It was an oppressive summer's day in 1948 when 545 refugees from 15 European countries sailed away from the port of Marseilles with light suitcases but heavy hearts, towards an uncertain future in a distant land. Circumstances rather than preference had dictated their choice of a country about which they knew nothing. They measured Australia's advantages by negative rather than positive attributes: absence of persecution, disapproval of communism, and distance from Europe.

The voyage took almost three months instead of five weeks. By the time the SS Derna reached Melbourne, the arrogant Colonel Ogden Hershaw, the escorting officer for the refugees, had antagonised many of the passengers. By openly favouring the Baltic migrants, and making contemptuous remarks about the Jewish passengers, he aroused so much hostility that some young hot heads plotted to throw him overboard. The doctor who had accompanied the Jewish orphans wrote a letter to the headquarters of the International Refugee Organisation in Geneva, that a man who was so anti-semitic was hardly a suitable choice to accompany Holocaust survivors.

The Voyage of Their Life recreates the voyage through the eyes of the passengers who lived through it, and then traces their transition from refugees to residents, as they rebuilt their lives in Australia and, in the process, helped to build up their new country. The second section of The Voyage of Their Life shows how their hopes were dashed or their dreams were fulfilled, whether their relatives exploited or supported them, and whether they put down roots in Australia or whether they continue to long for the distant land they still call home.

The author, Diane Armstrong, was born in Poland in 1939, and arrived in Australia on the SS Derna with her parents in 1948. She is the author of Mosaic, A Chronicle of Five Generations which became a bestseller in 1998.