Audrey Tennyson, in a letter to her mother in January 1903, wrote:

About my letters … would you ask somebody to buy at Harrods a japanned tin box for holding them … the great thing is to keep them together as if they are in several places they are likely to get put away and forgotten. I am afraid they won’t be worth publishing but they may be of great interest to the boys some day – and Hallam might perhaps make use of them for a book on Australia.

We can be very glad that they weren’t put away, nor used by her husband in the way suggested, and that, despite the innate and characteristic modesty of their writer, they have at last been published. They are part of the Tennyson Papers, held on loan by the National Library of Australia since 1956, and it was a happy inspiration that those concerned chose Alexandra Hasluck to edit them. These letters, written by Lady Tennyson during the term of office of her husband (Hallam, Lord Tennyson) as Governor of South Australia and then as Governor General do indeed constitute, as Lady Hasluck so appropriately writes in her Introduction, ‘a unique picture of Australia and Australian society as seen from Government House by a charming, tolerant and interested Englishwoman’.

At one stage Lady Tennyson wrote, ‘… we certainly have been quite extraordinarily fortunate in having just been here during these last two years, by far the most interesting of any in the history of Australasia.’ It was true. There were the great social and political events of Federation (including the national celebration of Commonwealth Day on New Year’s day 1901); the Boer War; the Royal Visit by the Duke and Duchess of Cornwall and York (later King George V and Queen Mary) in 1901, and other events of the period, not least the cricket test matches against McLaren’s English XI – ‘We were wildly excited at England’s victory ... isn’t it splendid? We are so glad …’ (but alas Australia won the next four tests).

But cricket is part of the story too, and of coming events casting their shadows before them. Lady Tennyson, when she wrote of her son Lionel’s cricketing prowess as a schoolboy – ‘ … it is astonishing how Lionel has come on and he really plays extremely well and in excellent style’ – could not know that in years to come the Hon. Lionel would become a cricket international and captain England against Australia.