diaries in English as an aid to self-education. His biographer, Bethan Phillips, wrote in her foreword: . . . The diaries reveal him as a man seeking to exorcise his own demons by attempting to escape from them, but they also reveal him as an astute observer of the people and occurrences impacting upon his own eventful life. His dogged determination in keeping a daily journal, often under the most difficult of circumstances and in the most unpropitious surroundings, has given us a uniquely valuable historical record of life in the nineteenth century. Wales The first entry was on New Year's Day, 1839. Though he continued to record each day, much of the early record has been lost. The earliest complete year extant is 1845. Manuscripts for the years 1839–1868 and 1895–1898 (when he lived in Wales) are held by the National Library of Wales at Aberystwyth, together with his shipboard diary of the voyage from Liverpool to Melbourne. Australia The Australian diaries which were acquired in 1997 by the State Library of Victoria, Melbourne, cover the years 1869–1894. Joseph Jenkins disembarked from the iron-hulled schooner Eurynome at the Melbourne port of Hobson's Bay on 12 March 1869. The Eurynome was an 1163-ton sailing vessel transporting casks of beer to Australia on the clipper route, with 12 passengers in a first-class saloon and 21 (including Joseph) who paid a much lower price to share frugal and unhygienic steerage accommodation on the voyage of 140 days, including three terrifying weeks of gales in the Roaring Forties. The following month's diary shows him carrying his swag, pessimistically prospecting and offering rural labour in and around the goldfields town of Castlemaine where he found many fellow Welshmen. He rarely left this vicinity except to attend the annual St David's Day eisteddfod at Ballarat where, on thirteen consecutive occasions, he was awarded the premier prize for an englyn (Welsh verse form). Joseph obtained regular employment in 1884 as a cleaner of streets and drains in the town of Maldon, a few miles north from Castlemaine. He remained there working until he reached the age of 76 and became homesick for Wales. Having saved the fare, he departed Maldon by rail on 23 November 1894, and embarked on the ss Ophir which docked at Tilbury docks on 5 January 1895. In 1994 a water drinking fountain and a plaque were erected at Maldon railway station