It has been just over a month since the Critical Minerals Symposium, but my head is still buzzing from the rich, layered discussions generated by our fantastic speakers and participants. They are from diverse disciplinary backgrounds: curatorship, environmental humanities, geology, art and literary studies, media studies, architecture, labour history, psychology, sustainability consulting, and more. Given the breadth of their expertise, it was unsurprising, yet still exciting, to see such a wide range of themes and discussions emerge over the course of the day. These included critical minerals’ historical connections to technological imagination and their role in the current digital and AI transition (Dr Tom Nurmi); and a ‘critical’ history of critical minerals in relation to colonial extractivism, war geology, and today’s distrust of mining and mining companies (Panel I’s speakers: Dr Nicholas McGee, Dr Gustave Lester, Dr Geertje Schuitema). Dr Dipali Mathur’s paper discussed the fictions of the ‘green’ energy transition and the grim prospect of Ireland’s Sustainable Development Goals, while Dr Aileen Doran’s insight as a sustainability and risk consultant inspired us to imagine and to work for a more just transition.

Panel three (Speakers: Alexia Bozas, Ritam Dutta, Dr Gary Boyd)—and in fact papers from other panels too—demonstrated the unique affordances of literature, film, and the arts in imagining and critiquing critical minerals. Our feature paper by Camille Mary Sharp discussed the significance of confronting museums as extractive institutions in our efforts to create a just and sustainable mineral future. Our conversations also returned repeatedly to questions of how we teach, research, and communicate our work ethically and critically in the face of the extractive realities we live in. These questions were deftly handled by our speakers in our last panel themed ‘Critical Methodologies and Research Ethics’ (Speakers: Dr Helene Birkeli, Dr Kelly Richards, Camille Britton, Dr Padraig Murphy)

I was impressed by how deeply our speakers and participants engaged with each other despite their different disciplinary backgrounds and approaches to critical minerals. It was evident that we were all animated by shared concerns about critical minerals and the narratives shaping the green energy transition.

See below for some of the reflections from our engaged participants, each offers a window into the vibrant conversations we shared.

A few threads that resonated strongly:

• Arts and humanities are indispensable for any study of critical minerals. One participant even confessed that the symposium fundamentally changed his earlier misunderstandings about the role of arts and humanities in this field.
• ‘Holistic’ teaching and ethical research matter. We must keep interrogating the stories told about minerals, extractivism, and sustainability in our classrooms and research envelopments, and keep making space for interdisciplinary, ethical, and reflective approaches.
• Interdisciplinary conversation and collaboration are essential for challenging the illusions and ‘tidy narratives’ surrounding sustainability and green transition technologies.

The Critical Minerals Symposium has already sparked budding ideas for collaborations in various forms, and, on top of these, the development of a Critical Minerals Research Caucus. If you would like to join, please email ge.tang@ucd.ie, or getangvic19@gmial.com, with your name, email address, affiliation, and research interests, to be added to the Google Group.

I learned about ‘The Case,’ an English-language letter of grievances by Jong Ah Siug (1837–1900), a Cantonese miner in the goldfield of Victoria, while finishing my PhD in Melbourne. Its peculiarity and the questions it raises about the writing of diaspora, the literary culture of extractivism, and the boundaries of what constitutes Australian and Anglophone literature were among the primary reasons that drew me to Dr Sarah Comyn’s ‘Minerals’ project. The unusualness of this letter is striking at first glance (Fig. 1): it is written in block letters, with words joined by three vertical l dashes, and takes the form of a palm-sized bound book, with its front and back covers being marked as ‘book top’ and ‘book bottom page’ (Fig. 2). A Cantonese grammatical structure reveals itself almost immediately to my ear, trained as it is to this tonal rhythm, despite the differences between the Cantonese spoken by Jong and that spoken today and the regional variations in this language.

Fig. 1. Front cover of Jong’s book. Image Courtesy of the State Library of Victoria. 

Fig. 2. The back cover of Jong’s book. Image Courtesy of the State Library of Victoria.

In 1855 Jong migrated from ‘Fong-sand’ (香山, present-day Zhongshan) to Victoria during the gold rush at the age of 18 and worked in the diggings in central Victoria. Jong wrote the letter in English in the hope that the colonial authorities could understand the abuse and hostility he suffered while living on the goldfields, in particular his account of a knife fight which led to his mistreatments in the hospital and his incarceration in gaols. His ultimate goal was to vindicate himself and to bring those who wronged him to justice. To help his addressees understand his case and to validate his testimony, Jong provided four hand-drawn maps of the places he referred to in his narrative:

(1) the Chinese camp where the fight occurred;
(2) Anderson’s Hill, where the Chinese camp and his shaft were (Fig. 3);
(3) the townships of Dunolly, Cochranes and New Cochranes; and
(4) the Dunolly hospital.

His determination to petition in a foreign language is particularly remarkable if we consider his reliance on scribes for writing his family letters (‘The Case,’ p. 21).

Fig. 3. Page 15 of Jong’s book. Image Courtesy of the State Library of Victoria.

On the first page of his letter (Fig. 4), Jong dated it December 1872, indicating that he wrote it while incarcerated in Ward B of Yarra Bend Lunatic Asylum in Melbourne (Fig. 4). Jong clearly intended his work to be seen, declaring that its ‘novel’—meaning the content of the letter (which can be inferred based on his use of the same word elsewhere in the text)—supports or follows ‘Law.’ Jong does not specify a recipient for his letter, instead addressing various authorities, including the ‘governor,’ ‘parliament,’ ‘high judge,’ and ‘Duke mans.’ I suspect that ‘Duke mans’ represents his phonetic approximation of dài-rén (大人)—a respectful term to address officials in his home country. At times, however, Jong shifts tone and refers to his addressees as ‘friends,’ demonstrating an effort to elicit sympathy

Fig. 4. Page 1 of Jong’s book. Image Courtesy of the State Library of Victoria.

Jong’s grievances concern both Europeans and his fellow countrymen. For a sense of it, we can have a look at the cover page (Fig.1), where Jong lists key episodes of distress:

1. Frequent visits from the local police force to the Chinese camp where he lived, which reflects the strict surveillance placed on Chinese communities at the time. Jong expresses hurt feelings over the dismissive way his questions were answered, highlighting a power dynamic that left him feeling vulnerable.
2. [European] Women and girls made fun of (‘talking nonsenses’) and even ‘harm[ed]’ him, seemingly because he remained ‘quiet’ and unprovoked. Jong’s account later reveals that these rumours concerned his desire for a wife, or even multiple wives— polygamy was then in practice in his home country and the Chinese diggers migrated without their wives and struggled to find partners in the goldfields.
3. Physical violence from [European ]men.
4. A bushranger attempted to poison him.
5. The Millstead family (an Irish family) spread rumours and wronged him.
6. Jong was verbally bullied and physically attacked by Chinese ‘sinners,’ who his narrative later reveals to be his Chinese neighbours involved in the knife fight, including Sheteen and Ah Key. This last complaint forms the core of his case book.

Jong’s narrative suggests some disputes with Sheteen and Ah Key, which escalated into a knife fight, leaving both sides wounded. Sheteen and Ah Key subsequently sued Jong for assault, leading to his arrest and trial in the Dunolly police court. According to the coverage of the trial in the Dunolly and Bet Bet Shire Express on July 18, 1868, two doctors (Doctor Wolfenden and Doctor Green), who were sent by the court to evaluate Jong’s mental state, agreed on Jong’s ‘unsound mind.’ They made the diagnosis despite their shared observation about Jong’s moments of lucidity, which they dismissed as temporary. The judge acquitted Jong on the grounds of lunacy, but he was retained in imprisonment and was later transferred to the Melbourne Gaol. From Jong’s narrative, we know that in the gaol, he made repeated pleas to people he encountered there for a new trial in Melbourne. He asserted his innocence, arguing that his rivals provided flawed and biased statements. After an attack on the wardens of Melbourne Gaol, he was transferred to Yarra Bend. It was there that he wrote ‘The Case,’ continuing his plea to the authorities to look into the knife fight and his other sufferings prior to and during his incarceration.

Jong’s little book is well structured. It comprises five distinct parts:

(1) the introduction of the people involved in the fight;
(2) the lead-up to the fight which occurred on the previous day;
(3) the weapons used in the fight;
(4) the fight itself and its aftermath, including the trial and his transfer between the hospital, goals, and the asylum; and
(5) a summary of his appeals.

The division between these parts is indicated by the remaining space on the page where Jong concludes each part. Furthermore, the structure within each part is equally clear. Jong explicitly signals the change of topics by using a recurring sentence structure at the end of each subsection: ‘All conclude, and down […] for.’ By this, Jong means that he has completed his account in the current part, and in what follows, he shall talk about a new subject, with him placing for after the name of this subject to indicate what he refers to.

The remarkable structure of Jong’s narrative suggests his sanity—at least during the drafting of the book, and in turn affirms its legitimacy both as a personal testimony and as a petition to the government. However, the unusual semantics of his English vocabulary and grammar make his letter difficult to comprehend, even if it did reach its intended recipient. According to sociolinguist Jeff Siegel (2009), ‘The case’ features a mixture of standard English, Chinese pidgin English, and Australian and Pacific pidgins (328–30). Jong’s limited English vocabulary —his 16,102-word letter, contains only ‘approximately 800 different lexical items’ (316)—imposed significant constraints on his capability to convey his grievances in a way that was accessible to his addressees. This challenge accounts for the unusual semantic meanings of his lexicons. For instance, in his letter, freedom carries a meaning similar to understand clearly. In Figure 3, Jong appeals to his addressees—his ‘friend’—asking them to ‘see map, see map letter, see case letter, see map, altogether freedom [his] case’ (page 15). While we can infer what Jong hoped to convey by freedom by examining how he uses the word throughout the text, many other words are more difficult to decipher.

I haven’t been able to find evidence about how local authorities responded to Jong’s petition. He was transferred to Sunbury Lunatic Asylum in 1879, where he remained in confinement until his death in 1900 (Moore and Tully, 63). His letter was gifted to the State Library of Victoria in 1880, by Henry P. Fergie, a parliamentary agent, as ‘a literary curiosity’ (Moore and Tully 1). Jong’s appeal and legal demands were thus likely incomprehensible to the readers the letter may have reached at the time.

‘The Case’ remained in obscurity in the library for over a century, until two historians, Ruth Moore and John Tully, deciphered and transcribed it into accessible English. Their translation and supplementary materials were published in a single book, titled A Difficult Case: An Autobiography of a Chinese Miner on the Central Victorian Goldfields (2000). The publication represents a sincere scholarly effort to bring Jong’s voice to the world and has contributed immensely to public and academic attention toward his letter. Yet, owing to the complexity of Jong’s writing, mistranslation and misinterpretation seemed inevitable in any attempt to translate ‘The Case.’ Indeed, Xu Mao (2023) has noted numerous errors in their translations as a result of linguistic and cultural barriers, arguing their flawed translation has created a negative image of Jong and risks affirming the poorly supported idea of Jong’s insanity (756). If Jong’s peculiar English, as Mao has reminded us, ‘makes any reading an uncertain interpretation,’ then misreadings of Jong’s story are inevitable. This raises a question for anyone who seeks to understand subaltern lives like Jong through their voices when they do speak. Jong’s writing represents a potent example of the many texts of an inherently cross-cultural and multilingual nature in the literary history of extractivism which brought together people of diverse ethnicities and cultures. How can we do justice to these voices which seek to be understood and place an ethical demand on us—yet may lie beyond our full comprehension—without What can we learn from Jong’s peculiar form of life writing in rethinking and redefining literary culture which was produced in the goldfields?

The Structure of Jong’s book*

*Here, I have provided my provisional summary of ‘The Case,’ but in fear of misreading, I refrain from translating Jong, and instead only indicate what each part is about.

Cover page. It contains Jong’s autobiographical notes and an abstract for the mistreatments he received.

Part One (pages 3–8) serves as an introduction to the people involved in the conflict, including himself. He narrates, one by one, when he and his neighbours moved to Anderson’s Hill, the relative location of their tents, their financial situations, and their relationships. Remarkably, he draws a map of the Chinese camp to visualise his textual narratives. These details aid our understanding of what he believes to be the causes of his neighbours’ ill feelings towards him, but they are also helpful, at least for me, in understanding his version of the fight and assessing the credibility of his narrative. For instance, the relative location of their tents helps determine whether it would have been possible for him to overhear conversations in a neighbouring tent.

Part Two (pages 9–13) describes the night before the fight. Jong lays out the disagreements between him and his neighbours, which contributed to their feelings against him.

Part Three (pages 15–18) describes two tools involved in the fight, a knife and a hatchet. He provides a sketch drawing for both, but he also includes a map of Anderson’s Hill (Fig 3). The map shows the location of his shaft (‘my diggings’) and other sites relevant to his movements after the fight, such as the location of the tree where he fainted from blood loss. His narrative starts on the next page with a heading: ‘hatchet, knife and map: 3 thing letter.’ Jong explains where and why he bought the hatchet and knife, as well as their original purposes. Ending this part on page 18, Jong states, ‘All conclude, and down fight for,’ indicating that this part is finished and he shall proceed to describe the fight.

Part Four (Pages 19–54) covers the fight and the aftermath, comprising clearly structured subsections. In pages 19 to 28, with a heading of ‘next morning letter,’ Jong details the day of the fight, which occurred the day after the night he depicted in Part Two. Apart from recalling the fight and describing his wounds, Jong also notes the arrival of doctors and the police. Then pages 29–41 cover Jong’s confinement in lock-ups and his treatment at the Dunolly hospital before his trial. He complained about the food in the goal, his European doctor who he distrusted, and the wardens who ridiculed and hurt him. On page 41, roughly one-third of the way down, Jong marks the end of his account of pre-trial confinement with this line: ‘All conclude, and down, 4 police court for, 1 session for.’ As he promises, Jong moves on to describe his appearances in court, and his experience of waiting for a jury court session that he requested (pages 41–46). After the trial, Jong was kept in Maryborough Gaol before his transfer to Melbourne Gaol. He describes his distress there on pages 47–53: he was forced medicine, his pigtail was cut, he was hit by the wardens, and he was bullied by other prisoners. He also details his unsuccessful suicide attempt, after he lost hope for a new trial. The chapter concludes with his transfer to Yarra Bend, where he wrote ‘The Case.’

Having offered a detailed account of the knife fight and the subsequent injustice and sufferings he endured, in Part 5 (Pages 54–78, with a jump between page 59 to page 70), Jong summarises his grievances (in a way more detailed and comprehensive than in the abstract) and appeals to the authorities for help and justice. The heading at the start of this, ‘Find Law, Find Warrant, Catch Mans’, written in larger lettering, translates the urgency of his demands.

In the Book Bottom Page, Jong articulates one last, impassioned plea for help. He asks his addressees to patiently examine his case report, page by page, and to study both the text and the maps.

Works cited

Jong, Ah Siug. Diary. MS 12994. The State Library of Victoria, Australia.

Mao, Xu. ‘Sanity at the mercy of language: Interpreting the “nonsense” of a Chinese miner in Australia.’ Journal of Postcolonial Writing 59.6 (2023): 754–67.

Moore, Ruth, and John Tully, trans and eds. A Difficult Case by Jong Ah Siug: An Autobiography of A Chinese Miner on the Central Victorian Goldfields. Daylesford: Jim Crow Press, 2000.

Siegel, Jeff. ‘Chinese Pidgin English in Southeastern Australia: the notebook of Jong Ah Siug.’ Journal of Pidgin and Creole languages 24.2 (2009): 306–37.

How does nineteenth-century settler newspaper fiction for children engage with the history of Gold Rushes in Australia and New Zealand? How can the periodical form be used to trace the growth of mining literature for children?

These are some questions that inspired my research trip to Australia and New Zealand. In July and August of 2024, I travelled to Dunedin, Canberra and Sydney to visit the archival collections in three of their libraries: The Hocken Collections (New Zealand), the National Library of Australia (Canberra), and the Mitchell Library (Sydney). The purpose of the trip was to find primary texts for my PhD project, which looks at nineteenth century colonial children’s literature based on goldmining. My research analyses the emergence of children’s fiction that depicts extractive labour in the periodical press and questions whether the reality of goldmining labour aligns with its literary fictionalisation for a child audience. Since starting my PhD, digital resources such as Papers Past and Trove have been invaluable in terms of sourcing material and corpus building. Searching through these digitised newspaper archives alerted me to the popularity of the “children’s corner” in periodical fiction and prompted a further investigation of children’s material that has not yet been digitised.

While all three archival collections offered surprising insights, the National Library of Australia provided a number of interesting children’s texts that address the questions raised above and proved to be the most fruitful in terms of compiling primary material.

National Library of Australia, Canberra

The library is home to the Marcie Muir Collection of Australian children’s books. The collection contains juvenile fiction published in Australia between 1800 and 2001, written by Australian authors, or are about Australia. The material was collected by Muir and supported her work in compiling the extensive  Bibliography of Australian Children’s Books (1970).

As the collection contains over 6,000 records, I began by limiting my search to the period of 1842-1910 and subsequently establishing whether this parameter also contained any gold-related material. The search contained several novels for children that have mining or minefields as a focus. I was then able to use these findings to determine whether any of these juvenile novels began as a serial, or to locate additional works by the authors which may have been published in newspapers. What is most interesting about the findings is that the majority of gold-related material for children emerges in the later-half of the nineteenth century, rather than mid-century alongside actual discoveries of gold. This delay will serve as a point of analyses for my wider project.

The Mitchell Library also offered some interesting finds, ranging from children’s novels to more education-based local newspapers. These included The Australian School Paper for grades three to six, and The Commonwealth School Paper. These newspapers provided a sense of the teaching material circulated in settler schools throughout the Empire.

At the Hocken Collections in New Zealand, I struggled to identify newspapers with gold-related fiction for children. This has raised some interesting questions for my thesis as a whole, prompting me to consider the relative lack of the New Zealander goldmining adventure novel in comparison with the growing trend of the ‘gold fever’ adventure tale in nineteenth-century Australia.  However, while visiting the collections, I was able to find some useful information regarding the publication history of a weekly children’s column titled ‘Dot’s Little Folk’ in the Otago Witness. This included some biographical information about Louisa Baker, the author behind ‘Dot’. Baker was also an editor and frequent contributor to the column under her other pseudonym ‘Alice’. The column began in 1886 and served as a space for children to write about their interests or concerns and to submit some original short stories or poems.

‘Dot’s Little Folk’ Column in Otago Witness

Dot’s little folk (Winter Show) (1910)

The findings from my research trip have been crucial to both my growing corpus of primary texts, and my understanding of the representation of mining labour in children’s periodical fiction. I look forward to incorporating these research findings into my PhD project.

In various imperial contexts—whether in the British Empire, the United States, or Canada—mineral extraction was indebted to the labour of imported workers. These labourers often did not speak the local language; few had sufficient reading and writing literacy in their mother tongue. These raised several important questions: How did they document their experiences and grievances in foreign and often hostile environments? What forms of writing did they use? Did they bring any home culture of self-fashioning that shaped their writing in the mining fields?  How does their writing provide insights into their lives and reflect their agency?

Guided by these questions, my research trip to South Africa focused on the petitions submitted by Chinese indentured miners working in the South African mines from 1904 to 1910. The majority of these labourers were from northern China, primarily from peasant and rural backgrounds. Forced by a combination of natural disasters and social unrest following the Boxer Uprising, they sought work in South Africa as a means of survival and to support their families. The Foreign Labour Department (FLD) was established to oversee the employment of the Chinese labour force in the mines, and to enact protection of their rights and well-being such as wages, accommodation, and medical provisions. For this purpose, FLD set up mailboxes at the mines’ pay stations where the Chinese could submit complaints and petitions to appeal for help and interference from FLD.

In the FLD archives housed in the National Archives of South Africa in Pretoria, I found two big folders of papers (FLD 240 and FLD 241, Figure 1). The papers in the folder are further organised into individual files based on the mines where the petitioners were employed (Figure 2).  FLD 240, for instance, labelled ‘Chinese Complaints,’  contains files from 76/1 to 76/15. Among these files, File 76/7 contains complaints from the Wit Deep Gold Mine. All the original complaints and petitions are understandably written in classic Mandarin. The FLD hired several Chinese clerks, who could extend language assistance, while FLD’s inspectors of the mines were alleged to master certain levels of Chinese proficiency.

Figure 1: FLD 240, ‘Chinese Complaints’, Files 76- 76/15.

Figure 2: Complaints by Chinese, Wit Deep (Limited), File 76/7, FLD 240

The file folder includes not only the complaints themselves, but also government correspondence for instance, between the FLD’s superintendent, secretary, and inspectors, revolving around addressing and solving individual petitions. Some petitions are accompanied by translations and investigation reports by inspectors as well as testimonies gathered during the inquiries.

Not all petitions were submitted through the mailbox system. Some Chinese workers, likely harbouring distrust, petitioned through the Chinese consular based in Johannesburg. For example, a Cantonese worker from the Kleinfontein Mine petitioned the consul to be transferred to another mine owing to bullying by northern Chinese workers at his current location. In response, the FLD directed the secretary to write to the acting consul-general, advising that the petitioner ‘lodge his complaint in the usual manner without delay’ (Figure 3).

Figure 3: Petitions from Chinese workers employed at the French Rand Gold Mine. File 76/10, FLD 240.

Given the limited literacy of most indentured labourers, I’m not surprised to see that petitions signed under different names display identical handwriting. One scribe drafted individual petitions for four Chinese workers at the French Rand Gold Mine (Figure 4), all of whom pledged, likely against the Chinese policeman or the mine controller, for withholding their hard-earned wages (Figure 4).

Figure 4: Petitions from Chinese workers employed at the French Rand Gold Mine. File 76/10, FLD 240.

These petitions show several prominent features shared by other Chinese petitions in the FLD archives.  First, they are written vertically from top to bottom, with the columns arranged from right to left on the page, following traditional Chinese writing conventions. Second, these petitions adopt normative etiquette, diction, and format reflective of petition culture in Qing China. Of the four petitions (except for the one on the bottom right), three begin by invoking the traditional gesture of deep respect and submission—’叩禀’ (kowtow petition). In the petitioners’ culture, one kneeled and touched the ground with one’s forehead to express utmost humility before an authority figure to whom one made a formal appeal. Referring to the inspector—an FLD clerk responsible for looking into their cases—as ‘老大人’ (respected superior), a title imbued with reverence, the petitioners aimed to establish a relationship of submission in the hope of gaining favour. After thus addressing the inspector, these four petitions unfold in a format widely adopted by others in the FLD archives. We are provided with the petitioner’s passport number followed by his name； the petition then briefly describes the mistreatment and wrongs suffered, ending with a plea for help. This format enhances the formality of the petitions.  While this formality allowed labourers to utilise the FLD’s established channels to express their grievances, it also imposed constraints on how they conveyed, often at the expense of individuality and the more emotionally charged aspects of their experiences. The fact that petitioners with limited literacy had to rely on scribes also raises questions about the embodiment of agency in these petitions.

However, there are also less formal petitions that blend casual, everyday language with some formal elements. One petition from Nourse Mines Limited stood out for its plain and rambling style (Figure 5). The petitioner, in a conversational tone, recounts his experience (translated as follows to the best of my ability):

(I work in) Mine No. 44. On Saturday, along with someone from Mine No. 67, I went to (a store called) Li Hongzhang and bought a bag of flour for eight Rands. The policeman saw this and didn’t approve. He hit me with 20 strokes. At the police station, he sells (or they sell) flour for 20 Rands a bag.

On Saturday the 14th, I bought some peaches for 20 cents. I got 60 peaches and a towel. I went to work, and at 12 o’clock, I was off work. The policeman saw the peaches and asked, ‘Where did they come from?’ I told him that (I, from) Mine No. 44, had bought them. The policeman didn’t believe me and hit me, with over 40 strokes. (Afterward,) I was locked in a dark room.

The policeman is selling official flour and peaches. In the police station, there is a trader, and (they exchanged) one pound of official money.

If you, my respected superior, don’t believe me, go and check the room yourself. Let’s see if the policeman will keep selling when you arrive.

Figure 5. A Chinese petition from the Nourse Deep Gold Mine. File 76/16, FLD 240.

As evidence of his limited written literacy, the petitioner used a number of homophones—words with similar pronunciations but different meanings. Interestingly, a later reader, maybe a scholar who consulted the archive as I did, marked the letter to note spelling errors, not comprehensively though.  In addition, unlike other documents, it bore fingerprints and other marks of pollution. These material aspects invite us to consider the condition of the writer, and the arduous journey this document took to eventually reach the FLD. Despite its informality, this petition compelled official action. In the file where I found it, it is accompanied by a detailed two-and-a-half-page investigation report, indicating that the FLD sent an inspector to look into the case.

For the Chinese miners, who had no access to conventional literary forms to publish their stories, these petitions served as vital expressions of their experiences and grievances. They are not merely historical records, but powerful life writings that illuminate and illustrate human experience and indenture under extractive capitalism. I am currently in the initial stages of sorting these materials and look forward to sharing more findings as my research progresses.

Opening with a professor waving ‘his arms around magnificently’ in the ‘dusky’ scientific laboratory of the University of Otago, the gothic tones of the pseudonymous short story, ‘The Gold Fisher’ (1897) are apparent from the start. Published in the Cromwell Argus, the story follows the student Ebenezer Grookin as he is inspired by the professor to consider the inexhaustible wealth of the ocean:

the very water of the ocean contains gold, one grain to every ton—to every ton—and just think of the thousands, the millions, of tons of sea water, rolling and tossing eternally, spouting high against the towering cliffs of rocky shores, tons of it shooting up into the air with resistless force—and a grain every ton; lap lap-lapping softly against the ‘silver strand,’ dark and horrific under the open sky.

Like his etymological ancestor, Ebenezer Scrooge, Grookin is consumed by the pursuit of wealth. For Grookin this obsession is directed towards the gold that can be found, according to his esteemed professor, in the depths of the ocean. While the other students ridicule Grookin and the professor, joking they should ‘float a company to exploit the Pacific’, Grookin is clearly captivated by the prospects of the professor’s repetitive ‘grain to every ton’ ‘lap lap lapping’ and sets off on a journey to an abandoned island.

With this setting, Grookin’s pursuit enters the realm of the nautical gothic where, as Jimmy Packham and David Punter reminds us that ‘to think about oceanic depths is already to think in gothic terms’. Through the nautical setting the story also seemingly challenges the ‘land-bias’ not only of gothic literature, but of mineral mining (Adler). Grookin does not dig for gold; rather he fishes the ocean’s depths, unlocking its secrets: ‘Knowing the secret of its composition, Grookin would be able to force the sea to disgorge the wealth it contained, and, as he truly shouted, the world was his.’ The nautical setting allows for the isolation of Grookin the gold fisher—‘human companionship was the last thing he wished for’—while also drawing attention to the differences between Grookin’s solo pursuit and the romanticised ‘mateship’ and community of the land-based goldfields.

Grookin’s solitary activity is interrupted by the arrival of a pair of diggers. It is here that Grookin’s oceanic gold fishing is transformed from an apparently harmless obsession into a monstrous one. While spying on the pair (who still remain unaware of Grookin’s presence on the island), Grookin overhears them speaking of a recent American discovery where ‘one o’ them scientific blokes, has found out a way o’ makin’ gold with chemicals an’ stuff…Takin’ the bite o’ grub out o’ the mouths o’ thousand o’ hard workin’ diggers, an’ their wives, an’ kids’. Horrified by the alchemical association of his labours and what it would mean for ‘hard workin’ diggers’ and their families, Grookin’s night becomes filled with the terrors of starving women and children haunting his solitary gold fishing:

Thousands of women looking eagerly, imploring to thousands of husbands for bread which, alas, they could not give; and clinging to these haggard women, thousands upon thousands of children with their faces pinched and pale, stretching forth their hands unceasingly and crying ‘Bread, mammy, bread, I’m so hungry!’ and the voice of their wailing rushed through the air like the roaring of a tempest, and the din of it filled the world…And then these thousands of haggard, hunger-worn faces turned towards him, and from their deep sunken eyes the sufferers shot at him glances of undying hate, of maternal ferocity, of childish complaining, and a forest of bony hands rose in the air, some clutching at him as if to tear him to pieces, some raised fiercely to Heaven as if curses were being dragged down upon him…

The sea in which Grookin was searching for gold now becomes a sea of skeletal hands trying to catch hold of and punish him for his scientific experiments in gold mining. Even though the intellectual and scientific labour of Grookin’s oceanic explorations and its mental and physical cost is apparent in his altered appearance—’shaggy-haired, red-bearded, freckle-faced man danc[ing] madly on the shingle, flinging his arms wildly’—the narrative draws a stark contrast between Grookin’s labour and that of the land-based heroic miners ‘toiling in old mines, finding new ones, pressing into strange regions where they alone ventured, suffering all kinds of privations and hardships, daring and doing all things in their search for gold—these thousands of bold enterprising men would be ruined at a stroke’ by Grookin’s ‘gold net’ being made public. Despite the ‘amalgam [being] the secret that had cost so much thought and so many experiments’, Grookin’s mental labour can never compare to the physical labour and hardship of land-based miners. Faced with the prospect of destroying the livelihood of these miners through his scientific discoveries, Grookin chooses to destroy all his records and tools, instead throwing his lot in with the pair of diggers who he leads to the land-based gold he had already discovered on the island prior to his oceanic experiments.

While fishing in the monstrous depths of the nautical gothic, the short story ultimately re-establishes the land-bias of mineral mining through its celebration of the romanticised mateship of heroic diggers who battle with the earth, rather than the sea.

Works Cited

Alder, Emily, ‘Through Oceans Darkly: Sea Literature and the Nautical Gothic’, Gothic Studies 19, no. 2 (2017), 1-15.

Huia, ‘The Gold Fisher’, Cromwell Argus, 26 October 1897, p. 3.

Packham, Jimmy and David Punter, ‘Oceanic studies and the gothic deep’, Gothic Studies 19, no. 2 (2017), 16-29.

Santa Claus, young, fresh-faced and eager; Santa Claus, blonde and flaxen; Santa Claus, dark; Santa Claus with a brogue and Santa Claus speaking broken English; Santa Claus as a Chinaman (Sun Tong Lee & Co. storekeepers), with strange, delicious sweets that melted in our mouths, and rum toys and Chinese dolls for the children.

The portrayals above readily conjure images of a highly commercialised Christmas which is celebrated by diverse ethnicities worldwide. However, this scene is not set in the present, but rather in the nineteenth-century goldfields of Australia, vividly brought to life by Henry Lawson (1867 –1922) in his Christmas prose ‘The Ghosts of Many Christmases’, published in a Christmas issue of the Western Mail (Perth, WA: 1885–1954), on 25 December 1902. Born amid the dust and din of a miner’s world in a humble tent on the Grenfell goldfield in the colony of New South Wales (Lawson, Autobiographical and Other Writings, p. 173), Lawson’s upbringing in Pipeclay, another major goldfield in New South Wales, afforded him a keen insight into the miners’ experiences and emotions, which informed his depiction of Australian Christmases. Adapting the form of Christmas tales transported from England, Lawson crafted a narrative imbued with local colour, celebrating Australia’s development (and even modernisation) and its unique Christmas culture.

The structure of Lawson’s narrative is episodic, weaving together a tapestry of stories that depict varied Australian Christmas experiences. The first Christmas memory occurs in the cold embrace of an English village, featuring ‘bare hedges and trees, and leaden skies that lie heavy on our souls as we walk, with overcoat and umbrella, sons of English exiles and exiles in England’. The Christmas depicted is thus the last wintry one for a group of ‘English exiles’ longing to depart for the antipodean lands of luminous days and embracing warmth. Lawson uses the trope of antipodean inversion here, widely deployed by colonial newspapers to depict Christmas and New Year’s festivities in the southern hemisphere as ‘the reverse of the north in climate, mood, and fashion’ (Comyn, 63). English migrants, particularly the first generation, often held a profound nostalgia for the homeland they had left behind, as depicted by Anthony Trollope in his 1873 travelogue Australia and New Zealand.

Lawson’s narrative, however, steers clear of nostalgia for England. The wintry, English Christmas lacks the expected festive joy that would typically compel the ‘English exiles’ to yearn for their former home. Dismissive of the bleak Christmases in London—‘gloom, slush, and soot’—the narrator reflects, ‘It is not the cold that affects us Australians so much, but the horrible gloom. We get heart-sick for the sun’ (my emphasis). The collective ‘we’ unites the diverse memories of Christmas to create a shared remembrance of their Australian identity and their journey from an old world to life in the southern hemisphere. Christmas celebrations recorded in the article vary widely, ranging from Christmases spent at sea and a voyage to New Zealand, to modest celebrations alongside linemen on a new telegraph route. There are intimate gatherings in hessian tents in the goldfields, amid Asian companions, as well as cosy celebrations in pastoral homes; some, however, are solitary, like the lonesome Christmas of an unfortunate bullock-driver isolated by floods. These celebrations capture the diversity of Australian society and their different fortunes.

The author revels in the quintessential Australian Christmas that harmonises with the country’s distinct climate and geography. A ‘sensible Australian Christmas dinner’ should suit the Australian summer: ‘Everything cold except the vegetables, the hose playing on the veranda and vines outside, the men dressed in sensible pyjama-like suits, and the women and girls fresh and cool and jolly’. His memory is of simple, unadorned joy. In contrast, Lawson views with ironic detachment the exertions of ‘many Australian women’ labouring in stifling heat to prepare a traditional English Christmas banquet, ‘a scalding, indigestible dinner’. He wryly describes how they would end up ‘hot and cross and looking like boiled carrots, feeling like boiled rags, and having headaches after dinner’. Even the plum pudding is not spared his wit, deemed ‘one of the most barbarous institutions of the British’ and ‘a childish, silly, savage superstition’.

The gold rush emerges in the story as the impetus for community building; traditional virtues of kindness, generosity, and camaraderie flourished among the throngs of the goldfields. The diggers, in a display of communal spirit, lavished guineas on toys for children who reminded them of their own at home, inviting kids to pick out their desired gifts. Most touching is the depiction of diggers who fit poor children with the best boots available, ‘with great care and anxiety,’ and eagerly ensuring their comfort in the new boots. The goldfield community depicted is one of inclusivity, transcending ethnic boundaries to establish a shared identity and collective support. Lawson tells of a Scottish miner whose newfound wealth was overshadowed by the unexpected news that his beloved girl in Scotland ‘had grown tired of waiting and was married.’ Lamenting how the poor man ‘drank, and drink and luck went together’,  the narrator extends sympathy to this Scottish miner and, by extension, to white, if not all, communities living on the goldfields, regardless of their origins. Returning to the opening quotation of this blog post, a Chinese storekeeper assumes the role of Santa Claus. His shop is a treasure of exotic sweets consumed by the community and toys that bring joy to children’s hearts. The Chinese migrants seem favoured in Lawson’s memory and literary imagination of Christmas celebrations. However, this positive portrayal raises questions about the author’s sincerity, given—as William Harrison Pearson has noted—the prevalent anti-Chinese sentiment Lawson exhibits in his many other writings (1-3). In 1901, one year before the publication of ‘The Ghosts of Many Christmases’, the newly established Commonwealth of Australia enacted the White Australia policy to formalise attempts to construct an Australian identity strictly based on skin colour, systematically excluding ethnicities of other colours. This policy particularly impacted Chinese migrants, among others. Including the Chinese in his festive perception of Australia as a country for all men, Lawson registers, consciously or not, their contribution to the goldfields community, celebrating virtues crucial to the Christmas spirit, such as friendship and happiness. But his portrayals of multi-ethnic Santas of the Southern Cross gloss over the marginalisation and alienation faced by the non-white Chinese immigrants and Indigenous Australians in a ‘white’ Australia.

Lawson mourns the decline of once-thriving mining towns, but the narrative evolves past mere nostalgia about Australia’s mining history to depict the country’s continuous growth beyond its mining and relatedly, colonial roots. Through the portrait of the lively metropolis of Sydney, the author transcends traditional Christmas stories’ emphasis on personal success or domestic joy, opting instead for a grander vantage point to laud the achievements of the newly federated country. Notably, much like a painting relies on a sturdy framework before the details can flourish, Lawson’s portrayal of Sydney relied on a structural backbone formed by the city’s sophisticated transportation system. He writes,

Christmas in Sydney…in the Queen city of the South. Buses, electric, cable and the old steam trams crowded with holiday-makers with baskets. Harbour boats loaded down to the water’s edge with harbour picnic-parties. ‘A trip round the harbour and to the head of Middle Harbour one shilling return!’ Strings of tourist trains running over the Blue Mountains and the Great Zigzag, and up the coast to Gosford and Brisbane Water, and down the south coast to beautiful Illawarra, until after New Year.

Roads, railways, and coastlines delineate the landscape’s boundaries and guide the reader’s gaze, connecting the urban bustle with the surrounding natural beauty. While the transport systems owe their existence to the mining industry to some degree, their representation explicitly ties them to this past—they are the conduits that allow people to visit and embrace the wilderness associated with the rugged lifestyle of their pioneering forebears. Perhaps passengers from the countryside seeking urban comforts are absent from Lawson’s descriptions of Sydney. Instead, he depicts young people venturing out ‘with tents to fish in lonely bays or shoot in the mountains, and rough it properly like bushmen’. This desire for authentic bushman experiences, ingrained in Australia’s mining legacy and pioneering spirit, makes Lawson’s Christmas lore distinctly Australian.  Casting a sweeping gaze over the festive and prosperous visage of Sydney, Lawson’s celebratory narrative of the nation’s progress glosses over the environmental toll of this development and the systematic dispossession of Indigenous peoples.

Works Cited

Comyn, Sarah. ‘Southern doubles: Antipodean life as a comparative exercise.’ Worlding the South. Manchester University Press, 2021. 58-77.

Lawson, Henry. Autobiographical and Other Writings, 1887-1922. Angus and Robertson, 1972.

—. ‘The Ghosts of Many Christmases.’ Western Mail (Perth, WA: 1885 – 1954) 25 December 1902: 8 (Special Edition). Web. 21 Dec 2023 http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article37544542

Pearson, William Harrison. Henry Lawson Among Maoris. Australian National University Press, 1968.

With Halloween’s shroud already upon us, are you yearning for some spine-tingling tales to share with family and friends? Many of us are magnetically drawn to ghost stories, not out of any firm belief in the supernatural but because they resonate deeply within our psyche. They captivate us, reflecting our innermost yearnings and laying bare stark realities of the human condition. ‘The Ghostly Digger’ (1880), a piece of Australian goldfield gothic literature by Henry John Congreve (1829-1918), delves into the emotional and mental impacts of mining on prospectors as a way of revealing the harsh and grim aspects of life in the mining fields. Set in 1861, against the backdrop of the gold rush in Inglewood, a bustling gold town in colonial Victoria, the story follows a solitary digger venturing into the depths of an abandoned mine rumoured to be haunted by a ghostly miner (its previous owner), where he struck a large deposit of valuable minerals.

The tale is intimately narrated in the first person by a former gold digger who, despite modestly claiming a lack of learning, used to seek solace in reading during his days of toiling away in the relentless grind of the goldfields. The narrator affirms his reliability by avowing his scepticism about ghosts—‘I’m not a believer in ghosts’—while expressing vexation over an unexplainable ghostly encounter from decades ago, an experience he feels compelled to disclose to his readers as he approaches the twilight years of his life. Nevertheless, the narrator runs the risk of diminishing the authenticity of his tale: ‘I was always a dreamy sort of a chap, and even when a boy used to sit about in the bush, dreaming and dreaming, and fancying I could see all sorts of things. Sometimes all of a sudden I would seem to go off in a kind of sleep, and yet be awake all the time’. As evidence of his capability for imagination, the narrator vividly describes his ethereal, multi-sensory experiences within the supernatural realm, from soaring through the skies and gazing upon breathtaking landscapes, to being serenaded by melodies of exquisite beauty, reminiscent of the Sirens’ allure. As the narrator fashions himself to be ‘a good medium’ between reality and the otherworldly, one is prompted to ask: is the ghostly digger merely the narrator’s hallucination, born of his relentless and despairing quest for riches?

The narrator’s serene and euphoric supernatural experiences, as described above, stand in sharp contrast to the bleak reality of life in Inglewood’s mining fields. ‘It had been a wicked place, too, as most big rushes are’, the narrator describes, continuing, ‘There was vice of all sorts, and some murders—more, I fancy, than were ever found out’. The influx of migrants from other Australian states and beyond, and the resulting multicultural mix brought inevitable conflicts. His penchant for solitude—‘I don’t like crowds’, thus, betrays a feeling of estrangement and a desire to escape the goldfield society.

Intriguingly, the narrator’s ghostly encounter took place after he sought solitude in a gully deserted by miners after its riches were depleted, far from the throngs where he previously worked. He was almost immediately taken with the gully, noting, ‘I liked the look of it, and I liked the quiet more’—further stressing his preference for solitude. He pitched his tent beside a forsaken chimney, relishing the prospect of reading by the fire during the chilly nights. At this solitary encampment, a man often came to chat at nighttime, who was dubbed the ‘walking newspaper’ by locals, renowned for his extensive knowledge of the mining community’s affairs. Yet, beyond his physical appearance, this man’s ethnicity and even age remained a mystery to the reader. He seemed like a ghostly apparition himself, akin to the many miners whose histories fade into the shadows, untold and forgotten. One night, this man, seemingly troubled, disclosed to the narrator that the chimney belonged to a gold digger of the Robbie Burns Reef nearby, who had vanished after a mine collapse—potentially a victim of foul play— and whose restless spirit was rumoured to linger within his very own mining pit. After sharing the grim story, ‘walking newspaper’ asked the narrator to accompany him en route to his dwelling, expressing unease at the prospect of passing by the haunted creek. When the ghostly cadence of ‘tap-tapping’ pierced the air—a metallic clamour of the shovel on stone, interlaced with unsettling laughter and groans—the poor man screamed and bolted in sheer panic. These haunting echoes in the hush of night over Australia’s mining fields wove a narrative of fluctuating hope and despair, a chronicle of fortunes found and forfeited, shaping a unique Australian Gothic tableau.

Just as the narrative gathers its spectral momentum, it levels off, revealing itself to be a tale of the narrator’s despair. Left alone, the narrator approached the source of the sounds—drawing ‘near and near’ to listen to ‘the noise as plainly as possible’—and remained there for an hour, as the phantom labourers seemed to persist in their toil. The narrator exhibited no fear, but it soon became clear that his real concern centres on the prospect of hidden gold. ‘I knew people said that concealed money or gold was often revealed in such ghostly fashion’. Only now that the readers know the narrator had been plagued by the fear of losing Dora, his friend’s daughter, whose hand in marriage was contingent upon a dowry of 500 pounds—a fortune he hoped to amass through a lucky strike one day. Exactly the day before hearing about the ghostly miner, he realised that the old man, weary of Inglewood, had planned to leave, a move his financial situation barred him from following. The delayed revelation of the narrator’s predicament, while enhancing suspense, may also deepen the reader’s scepticism about whether the ghostly miner was merely a manifestation of a desperate prospector seeking good fortune. The spectral miner indeed proved to be the narrator’s salvation from his troubles. Upon returning home and mired in thoughts of losing his beloved, he was startled by a succession of knocking at his chimney, interspersed with eerie laughter and groan. Concluding that the ghost was summoning him to the haunted creek, he set out, following the creek downward to where the distinct knocking persisted. Using his pickaxe to investigate the origin of the sound, he dislodged a chunk of slate, revealing an abundance of gold and quartz.

‘The Ghostly Digger’ was first published in Adelaide Observer, on Christmas, 25 December 1880. While it does not feature a Christmas setting, it aligns with Christmas stories by concluding on a joyful note: the narrator weds Dora. However, the narrator’s act of penning the tale while Dora was asleep raises questions about her actual presence, again suggesting the solitude and loneliness that has marked the digger’s story from the start. Perhaps he never truly had a wife at all, casting a shadow over the supposedly festive Australian goldfield Christmas tales and revealing a darker reality of digger seclusion and fatigue.

Works Cited

Congreve, Henry John. ‘The Ghostly Digger’, Adelaide Observer, 25 December 1880.

‘A Hunt for a Gold Mine: A Lunatic’s Christmas Ramble in the Land of Tasman’, is an Australian gothic tale, published anonymously in the North Australian in 1886. The short story is recounted by an unnamed narrator, presumably a white settler, on his journey through the land of Tasmania in search of a gold mine. Driven by a romanticised desire for fortune, the narrator leaves his “humdrum life of a clerk” in favour of the “halo of romance” surrounding the gold-hunting lifestyle (6). His eventual isolation in the wild Australian landscape is entirely self-provoked by this sense of greed and ignorance of mining labour. However, the text’s depiction of his gradual psychological decline is also highly racialised in its direct relation of his madness to his increased exposition to the “primitive” indigenous land and its natural extremities. The uncanny setting of the tale is derived from the narrator’s obvious sense of whiteness within the racialised landscape, indicating the author’s use of the gothic in a process of estrangement that highlights Australia’s cultural and geographic difference from Britain and Europe.

From the narrator’s arrival in Tasmania, descriptions of the barren landscape are palpably gothic. With a strong emphasis on the severe sensory impact of the climate, the land itself is villainised as an inflictor of pain on the unacclimatised body of the narrator. This in turn creates an interesting dynamic between the untamed landscape and the civilised body, who inhabits it. Unaccustomed to Australian life and land, the narrator’s non-indigeneity causes him to become victim to the harsh environment:

Hard walking was a novel experience; in my thin-soled boots, it was positive torture, with every step, I sank to the ankle in the imponderable dust, which, working into the interstices of my knitted socks, caused me exquisite agony. My feet were raw and galled within a very short time (6).

This passage draws a stark contrast between commodity culture and nature, as the sophisticated and well-dressed man becomes the “foreign other” in Australia. Here, the narrator’s items of luxury are rendered torturous under the crude conditions of the land. It is ironic that the author emphasises the pain that the narrator’s clothing causes, rather than the natural conditions themselves. His material commodities are of no benefit and he is consequently stripped of his class-based attire, which apparently cannot exist within the Australian bush. Accordingly, it is his inexperience and sense of white foreignness that occasions disorientation, provoking his psychological decline. As his journey progresses, his gradual descent into madness coincides with his further seclusion into the wilderness. Influenced by his recent reading of Marcus Clarke’s For the Term of His Natural Life, the narrator describes his second day’s travels as a combination of “weary plodding and panoramic horror” (6). Clarke’s classic Australian novel that portrays the horrors of convict life has clearly impacted the narrator’s projection of anxiety onto his current environment. The panoramic vastness of the scene enables this projection and paradoxically produces the gothic trope of claustrophobia. As Roslynn D. Haynes has demonstrated in her analysis of the Australian desert, the most alarming prospect faced by explorers coming from the confines of heavily populated Britain and Europe, was that of void: repeated vistas of empty horizontal planes under a cloudless, overarching sky. These vast expanses of apparently empty space became paradoxical symbols of Gothic enclosure and entrapment (77). The Australian wilderness thus becomes a panoramic version of British gothic’s claustrophobia of confinement. In this text, the landscape’s boundlessness facilitates a projection of hallucinogenic and hypnotic qualities. The narrator’s panoramic view, in combination with his foreign perspective, thus becomes a gothic component of psychological delusion.

The text’s Christmas setting adds to this gothic atmosphere, coinciding with the Victorian tradition of telling yuletide ghost stories. A direct reference to Ann Radcliffe’s Mysteries of Udolpho in the narrator’s description of a rustic church “amid dark foliage” highlights the text’s adoption and translation of European gothic conventions onto a specifically Australian context (6). Moreover, another Radcliffean trope is evident in the feminisation of the masculine narrator against the rugged landscape. Under the isolating conditions, the narrator himself comes to resemble the trope of the vulnerable gothic heroine. These transpositions of European gothic onto the spectralised Australian wilderness are described by Ken Gelder as “imported concepts”, contributing to the theme of “the explorer who never returns” (380). Although the narrator survives and ultimately returns to society without having struck any gold, Gelder’s idea of imported gothic is still relevant here. Specifically, the narrator’s depiction of the intricate pathways and winding forestry of Tasmania are clear derivatives of the traditional maze-like gothic castle: “the ringed and blasted gumtrees, like skeletons whose dry bones glistened in the rays of the setting sun, gave a weird and spectral appeal to the landscape” (6). Instead of supernaturally inhabited buildings, the land itself becomes a spectral entity, manipulating its appearance to the vulnerable foreigner, who perceives the natural flora and fauna of Australia as skeleton-like. Gina Wisker similarly states that if the gothic genre serves as an attempt to defamiliarize the familiar, the Australian gothic is even more uncanny in its destabilisation of the common haunted house trope, instead constructing images of abandoned mines and emptied out towns that draw on settler perceptions of the “harshness of the land” (297). In this text, the haunted landscape transcends the traditional haunted house in its inherent vastness and gothic enthrallment of the narrator’s mind.

Similar to European gothic, there is a close connection between physical space and mentality evident in the text. In this case, the haunted landscape and the narrator’s haunted mind are parallel. The further the narrator strays from human-inhabited land and social communication, the more disorientated he becomes. The symbols of telegraph wires and tram lines are significant as the only evidence of human life in the rough landscape, and are also important in highlighting the narrator’s self-inflicted exile:

The uncanny-looking vegetation which fringed the tram-line waved and rustled its dusty foliage in a ghostly manner, stirred into goblin life by the evening breeze which whispered and moaned like the voices of departed spirits (6).

By the tale’s conclusion, the landscape has completely adopted the narrator’s frame of mind. As he contemplates his isolation from his family and reminisces about their usual Christmas festivities, the scenery externally manifests this loneliness, with the wires representing his lack of communication. The text’s landscape subsequently conjures these metaphorical images of departed spirits to represent his distant family members. On account of the narrator’s intense solitude, he becomes a ghostly figure himself, departed from his own homeland. With this in mind, he acts as a spectral outsider, threatening the indigeneity of the Australian landscape in terms of both his spectral foreign identity and his initial intent to exploit the land and acquire gold. The text therefore provides a gothic contemplation on white greed for gold versus the harshness of natural landscape.

Works Cited:

‘A Hunt for a Gold Mine: A Lunatic’s Ramble in the Land of Tasman’, The North Australian, 29 Jan 1886, p.6.

Clarke, Marcus. For the Term of His Natural Life. London: Richard Bentley and Son, 1897.

Gelder, Ken. ‘Australian Gothic.’ A New Companion to the Gothic, edited by David Punter, John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated, 2012, pp. 379-392.

Haynes, Roslynn D. Seeking the Centre: The Australian Desert in Literature, Art and Film. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999.

Radcliffe, Ann. The Mysteries of Udolpho. Ed. Bonamy Dobree, Oxford University Press, 2008.

Wisker, Gina. ‘Australian and New Zealand Women’s Supernatural and Gothic Stories 1880-1924: Rosa Praed and Dulcie Deamer.’ Women’s Writing: The Elizabethan to Victorian Period, vol. 29, no. 2, 2022, pp. 295-318.