In 1786, the young Watkin Tench (c1758-1833) volunteered for three years' service in the coloney of Botany Bay. In two books, of which this is the second, he described the "voyage to and the early years of the settlement in New South Wales, at once the most perceptive and the most literary of the contemporary accounts. Less detailed than David Collins, less matter of fact than Arthur Phillip or John White, Watkin Tench was the first to mould Australian experience into a work of conscious art. To a sound eighteenth-century style—he had read Voltaire and Gibbon—he added an interest in the novel, the picturesque and the primitive which foreshadows romanticism. His eye ranged over the convicts and the Aboriginals with a mixture of shrewd common sense and sympathetic tolerance, and his reaction to the country itself shows the same qualities. His notes, made while the events were fresh, were no doubt polished at leisure and were then selected and arranged to bring out the main themes, and his writing combines the freshness of immediately recorded experience with more elaborate set pieces and reflections" (Fitzhardinge for ADB online).