On a Bright Hillside in Paradise

For many years the idea of having convict descendants was something to be ashamed of, but not anymore. ‘A convict in the family’ is now almost a badge of pride, although as the Founders and Survivors project on Van Diemen’s Land convict records has shown, the life histories of people transported to Tasmania were not necessarily the optimistic stories of redemption and upward progress that we might like to imagine. Annette Higgs’ book On a Bright Hillside in Paradise, set in 1874 takes a more clear-eyed view of Tasmanian rural life, where ‘collisions’ with the indigenous people and the ‘convict stain’ were still within living memory. Based on her own family history, this is the story of three generations of the Hatton family, eking out a precarious living on a small land holding on the west coast of Tasmania, in a place rather ironically called ‘Paradise’.

Into this ‘Paradise’ come two Christian Brethren preachers, a trope more familiar in American rural stories than Australian ones, who convert members of the Hatton family to varying degrees, along with many others from the Paradise community, in a mixture of faith, curiosity, lack of other excitement and life disappointment.

The story is told from five different perspectives. It starts with Grandmother Eliza whose convict father married her off to a fellow convict who was violent to her and fathered multiple children upon her. She now sits in the corner of her adult daughter’s house, watching the family, and she is full of stories and secrets from the past. We move to the oldest son, Jack, who is converted by the preachers, and stays on the family farm. Susannah is Eliza’s daughter and Jack’s mother, drained by her many children and too much sadness and death. Her son Jack’s brother Eddie, takes up the story, but he is the one who strikes out on his own, after falling out with his brother. Their sister Echo rounds out the book, sharing her brother Jack’s faith but still close to her brother Eddie.

Not much actually happens in the book. There is an ongoing rivalry with the Dunstan boys; the indigenous Coleman boys hold knowledge of older ways; there is a tragic accident and subsequent guilt; there are births and deaths. Small things are part of big things. The same events are told in each section, adding a little more detail each time, widening out each time and through another perspective to have other significances. These are the stories that are handed on through families, shaping later generations’ sense of family history.

Higgs captured well the sameness and the precariousness of farming life, and the narrowness of vision under the wide expanse of sky, mountain and bush. She has obviously done her research well, and it rings true. I did keep expecting something to happen more suddenly and randomly, but instead this is a slow unspooling of small events into a bigger meaning, with individuals placed against a wider backdrop of ‘history’. It is beautifully written, with a slow, even pace but I found myself anticipating a jolt that never came.

My rating: 7.5/10

Sourced from: Yarra Plenty Regional Library