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We feature each week Nicholas Reid's reviews and comments on new and recent books.
We feature each week Nicholas Reid's reviews and comments on new and recent books.
“RUSHING FOR
GOLD – Life and Commerce in the Goldfields of New Zealand and Australia” Edited
by Lloyd Carpenter and Lyndon Fraser (Otago University Press, $NZ45)
I have always
found it difficult reviewing collections of academic essays written by many
hands. Each essay will be so dense with information and meaning that it really
requires a “close reading” – or perhaps a detailed counter-argument, if it is
on a topic about which I know something. And yet any review which gave a “close
reading” to all the contributions in such a collection would become unwieldy
and over-long. This problem rears its head again as I look at this heavy
(nearly 400 closely-printed pages) collection of twenty essays written by 23
people. [There are two contributions written in collaboration.]
Rushing for Gold has been
jointly edited by Lloyd Carpenter (Lincoln University) and Lyndon Fraser (Otago
University) and looks at New Zealand’s nineteenth century gold rushes with
special – but not exclusive – reference to the trans-Tasman connection. These
gold rushes were as much Australasian affairs as solely New Zealand ones. This
fact was noted in Stefan Eldrid-Grigg’s racy and populist history of New
Zealand’s gold rushes Diggers, Hatters
and Whores (2008) and has also been glanced at in such recent works of
fiction as Charlotte Randall’s Hokitika
Town (2006) and of course Eleanor Catton’s The Luminaries (2013). I have noticed that in the last decade there
has been a growing interest in the gold-rush era of our history, by writers of
fiction as much as by historians. Perhaps it is because our gold rushes can be
framed as the nearest things in our history to the “wild frontier” phase of
American history.
Rushing for Gold is not a
“wild frontier” book or a piece of mythologising. Its sets of essays are
grouped thematically into five parts.
The four essays
of Part One are the ones which deal specifically with the Australian
connection. Chris McConville, Keir Reeves and Andrew Reeves collaborate to chew
over the issue of how much gold rushes in Otago and in the Australian colony of
Victoria produced similar societies and mentalities. In his essay, Daniel Davy
takes the more direct path of chronicling exactly how many Australians rushed
to Otago and what social impact they had. “Victorian
capital and commerce flooded into the province with a rapidity that stunned
Otago colonists,” he notes, adding that the rushes “pulled Otago closer to Melbourne.” (p.45) In a dense demographic
reading, Terry Hearn shows how the Tuapeka rush produced as much disillusioned
movement of miners away from New Zealand as influx into the province. Finally,
John Angus explains why, despite their populism and their desire to participate
in politics, the influx of miners into Otago did not set off the type of political
clashes that had happened in Ballarat in the 1850s. As one would expect, the
figure of Vincent Pyke looms large in this chapter.
The next four
essays deal with two ethnic groups who were involved in New Zealand gold
rushes. One of these groups has been amply documented in relation to the gold
rushes, and made the subject of films, TV documentaries and so forth. These
were the Chinese, who are commemorated in three essays by James Ng, Joanna
Boileau and Paul Macgregor. Ng is mainly concerned with the physical conditions
under which the Chinese miners worked. He writes:
“When the Chinese miners arrived in Otago,
European miners held the best claims and water rights, so newcomers got the
rest, including worked-over and abandoned ground. In poor-yielding land, the
work had to be methodical, and the Chinese miners excelled at this by working
in cooperative parties. They readily took up poorer auriferous ground, which
was apparently plentiful and mostly free when they first arrived, a practice
which minimised competition and irritation between Europeans and Chinese.”(
p.107)
Joanna Boileau
talks about how the Chinese provisioned themselves and established a local
tradition by producing both their own food and food for trade in market
gardening. Paul Macgregor takes a broader picture on the social impact of Chinese
in the area. This is a particularly nuanced essay, as Macgregor does touch on
some Pakeha antagonism towards the Chinese, but also notes how well Chinese
were able to establish themselves in local business and indeed how various the
Pakeha response to them was. On the whole, the law protected the Chinese from
the type of racially-inspired attacks to which they were sometimes subject.
The other and,
oddly, less-often-discussed ethnic group involved in New Zealand gold rushes
were the Maori, the subject of an essay by Lloyd Carpenter. Among other things,
Carpenter makes what should be the obvious point (but is often overlooked) that
Maori were aware of some of the local gold deposits before the gold rushes
began. He also documents some of the Maori diggers involved in the rush, and
the fact that a very few Maori goldminers made it to overseas rushes in such
places as the Yukon.
If the broad
picture of the international nature of the gold rushes, and the various ethnicities
involved, are dealt with in the first two sections, then Part Three turns to
the matter of gender, without which no respectable modern socio-history can
appear. Specifically, there are three essays on women in the goldfields of
Otago and the West Coast. Sandra Quick takes on the large topic of how women
were involved as hoteliers and illegal purveyors of liquor for the whole of the
late nineteenth century. Julia Bradshaw’s contribution, entitled “Forgetting
Their Place”, is one of the most nuanced in the collection. Discussing women of
“abandoned character”, Bradshaw comes close to refuting the view that the
goldfields swarmed with prostitutes. Many women thus labelled, she argues, were
women who lived unconventionally (not married to their male partners, for
example) but who were not necessarily career prostitutes. This is an
interesting chapter as much about perception as about the objective facts of
the case. As Bradshaw notes: “The courts
and public opinion were relatively unforgiving if women stepped out of the
sphere of what was seen as acceptable behaviour for women at the time.”(p.167).
She instances the case of a hotelier’s wife being fined by a magistrate for
using foul language as she attempted to eject forcibly a drunken customer. The
magistrate suggested that her actions would have been perfectly acceptable had
they been performed by her husband. On quite a different tack, Lyndon Fraser,
who has twice published volumes about the early Irish in New Zealand, combines
the themes of gender and ethnicity with an essay on Irish women in the West
Coast rush, a sober account of how these deracinated women made careers in all
spheres of life.
If I have been
able to tick off the Aussie connection, ethnicity and gender as being the
subjects of the first three parts of Rushing
for Gold, it is harder to characterise the five essays of the fourth part.
Part Four is headed “Goldfields Society”, but this seems to refer to the matter
of social class and profession. Professor Tom Brooking’s essay “Harsh
Environment, Softer Sociology” looks at the whole story of goldmining in the
Dunstan area of Otago, from the first rush through the long period when an
established gold-mining “industry” was operating there. Brooking laments the
lack of real sociological analysis of people involved. Rosemary Marryatt observes
what was, for one social class, the negative impact of the gold rushes. She
tells the story of the run-holder (large-scale pastoralist) William Rees and
his family, whose way of life was disrupted by the arrival of all the diggers.
Lloyd Carpenter considers the number of businesses that were set up, either to
support and provision gold-diggers or to “grubstake” them and finance them with
loans. But he concludes that those who prospered on the back of miners’ toil
were not a class apart – generally the goldfields’ merchants and bankers were
no wealthier than the toilers in the goldfields themselves.
Remarks
Carpenter: “Although a divide existed
between miners and merchants on the goldfields, the divide was not one of
wealth or even of the degree to which earnings were hard-won. The divide was
simply along the nature of urban resident and mining-cottage dweller, of
business-owner and miner. The nature of their respective operations produced a
naturally dichotomised society, but the relationship between each was more
symbiotic than adversarial.”(Carpenter, p.239)
Jeremy Finn
considers the careers of fifteen lawyers who practised in the goldfields while
Andre Brett analyses the impact of the gold rushes upon the rise (and later
fall) of the New Zealand provincial system, and especially upon the development
of railways in Otago and Southland.
When an
historical process passes out of living memory, it enters the realm of legend.
This is very much what the fifth and final part of Rushing for Gold deals with. Warwick Frost’s unexpected
contribution considers the way tourists are encouraged to interpret and “act
out” a mythologised version of the American Old West and of Australian
colonialism in the USA and Oz, and what principles underlie such presentations.
Implicitly, these principles could be applied to the Otago goldfields. Neville
Ritchie’s chapter is the most matter-of-fact: a methodical survey of
archaeological sites in Otago related to goldfields. And at the other end of
the creative spectrum, the final chapter is the playscript of a musical
entertainment devised by Fiona Farrell, concerning a group of entertainers who
toured the goldfields putting on shows for miners. Their chief is Charles
Thatcher, an historical figure from the goldfields, noted for his ability to
whip up satirical songs for all occasions. Some of Thatcher’s songs are quoted
in earlier chapters in this book.
You have got to
the end of this review probably as exasperated as I am. Given the variety of
its contents, Rushing for Gold has led
me to do what is a very bad habit of mine. I have listed conscientiously and
name-checked diligently the various contents of this volume like a good
bibliographer but a bad reviewer. You see, I have barely passed reasoned
judgment on the volume at all. I have simply told you what is in it.
Time to ‘fess
up. Some of the essays really held my attention for the human stories they told
and the vivid accounts they gave of living and working conditions a
century-and-a-half ago. Others are more in the nature of academic exercises.
From that point of view, Rushing for Gold
is a mixed bag. As always in a well-illustrated book, the many images are
fascinating. I am always intrigued by the way outdoors photographs taken in the
nineteenth century, because of the primitive nature of early cameras, wash out
backgrounds so that panoramic shots of towns and settlements leave them
floating in blank-space, like revenants. Thus it is with the photo of the boomtown
of Naseby in the 1860s. I am sorry that the front cover presents us with a
rather cluttered design. But apart from that gripe Rushing for Gold succeeds in its aim of being the highly
informative tome it is.
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