These letters were discovered in a kangaroo-skin pouch in 1931; that they survived William Sykes was pure luck. After his death in Toodyay (then called Newcastle) the pouch containing the letters, along with his few other belongings, was taken to the local police station. At some point, the pouch must have fallen down behind a cabinet or other piece of furniture in the police station, where it was found by workers in 1931 when the building was being demolished. The rediscovered pouch of letters came into the hands of local historians who, after many years of indecision and debate {should these personal documents be destroyed or preserved for posterity as historical documents?) finally placed them in the Battye Library of Western Australia where they are held today.
Reading between the lines of some edited selections from the 'Toodyay Letters', as they are known from the Western Australian town where William Sykes spent a good part of his sentence, reveal a touching tale of hardship, hope and struggle. William Sykes suffering the horrors and humiliations of transportation to an utterly alien land and environment; his wife Myra struggling to feed, clothe and educate her large family of Thirza, Anne, Alfred and William in England's impoverished industrial north; husband and wife both trying to maintain a relationship across twenty thousand kilometres by the tenuous link of the indifferent postal service of the time, hoping against all the odds that somehow, sometime, in some way they could be together again.
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part of the first Toodyay Letter
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