| Biog: |
Jeanette Hyland is a forth generation Tasmanian. She was born at New Town, lived at Moonah and North Hobart. Her nursing training (Royal Hobart Hospital) and midwifery training (England) followed by study at the Melbourne Bible Institute and the College of Nursing Australia preceded her career of 20 years as a nurse, health educator and social researcher in Nepal. ‘In Nepal I studied and worked with Leprosy sufferers – the downtrodden of today, while in Maids Masters and Magistrates I studied and ‘worked with’ (I wish!) the downtrodden of yesterday – convict women.’ Now retired Jeanette is engaged in writing, historic research and art. The death of Jeanette’s uncle Allan Hyland in 2000 prompted research into her ancestors, several of whom she discovered had been transported from England in the 1830s. This book grew out of that discovery and Jeanette’s pondering about the lives and experiences of convict women. She decided to tell the story of her ancestor, feisty flaxen-haired Harriett James – but not just her story. In Maids, Masters and Magistrates Harriett James is set alongside some of her fellow convicts. Their lives in turn are pictured against the backdrop of the colony of Van Diemen’s Land in the 1830s; the places, settlers and authority figures. Harriett James married John Ireland in 1840, their son Michael (Ireland 1844-1928) married in 1866, his son Percy Arthur (Hiland) Hyland (1876-1950) married in 1901, his son Roy Edwin Hyland, Jeanette’s father, (1905-1965), married in 1938. Maids, Masters and Magistrates tells the stories of twenty convict women in Van Diemen’s Land between 1835 and 1840. Within a week of arriving in Hobart Town in March 1835 most of the 165 women and girls from their transport New Grove were put to work. They were house and laundry maids, cooks, nurse maids, dress makers and general servants. Their masters and mistresses were a veritable who’s who of the colony. The New Grove women are followed as they travel to distant isolated farm establishments, to Launceston or round the corner in Hobart Town. Their ‘careers’ as convicts are presented as recorded in the ‘Black Books’ of the police establishment. Maids, Masters and Magistrates is a work of history which pays tribute to these women, representative of the more than 11,000 women transported to Van Diemen’s Land between 1803 and 1853. Here they find their place in history. Maids Master and Magistrates was published in March 2007. |
| Writing Interests: |
Non-Fiction;Memoir / Auto-biography;Historical Fiction or Non-Fiction;Academic |
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