Anne Frankland: The First Lady of Secheron House

Ocean waves carried Anne Frankland (nee Mason, 1793-1842) around the world. From England to India to South Africa and Australia, and back again several times. The product of an upper-class family with a proud history of well-regarded professional and charitable men, Anne could never have imagined what would become of the nearly destitute 26-year-old spinster

employed as a governess about to leave London for India in March 1820. Her life evolved in a series of events, circumstances and opportunities. From a daughter, granddaughter and sister, she became a teacher, a friend, a wife, a mother, the mistress of a large estate and a member of the upper echelon of society, all within the bounds of an antipodean English colony that was on the other side of the world.

The wife of Van Diemen's Lands' Surveyor General George Frankland (1800-1838), Anne also became the chief supporter of his career progression, the quiet confidante and counsel with regards to his public portrayal within a brutal Hobart Town press, the host of his many balls, dinners and soir嶪s, and the worried partner when George was away in the remote Van Diemen's Land wilderness. And then she lost it all: her home, her husband, her life as it was.

Whereas Anne and her three teenage children returned to England a few weeks following her husband's death in late 1838, her legacy remains in the Gothic and Georgian-era sandstone residence, Secheron House, that she and George built in the early 1830s overlooking a small, sheltered bay at Battery Point on the edge of the River Derwent. With this book, her personal legacy is no longer hidden in the shadows of history. A life lived within nineteenth-century class conformities and complexities, of love and loss, of financial gain and hardship, this is Anne Frankland's story.