Two hundred years ago two young sisters (children really) stepped off the “Castle Forbes” which had just docked into the new settlement of Hobart in Tasmania. Ann and Margaret Honeyman were just 11 & 10 years old. They had been newly indentured to the Reid family as maids to the Reids two babes. They had left their mother and two younger brothers aboard the Castle Forbes to travel onto Sydney Town having just received news that their convict father, who they hoped to join up with in Sydney Town, had died. These two girls, new arrivals to the penal settlement of Hobart, a town settled just 18yrs prior, were Scottish emigrants now bound for the colonial outpost along the Clyde River in the highlands near to what was to become the township of Bothwell on the Central Tasmanian High Country.
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Jan Hawkins Author 