Pay Dirt! Ballarat & Other Gold Towns
An endorsement of the old adage ‘good things come in small packages’ is this celebration of Ballarat Heritage Services’ 21 years of publishing. The overarching theme is of Victoria’s central goldfields but looking also to wider transnational relationships.
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Pay Dirt! Ballarat & Other Gold Towns
Dorothy Wickham and Clare Gervasoni (eds) | 2019
An endorsement of the old adage ‘good things come in small packages’ is this celebration of Ballarat Heritage Services’ 21 years of publishing. The overarching theme is of Victoria’s central goldfields but looking also to wider transnational relationships. In the foreword, Geoffrey Blainey highlights the many topics covered in the book and congratulates the editors on such a variety of authors. The creators have conveniently broken the work into four themed sections: Faces, Places, Spaces and Traces.
‘Faces’ presents us with five images of European and Aboriginal men and women across the goldfields’ communities. In dealing with issues of gender, race, tribal and sporting concepts and outcomes, personalities are brought to life and given a clearer focus than history often presents. Dorothy Wickham leads off with an overview of women who left their mark on the goldfields, from observations of those involved in the Eureka affair to writers like Matilda Dixie/Goldstraw and Ellen Young.
Fred Cahir and Ian Clark describe the corroboree as much more than an Aboriginal ritual. They demonstrate how Aboriginal people on the goldfields took agency in presenting European settlers with an entertainment while preserving their own culture. Developing the Aboriginal focus, Clark and Janice Newton revisit the stories of Mullawallah, aka King Billy, and Yarley Yarmin, or Johnny Phillips. In Chapter Five, Robert Pascoe and Mark Pennings segue the reader into a broader tribal history, introducing colonial Ballarat’s football teams and those who played the game. Again, this overview incorporates Ballarat sporting relationships further afield.
‘Places’, as the name implies, takes us to specific locations, including gaols and asylums. Leigh Edmonds and Terrence Fitzsimons bring more than stones and mortar together in their exposé. While Edmonds presents us with the story of some of the state’s most interesting buildings, Fitzsimons reveals the less satisfactory tale of an embryonic judicial system and the vagaries of appointments. Personalities of officials and the demise of felons are set against the final great mark of British civilisation: the gallows.
David Waldron takes us into the world of the lunatic asylum from multiple viewpoints. A formidable historian and folklorist, Waldron succinctly contrasts community pride against personal traumas and the more recent use of the past for tourism commodification. Chapter Nine comes as something of a relief and I imagine it would fit into several themes. Clare Gervasoni’s ‘Twenty Million Reasons’ makes the virtual world into a real place; maybe a first in doing so. The possibilities of the Wiki for the researcher are exciting, however I would like to have seen the concept or the project elaborated upon more to further interest and challenge the reader.
‘Spaces’ explores and unwraps some of the folklore, mystery and intrigue of the goldfields. It focuses on the physical environment and the people that inhabit it. Val Noone enlivens family history in his rendering of the Irish story on the goldfields, with his tales of football, music and Irish folklore. Noone touches on individual stories enough to have us wanting more. These chapters tap into the crux of what history is about, at the heart of which are people and family history. In 'Metamorphoses, New Landscapes’, your reviewer looks to early diaries and travellers’ experiences in documenting the changing landscape of the goldfields, ranging from Geelong to Bendigo and from the Aboriginal landscape through the changes wrought by settlers, gold-seekers and townsfolk who created a European colonial urban landscape.
David Nicholls and Victoria Kolankiewicz put the spotlight on more recent historical efforts at recreating the past to preserve memory. This essay is a salient call, as much of our collective memory today is engaged with recalling events that remember earlier events. The authors challenge us and our concept of heritage using examples of remembering the past through Walhalla and Sovereign Hill. For me, this message is summed up in their reflection of Frank Strahan’s adage, ‘Our past, is part of our present’.
‘Traces’ goes from the regional into the global with linkages between the goldfields of Australia, the United States, and even back to Europe. Benjamin Mountford and Stephen Tuffnell trace some vital transnational links of the nineteenth-century gold rushes. They highlight the observations of Mark Twain on the Australian goldfields and the two-way trade links between the United States and Australia. Contrasting with this and earlier profiles in the anthology, Dorothy Wickham’s revolutionaries and radicals take us on a journey encompassing the likes of Raffaello Carboni from Ballarat to link with the Italian Risorgimento. Her story adroitly links this chain of events to the English chartists, the Ballarat Reform League and the Eureka Stockade.
Following these transnational stories, Gerversoni picks up another link between Australia and Garibaldi in the story of the gift of Garibaldi’s sword. This essay challenges the historian to seek further into the sword’s whereabouts, while at the same time shining a light on an aspect of Australian history outside of the Anglo-Saxon narrative. Wickham joins with Waldron in an exploration of mason’s marks etched into stone and the mysteries they hold. Transnational links recur as they explore the relocation and re-use of stones in English buildings, raising questions as to similar changes in the Australian experience.
Again, the two editors introduce us to the wonders of the internet and Wiki, this time with Eurekapedia. This essay answers some of the shortcomings mentioned earlier in relation to the Ballarat Industrial Heritage Wiki, qualifying some of the linkages between ideas, personalities and events. In the final chapter, Keir Reeves and Tim Harrison draw together many issues raised throughout the book, explicating the intricacies of world heritage. They link British and Belgian listing experiences compared to Victoria’s goldfields listings and points of difference.
For those familiar with the output of Ballarat Heritage Services over the past 21 years, Pay Dirt brings together old friends in a way that enables the reader to graze pleasantly. Not all of this book involves re-visiting old friends, however, with eighteen authors and articles sometimes written in collaboration, the book expands horizons while challenging the reader. The brevity of some chapters, such as that dealing with the Ballarat Industrial Heritage Wiki, is disappointing. Regardless of such minor criticism, nothing has been lost in the rendering of the authors’ broader writings as presented in this tightly edited book.
Reviewer: Michael Taffe, PHA (Vic & Tas)
Pay Dirt! is published by Ballarat Heritage Services.