was frankly not a place anyone wanted to go to voluntarily.

Soon after the First Fleet arrived in Sydney in 1788, the Governor, Arthur Philip, wrote to the powers that be back home pleading for more farmers to be sent out. (Unbelievably among the First Fleet of convicts and marines there was only one man who knew anything about farming.)

A year later he was still pleading, to no avail. But then why would anyone want to up sticks and sail across the world to live among convicts in what had been deemed, by the same early European colonists, the worst country in the world?

Enter George Matcham. George was tall, handsome and – thanks to an inheritance – rich enough to spend his time in gentlemanly pursuits, among which was a passionate interest in the fledgling colony of New South Wales – where, uniquely, he saw opportunities. He was also married to Horatio Nelson’s sister.

In January 1792 George wrote to the Admiralty to say ‘A skilful farmer has offer’d to go there with his family (on my account) by the first ship, and I make no doubt of being able to send more colonists . . .’

This skilful farmer was more than probably Thomas Rose from Blandford, who migrated with his wife Jane, their four children, a niece, her baby and a friend on the Bellona, which sailed in August that same year.

I know very little about the Rose family before they left Dorset other than that Thomas’s parents, Christopher and Mary (nee Belbin), were buried in a pauper’s grave.

What I do know is what a momentous and courageous decision it was on their part, to give up everything they had known to chance the future of their entire family in an alien country.

The first place they settled in (Liberty Plains, now Strathfield, a suburb of Sydney) was unproductive so they moved to the Hawkesbury River, 50 miles north of Sydney, where they lost everything in successive floods.

Their letters home were, not surprisingly, ‘full of grumbling and complaints’, according to Jane’s mother Jane Topp.

George Matcham was certainly responsible for the migration of Mary and her family nine years later. He was her first cousin after all.

The Pitts were distant relations of the Roses and lived just a few miles away from them in the village of Fiddleford.

It’s assumed, since Mary and her family were living in May Cottage rent free thanks to the generosity of the landowner Lord Rivers, that she’d been experiencing hard times following the death of her husband Robert.

It’s pretty safe to speculate that both families migrated to escape their reduced circumstances.

There is a copy of a portrait of Robert, dated around 1770, which shows him to have been a bit of a dandy. On various indentures Robert was listed as a yeoman and a shopkeeper, which is at odds with a man who had his portrait painted, and who, in 1779, took on the lease of Fiddleford Mill on condition he ‘put the said mill and premises in good and tenantable repair’ in two years.

Six years later the lease was abandoned, the mill ‘being now very ruinous and out of repair’ since Robert had failed to fulfil the condition ‘owing to his distressed circumstances’, whatever they might have been.

The happy ending to the story is that for both the Pitts and the Roses the decision to migrate was triumphantly vindicated. Mary and her family – the subject of my book The Worst Country in the World – were granted land also near the Hawkesbury and their children went on to marry and make their various fortunes in Australia. (None of it survived through the centuries unfortunately.)

The house Thomas Rose built in Wilberforce on the Hawkesbury still exists and is considered to be the oldest timber-frame house in Australia.

The most famous Dorset residents to find themselves in Australia were of course the Tolpuddle Martyrs, generally regarded as the founders of the trade union movement.

They were convicted and transported in 1834 on a trumped-up charge of making an illegal oath and pardoned two years later as a result of public outrage. Needless to say none of them chose to stay in what might now be considered the highly desirable country of Australia.

*Patsy Trench is a writer for television, theatre, radio, music theatre and books. Her book The Worst Country in the World - The True Story of an Australian Pioneer Family is available to buy now from Amazon in ebook and print edition. See patsytrench.com for more information.