The narrator recounts arriving in North New Zealand with family and the practical trials of establishing a household, travel, and adapting to colonial conditions. Episodes alternate between humorous and perilous anecdotes—voyage hardships, housing scrapes, hunts, auctions, and a bushranger encounter—and descriptive sketches of the local environment and economy, including forests, fisheries, bird shooting, and kauri gum digging. Social and civic life receives attention through accounts of dances, a Maori wedding, education, labouring settlers, and county government meetings. The volume blends personal observation, natural description, and practical commentary to portray everyday settler experience.