PARADISE HEIGHTS
Cathy Stubbs is a farmer's daughter who lives on an isolated farm in the Paradise area of the New England gorge country. Her father is a salt-of-the-earth farmer who has only ever read one book in his life: Wuthering Heights. Whenever he finishes it he starts all over again, and he sees life through the lens of that book. This is how Cathy got to be called Cathy.
She develops a deep friendship with an Aboriginal boy, Cliff who is part of an Aboriginal tribe that live on Mr Stubbs' farm. At least that isn't his real name but when, at the age of 12, he starts working as his stockman, Mr Stubbs calls him Cliff. (His wife put her foot down about the name Heathcliff!)
The nearest neighbours are the Wade family, descendants of the bushranger Wordsworth Wade, or Captain Thunderbolt as he's better known as. Being four miles from his own farm-house, Mr Stubbs calls the Wade's place Throshcrush Grange. (He was always getting things the wrong way round.) Cathy plays with Richard Wade, a boy about her own age, but as he's only at home during the holidays from boarding school she has less to do with him than with Cliff.
As soon as she completes her Leaving Certificate, she moves to Kings Cross to stay with her aunt and uncle, while attending Sydney University. There she meets up with Cliff whom she hasn't seen for some years. He was taken under the wing of the Methodist minister at Uralla, who saw his potential and tutored him. He is now doing Veterinary Science. Who will she end up marrying? Cliff, or Richard, or perhaps the mysterious boy on the tram?
Many of the events in the novel parallel those in my own life. For example when Cathy starts at Sydney University in 1946 she is studying Mathematics, English, History and Geography. Several of the mathematics lecturers that she would have had were still there when I did mathematics there in 1959 and I was able to put my own observations about their lecturing styles into Cathy's inkwell. She starts as an English teacher at Canterbury Boys High in 1954, the very year that I started at the school. Again my observations of the other teachers became Cathy's.
When Cathy does get married (I won't tell you whom she marries) she honeymoons at Stanwell Park, which is where my wife and I honeymooned and lived for many months. The bushfire that Cathy and her husband help to fight is the one that Elisabeth and I assisted in fighting.
There is a second generation, who live out at Ebenezer on the Hawkesbury. I had great fun researching the original inhabitants of that area. They were all from the border country of Scotland and they came out together, as free settlers, on the Coromandel in 1802. One of these families was the Stubbs family, so Cathy's father wasn’t a descendent of a convict as he'd thought, but was a descendant of a free settler. Tragedy strikes from time to time. In all there are three falls from cliffs, two bushfires and a couple of floods. Such is Australia!