All our tracks and ways

In 1862 a middle-aged couple, James and Frances Reed, accompanied by all ten of their adult children, left their established home in Sydney to restart their lives 800 kilometres away in the fledgling far western NSW town of Bourke. "All our tracks and ways" records their life stories and those of their parents and children, three generations of ordinary working people who forged a better life for their descendants built on kinship, initiative and enterprise.

The book provides a history of a pioneering Bourke family headed by James Reed and Frances Heazle, a devoted, resilient and resourceful couple whose lives of initiative and enterprise helped to forge a better future for their ten adult children and eighty-nine grandchildren. It details the struggles and successes of three generations of an immigrant family of ordinary people from rural England and Ireland throughout the nineteenth century. The background to their lives features the Napoleonic war, the Aboriginal Wars, the development of democracy in NSW and the experience of women on the Australian frontier.

Numerous details of the family are provided that are not otherwise known. The book details their experiences through a turbulent decade spent fruitlessly searching for a means of improving their prospects and examines the difficult decision to remain in Australia when James' regiment was redeployed to India. It outlines the societal forces that contributed to the decision to move to Bourke, including the gold rush, the expansion of grazing, the displacement of the aboriginal population, the government policy that delayed settlement in the district by about 15 years and the land reforms of the early 1860s.

The middle chapters recount a Dickensian series of tribulations that beset almost every member of the family during the late 1870s, culminating in the gruesome death by fire of granddaughter Jane Eliza Reed. The later chapters cover the couple's final years and feature family photographs, the cameleers' arrival, Bourke's central role in the shearers' strikes that led to the formation of the Australian Labor Party, inundation by floodwater, a typhoid epidemic and the horrible heatwave of 1896 that killed 47 townspeople in two weeks. The Epilogue ties up the loose ends of this dynastic tale, including the experiences of nine grandsons in the Great War, where three made the ultimate sacrifice.

The main theme of this book aims is that the lives of ordinary people can illuminate the past in much the same way as those of society's leaders.