On a Bright Hillside in Paradise: The Christian Brethren amongst the settlers on the north-west coast of Tasmania in the 1870s

Abstract

On A Bright Hillside in Paradise is a novel set in north-west Tasmania in the 1870s when Christian Brethren evangelists reached an isolated farming community. Exploration of this moment provides an opportunity to illuminate the psychic state of the white settlers and their relationship to the landscape. These back-blocks communities have rarely been considered seriously, and are sometimes even derided. The Christian Brethren themselves are often assumed to be a secretive sect, or even a cult, but the evangelists of the 1870s and their converts were part of the so-called Open Brethren movement and called themselves simply “Christians”. This project uses fiction and literary techniques to redress these omissions and misunderstandings. The dramatic spiritual conversion of the settlers was a strange moment which seemed in some way to energise their sense of community. Archives and historical records reveal insights about the nature of the people and why they might have been so affected by the revival message. But these communities and experiences remain little known in wider Australian culture. Therefore, to create a fictional world which would illuminate this community my research engages with historical sources and commentary, with the work of theorists such as Tony Hughes-d’Aeth, Paul Carter, Gerry Turcotte, Ken Gelder and Jane Jacobs, and the work of historians James Boyce and Grace Karskens; and makes a close examination of Tasmanian novelist Richard Flanagan’s Death of a River Guide. The exegesis also documents the search for a suitable literary structure, as well as the challenge of depicting the charged affect of a religious revival. The settlers in the novel were colonisers who displaced the Indigenous inhabitants, raising questions of illegitimacy, erasure, and overlapping occupation of spaces. The research and practice of writing the novel therefore considers the overarching question of how to write relevant white settler fiction in Australia today.