Hester's Diary is a 1947 Australian radio serial written by John Appleton set in colonial Australia.[1]
The Brisbane Mail said star Elaine Montgomery "gives a sincere portrayal of young sentimentalist confiding hopes and fears to parchment... But John Tate, as stuttering ensign, steals the show."[2]
Smith's Weekly said "This serial has steadily improved, episode by episode, and the story is already aflush with life. Miss Therese Howell, producer, Jhs wisely shifted the centre of interest from the women to the men and there is a latent promise of action moving through the delicately-played love story...This seems to be thatlong-awaited curipsity — a serial for intelligent listeners."[3]
The serial was repeated in 1951 and 1956.
According to ABC Weekly "It is a love story of Australia in Governor Macquarie’s time, and has a plot in which romance and adventure are cleverly blended. Based on the diary of a young and beautiful English girl, Hester, daughter of one of England’s landed gentry, the story opens when she is 22. In the manner of the times she is fearful of spinsterhood, journeys alone to Australia to marry, under Vice-Regal patronage, John Carmichael, a young officer of the 73rd Regiment, in N.S-W. Her life, first as an officer’s wife, later as the wife of a “free settler” when young Carmichael resigns his com-mission to “go on the land,’is the framework of a delightful story."