history
Don Garden
Robyn Annear
Nothing But GOLD
The Diggers of 1852
Text Publishing $24.95pb, 329pp
1 876485 07 8
THE WRITING OF non-academic popular history in Australia does not
have a particularly strong heritage, apart from that exception
which confirms the rule, Robert Hughes' The Fatal Shore. It is
the most widely read book of Australian history, excellent in
many respects, though academic historians have given it mixed
reviews. I was interested that a group of academically trained
fourth year honours students with whom I recently discussed
Hughes' book, were almost universally sympathetic to it and even
gripped by it. The principal reasons were its narrative power,
and an acceptance that such a book earns validity by virtue of
its capacity to popularise history and make it palatable to the
general reader. They are probably right.
Robyn Annear is not (yet?) in the same league as Hughes, but has
previously demonstrated a capacity for popular history with
Bearbrass, that imaginative, readable and amusing work on early
Melbourne. Nothing But GOLD is less imaginative, more
conventional and with fewer literary flights, but successfully
blends extensive research and a lightness of touch in her
writing. The twinkle in her eye, the capacity to intermix the amusing and entertaining with the detail of narrative, is never far away. It is not academic history, but it is a good read and makes accessible one of the most interesting episodes in our history.
There are, however, two minor misleading points in the subtitle. First, while Annear offers some broader coverage of the various fields discovered and worked in 1852, she principally concentrates on her own locality, the Mount Alexander and Forest Creek region around the present day Castlemaine and Chewton. (Chewton does not rate a reference in the rather half-hearted index which, incidentally, bestows a knighthood on C.J. La Trobe.) Secondly, while the book is ostensibly about 1852, perhaps inevitably some of the sources (such as Fauchery) and events are drawn from a wider period. It might have been easier simply to widen the period of the study.
While nitpicking, one disappointment is the absence of endnote references -- unlike Robert Hughes. Many of the sources are identified in the text, but the absence of detailed citation and in many cases the failure to identify sources of information, is rather frustrating.
Those issues aside, this is a valuable addition to the Australian history library. Given its more than 300 pages, Nothing But GOLD is the most comprehensive published depiction of life on the Victorian goldfields. Drawing essentially upon published sources, with a few supplementary manuscript materials, it delves into numerous aspects of the diggers and diggings; equipping for the great adventure, travel to the diggings, setting up camp, the domestic arrangements of the miners, their food, clothing and entertainment, their animals, their methods of mining, the trials of climate and hard work, the environmental devastation, the slaughter of wildlife, and more. Despite the paucity of evidence in the records, Annear even gives some idea of what the diggers did for a toilet, and identifies the presence of prostitution.
Annear has an eye for the amusing and quirky. Cats were highly prized for their capacity to catch mice, but were rare and expensive until an entrepreneur arrived with a dray-load scavenged from the lanes of Melbourne:
Thereafter cats became commonplace, thriving on a diet of offal, mice and small marsupials and breeding like mad until eventually they would outnumber and outface the dogs and create a flourishing supply for sausage merchants.
A mock despatch from Lieutenant Governor La Trobe to Earl Grey which appeared in the Argus in December 1851, when Melbourne and La Trobe had been largely deserted by their workforce, captured the vice-regal quandary when he finishes, 'Yours, in a hurry, as I fear the chops are burning'.