At Home on the Hill: Volume 1 and Volume 2

The books, At Home on the Hill Vol I and Vol II document the lives of all the burials within the Phillip Island Cemetery from the opening of the Cemetery in 1870 up until 1920.

One hundred and fifty stories over these fifty years.

The stories cover the rhythms of everyday life of farming, of birth, marriage and death, of everyday acts of kindness and cruelty, of success and failure.

It is a local history.

Whilst the word ‘local’ sometimes conjures up images of parochialism, obscurity, and irrelevance, the stories contained in these books give the reader a connection to place and an understanding of the lives and challenges the early Phillip Island settlers faced as the reader learns about them individually and not as a part of a faceless mass of national statistics.

In the words of the author “When my mother was a girl, she would walk around the village of Rhyll with her grandmother. Every paddock and field they would pass had a name and with every name came a story.”

Volume I was shortlisted in the 2020 Victorian Community History Awards.