Hillside

Hillside was the home of George William Field R.N., who had been Col Light’s second in command on the Rapid. He bought the land in 1845 and built the house shortly afterwards. Field died in November 1850 and the house was then rented out. It was described in 1854 by Margaret Cochrane Little, whose mother rented it:
It is strange to come upon a cultivated house in these wilds. Hillside is a pretty Australian house, with verandahs, covered with roses and vines. It is on the top of a high hill, with another hill for its back ground, and commands a view which would drive a panorama painter wild, such an expanse of mountain and wood, and on one side a peep at the sea. …Occasionally we bush-ranging daughters stay a night, and enjoy the almost forgotten pleasures of furnished rooms and domesticated bed-rooms, with blazing fires.
The house was damaged in a storm in 1916 and was demolished. A new Hillside was built some distance away on the same property, using much of the material from the old house. The photograph shows what little was left of the house in 1981, when members of the Historical Society visited the site. The hand-out for that tour read as follows:
[Hillside] was called the mansion of the district. It was a spacious, two-storeyed house, built of stone with brick-work at the corners and around the windows and was originally roofed with slate. The lower two rooms were partly set into the face of the hill while the upper three rooms were surrounded, probably on three sides, by roofed balconies with timber floors and balustrades. There were two-French-windows facing the front, giving a pleasant outlook over Hay Flat. The kitchen and service rooms were separated from the house by a covered walk-way.