The Fantasy Goldfields of New Gold Mountain

We are on the Ballarat diggings in early September 1857, the eve of the Chinese “Moon Festival”, when SBS television’s New Gold Mountain begins. Using a murder mystery to drive the plot—a disembowelled corpse has been discovered—this historical drama aims to give the viewpoint of Chinese participants in Australia’s gold rush.

SBS adopts a surprising position on Asian gold seekers.

The main Chinese characters work for a Canton-based syndicate, called “The Brotherhood”, which like the fabled Tong societies of California organises crime across the gold fields.

A fluent English speaker, the Chinese community’s headman, Leung Wei Shing, is the Brotherhood’s manager at Ballarat. The Chinese Protector, Frederick Standish, and local authorities are clueless about this control over criminal activity. So is Belle Roberts, the owner-editor of the Ballarat Star, who starts a Chinese edition and is investigating the violent death. She befriends the handsome headman.

Unlike European miners who work on their own account, many Chinese are wage-earning employees of the Brotherhood. Operating secret mines in unregistered claims, the Brotherhood does not use official exchanges to cash the gold it is digging up. Instead, it runs a covert smelter, casting undeclared gold into small spherical ingots which are easy to smuggle. This is done using human mules who swallow ingots then travel with contraband gold in their stomachs (hence the disembowelled body).

The Brotherhood also runs Ballarat’s opium den. This shadowy canvas hut is filled with Chinese men who visit to smoke a pipe then sleep, while gambling occurs in a room at the back. The authorities know of the opium and the gambling, but the local commissioner and police are being bribed to leave it alone. As well, the Brotherhood has a neat tent with brass bed where a European prostitute provides services for Chinese men.

The Brotherhood exerts control over the Chinese at Ballarat. Those not working for the Brotherhood fear it, such as a Chinese storekeeper who is pressured to assist their interests. And no wonder, given how the headman orders one man shot, and slashes the throat of another.

The headman plays a duplicitous game. He has his book-keeper brother Leung Wei Sun falsify records to keep Canton ignorant of real earnings; and when a surveyor from China discovers a rich gold seam, the headman has him killed to prevent Canton learning of the find. Then the Brotherhood’s enforcer Zhang Lei arrives to inspect the operation. An attractive and efficient woman, she is suspicious of the accounts. After finding the dead surveyor, she has the headman tortured then buried alive to teach him a lesson.

There are subsidiary stories. A dead woman, Annie Thomas, was a prostitute who fell in love and was running away with the Chinese accountant when she was accidentally killed. Patrick Thomas, an Irish miner with, inexplicably, a Welsh surname, is Annie’s estranged husband and regrets treating her badly. And a young Aborigine from Van Diemen’s Land, Hattie, has open access to the diggings, looking inside huts and tents uninvited. She also cures health problems with indigenous medicine.

The drama ends with the book-keeper and female enforcer separately fleeing to start new lives. The headman is arrested and sent to be hanged in Melbourne, but on the way there the Protector releases the headman and allows him to run off.

New Gold Mountain was created by Peter Cox, directed by Corrie Chen, and written by Peter Cox, Benjamin Law, Yolanda Ramke, Greg Waters and Pip Karmel. Principal funding came from Screen Australia and its COVID-19 Budget Support Fund. The drama is structured as four fifty-five-minute episodes, which have also been run together in a single block on SBS’s movie channel. Available on DVD, it is being used in secondary schools to instruct youngsters on racism in colonial Australia, and the history of the Gold Rush.

SBS promotes New Gold Mountain as showing the plight of Chinese on the gold fields from their perspective. However, according to those I spoke with from Ballarat’s Chinese Library, that view is not shared by descendants of Chinese gold seekers. They are disconcerted by SBS’s depiction of their history.

The cast assembled in New Gold Mountain is strong. With Yoson An and Alyssa Sutherland delivering fine performances in the lead roles, the standard of acting throughout is very high. The production’s deficiencies lie elsewhere, beginning with the portrayal of the Ballarat diggings in 1857.

Outdoor scenes of the tent settlement are well handled, and correspond with what was recorded by journalist illustrators at the time. Much of the drama was filmed at the Sovereign Hill historical village, a tourist park which re-creates the main street of an established early 1860s gold town. Because of this choice of location, numerous scenes occur on that street, or inside sizable buildings of timber or brick (interiors have wallpaper) when they should be in tents, rough huts or else modest new buildings. Like a well-stocked general store—such businesses were mostly still under canvas and the proprietors lived in them. There are too many large established buildings for what was a camp-like embryonic town. The well-equipped doctor’s surgery is just not credible.

Weather is also off the mark. At Ballarat there are intermittent snowfalls on nearby hills every winter, and it is miserably cold and wet until October. In fact, the rains were heavy in early September 1857. My great-great grandfather arrived on that goldfield on the last day of August, and his papers describe Ballarat as a quagmire. The mud was so deep his horses struggled to proceed, the wagon’s wheels sinking in the sludge repeatedly. He complained of taking over two hours to cross the diggings.

SBS has Ballarat enduring a spell of blistering weather. It doesn’t rain once. The sun beats down and sweaty characters shed their clothing, some cooling off at a waterhole central to the narrative. On this point my forebear writes of the choking dust in hot weather at Ballarat. All the dry earth being dug and mined raised a powdery dust, which sat in the air. This coated clothes and tents with a fine ochre residue, as well as causing coughs, wheezing, and miner’s lung, a major medical problem. But SBS shows work on the dry diggings as dustless. No miner in the drama wheezes or coughs.

Music was prominent in goldfields life. If flutes, pipes and fifes, as well as fiddles and accordions sounded across the diggings each evening, song was a constant day and night. There were passing entertainers with tent shows, while most people sang during routine activities. Women sang when washing laundry, tending children, and preparing meals: some recipes were memorised in song form. For men, singing was the customary pastime—the group singalong was always popular—with Welsh and Cornish miners renowned for singing at work to set a digging rhythm. The Ballarat goldfield also had several community choirs, and it hosted periodic singing competitions with cash prizes. However, in SBS’s drama we never catch the melodious sound of all that daily song.

Teenage miners were another feature of 1850s goldfields. Schools which gave children an elementary education (reading, writing, arithmetic) were quickly set up at each field. My forebear, a teacher, ran a school from 1857 in a crude hut of bark walls and canvas roof. He taught no teenagers, for they were in the workforce. Referred to as “young fellows”, on the diggings teenage males usually worked in teams with their fathers and family members. These strong young labourers were everywhere seen on Victoria’s goldfields, but no teenage miner appears in the SBS drama.

Chinese gold seekers began arriving in Australia in 1854, making mostly for central Victoria. The existing Californian goldfields they called “Old Gold Mountain”, whereas the Victorian diggings were “New Gold Mountain”. This metaphor doubled as the Cantonese term for Australia. Hence the title of C.F. Yong’s The New Gold Mountain (1977), the ground-breaking study of the Chinese who stayed and settled in Australia. The phrase is now also used as an alternative name for Ballarat’s Chinese Library, a leading historical archive.

Few Chinese gold seekers intended to settle, their purpose being to return home “with honour and wealth”. The overwhelming majority came from Kwangtung province. So they spoke the same dialect, Cantonese, home for them being one of twelve counties around Canton and along the Pearl River delta. About a third of the travellers were financially independent (they were tradesmen, shopkeepers or small merchants). The rest (rural labourers) used a credit system and had a financial debt to a moneylender or merchant.

Chinese could be scapegoats when problems arose on a goldfield, but the non-Chinese who interacted with the Chinese described them as sober, peace-loving, kindly, industrious and frugal. The Chinese stayed separate and were uncommitted in miners’ disputes with authority. They kept out when community grievances were aired, politicians appeared or officials petitioned.

Nonetheless the Chinese organised themselves like European gold seekers. They lived and worked with the men from their home country, so a miner from Chung Shan preferred to buy goods from a Chung Shan shopkeeper.

This same pattern was seen among British, Teutonic and Latin gold seekers, with a miner from West Penwith living and working among others from that part of Cornwall. The new Chinese would settle into a “village” of already loosely familiar people. On the Ballarat diggings there were twelve segregated Chinese villages from 1855. Each corresponded to a county in Kwangtung (the “Four Districts” and “Three Districts” around Canton, plus five rural counties) and was run by a county “association”.

Central to Chinese life on the diggings, county associations united and protected the interests of members, organising accommodation, channelling news to and from home, and helping newcomers find employment. Even gambling was circumscribed by them. The association handled certain welfare matters, such as funeral arrangements. In some instances a county association arranged the return of a deceased member’s bones to China for family burial.

Every association had a headman who supervised the resident community. Many headmen were agents of moneylenders back in China, keeping tabs on creditors. As well as county associations across different goldfields, there was an over-arching general association, the Sze Yap, which officially represented the Chinese in Melbourne.

As for the size of the Chinese population, Charles Price in The Great White Walls Are Built (1974) estimates there were 40,000 Chinese in central Victoria in 1857, the year population peaked, whereas C.F. Yong in The New Gold Mountain tables 25,424 as recorded in Victoria for the same year. This sudden population surge exceeded numbers in California.

New arrivals were male and unmarried. C.F. Yong finds only three Chinese women documented as entering Victoria by mid-1857, while according to the Rev. William Young, a welfare worker who ran Ballarat’s Chinese mission, in 1868 barely 5000 Cantonese men in central Victoria were married, of which just ten had their wives with them.

New Gold Mountain is heavy in stock clichés from television’s Wild West. There is a shoot-out with bandits, a Silver Dollar-style brothel with honky-tonk piano music, American obscene language, and actors swagger in cowboy-looking attire. Even the Chinese Protector strolls around wearing a gunbelt, drawing a revolver in a card game during his first scene. It is little surprise to see the producer Kylie du Fresne explain in a promotional short that New Gold Mountain is intended as an Australian version of Deadwood, HBO’s award-winning Western series of 2006 to 2008.

Fictional convention is substituted for plain historical fact. Like those spoken obscenities. Introduced to popular culture by rap music, they were not heard in public here even a generation back, let alone were such expletives uttered two centuries ago by reputable women, or casually used by the Chinese. Are viewers really to believe a Cantonese miner would say “Go f*** your dead mother’s grave” to a European? And every history undergraduate will point out that working people in the colonies with little money could not afford wide-brimmed hats of costly felt. They wore straw hats, especially the “cabbage tree hat” mentioned in standard histories and seen throughout contemporary illustrations.

The production’s costume and make-up staff deserve praise for the Asian extras and minor cast members appropriately clothed, even fitting wigs with queues. But with European attire and haircuts, the main Chinese characters do not resemble the Cantonese figures of drawings and reports from the diggings. A frugal Asian miner with a debt did not splash cash on expensive foreign dress, while cutting off his queue marked that man as politically subversive if he returned to China. It was not done.

Researchers helping prepare New Gold Mountain surely knew this. Librarians told me of archives used and inquiries coming in; although information gathered seems not always to have made it into the script. The drama can disregard blunt reality.

Take when, in the first episode, Patrick Thomas visits the bank to cash in gold chips. A sinister man stands to one side in the near empty bank, closely watching the transaction, then follows Thomas onto the street and attempts a robbery at knifepoint. Muggers did not frequent goldfields banks! Troopers were on duty to protect gold, cash, staff and customers.

The Chinese instantly attracted disapproval and criticism on the diggings. Much was due to appearance. Lacking pockets, buttons and buttonholes, Cantonese clothing significantly differed from European apparel, while their straw hats had unfamiliar shapes. Then there was the Chinese hairstyle, how males shaved their heads and wore a braided queue at the back to show loyalty to the Emperor. That “pigtail” was a target for mockery. Most Cantonese did not speak European languages, using a pronounced hard accent when they did pick up some English and miner’s argot.

Frictions with others were not always caused by prejudice. A major grievance arose from the amount of water used by Chinese in washing mined earth and crushed rock. This contributed to water shortages on several goldfields in the summers of 1855 and 1856. The Chinese also often tried to resift heaps of “mullock” (miner’s argot for tailings) and to rework abandoned claims. Europeans strongly objected, complaining that the Chinese were taking unfair and cuckoo-like advantage of other diggers’ labours.

Then there was how Chinese broke the Sabbath. Due to Christian mores, labour ceased each Sunday, but the Cantonese kept working. The Irish especially were alarmed about this “ungodly” practice. Later, as mining companies formed and absorbed activity across goldfields, the Chinese were willing to work for low wages and in poor conditions—thereby attracting disapproval from the embryonic miners’ unions.

Harassment of Chinese was constant. Some adults saw nothing wrong with stealing from them, or shoplifting from Chinese-owned businesses. If police intervened, miscreants often argued the law should not apply. Teenage yahoos across the colonies were also renowned for sneaking up behind Chinese men then yanking their queue. Even wayward children could tease unfamiliar figures outdoors, chanting “Chin Chin Chinaman, Chin Chin Chinaman”, the bolder boys throwing stones.

Racism was a given across all diggings. Most gold seekers came from insular—often rural—communities. They had no experience of people from elsewhere in their own countries, let alone those from foreign parts. Anxiety about other cultures was commonplace, with individuals labelled by ethnicity. It was usual to call another person “Paddy” (for the Irish), “Fritz” or “Hans” (Teutons), “Taffy” (Welsh), “Jock” (Scots), “Louis” or “Pierre” (French), and “Kwang” (Chinese). A Chinese person was politely referred to as an “Oriental” or “Chinee”, or informally as a “Chow”. The Chinese were equally prejudiced. The Cantonese term for a Westerner was “Foreign Devil”, while an Aborigine was a “Black Ghost”.

Ethnic diversity characterised the diggings. Each day one heard a mixture of languages, dialects and provincial accents. Even before gold was discovered, nearly 40 per cent of Melbourne’s population was Teutonic, with the proportion so high in Geelong it was then called “German Town”. That bayside settlement was the nearest port to Ballarat, so arriving Europeans and most supplies for the diggings passed through it in the 1850s. German was a second language in central Victoria’s goldfields, and miner’s argot included a smattering of German terms: an unproductive shaft or seam was “a shicer” (from schiesser), for instance, while a drunken man was “shickered”.

All this strangely has no place in SBS’s drama. No Teuton appears, nor is the mining argot common at Ballarat ever spoken. Even British characters come from too few places. The Cornish and the Welsh were renowned for their mining skills, their presence at the time signalled by the sturdy Methodist chapels that still stand in former gold towns. Yet the audience never hears the distinctive accents and vocabularies of those prominent ethnicities.

Instead, there is a Scotsman, an Irishman, and several English characters with the “home county” accents of Middlesex or Kent. Otherwise most actors speak with the inflexions of modern Australia. European accents are not heard, and no one utters a word of German. This is not credible.

Worse still, dialogue in SBS’s script seems processed by a political filter. Europeans never use the slang expressions or common racial phrases of the period—everyone politely calls the Cantonese either “Celestials”, “Chinese” or “Chinamen”. No hooligan ever yells “bloody Chinee”, or yanks a pigtail.

That political filter also misrepresents behaviour. None of the Cantonese speak with the accented English described in historical documents, nor do they call Europeans “Foreign Devils” or refer to Aborigines as “Black Ghosts”. As well, it is not credible for an Aborigine to roam unchecked in a segregated Chinese village, let alone look inside the headman’s tent. And the sole Irishman, Patrick, is affable towards the Chinese, not the belligerent Catholic of historical documents and analysed at length by social and political historians.

Australia was different from America. In California the goldfields had been lacking in mining laws, were effectively ungoverned, and were remote. So racist activity was unchecked there. In contrast, the Victorian diggings at Ballarat, Castlemaine and Bendigo, as well as around Bathurst, were within a hundred miles of their colonies’ capitals. Officials resided at most diggings, could refer to clear regulations, had ready police support, and good communication with cities.

News travelled quickly in central Victoria and an official response was immediate. When two agitators set about organising an anti-Chinese uprising at Bendigo, local officials were forewarned and Melbourne dispatched fifty additional police who prevented the incident taking place. Victoria therefore did not succumb to disturbances of the size or number as California. The only serious anti-Chinese uprising to occur was, due to remoteness, at Buckland River in the Victorian Alps during a wintry July in 1857. Troubles a month earlier at Daylesford, a day’s ride from Melbourne, were swiftly contained, whereas the incident years later at Clunes in 1873 was technically not directed at the Chinese. Escorted by sixteen police, forty-five Cantonese men had been hired to break a miners’ strike—so the Clunes miners’ association targeted the mine directors and their police support.

Colonial officials were well aware of troubles in California, and acted to prevent similar occurrences. Victoria’s government copied the American landing tax for Chinese, introducing an entry tax of £10 per person, with tonnage limits. It did not work. Ships from China landed at Robe in South Australia, then new arrivals walked 250 miles to the diggings. It is estimated that 15,000 Chinese arrived this way in the first six months of 1857.

The wilderness trek from Robe was dangerous. Besides physical hazards, Aboriginal raiders robbed parties of Chinese. In these attacks Cantonese were badly injured, some killed, and tales of cannibalism by indigenous raiders are still recounted by Australian descendants of Chinese arrivals. On the diggings, the Chinese feared Aborigines and would not mix with them.

The colony’s civil service appointed officials to monitor the Chinese. Every goldfield had a salaried Protector, who determined where each of the respective Chinese county villages was situated, monitored water usage and sanitation, and handled matters that arose. The Protector had a paid interpreter, and would liaise with—and keep an eye on—the headman of each Chinese “village”. Headmen were not used as the Protector’s interpreter.

Gambling was the major problem for Chinese on the diggings. Many Cantonese fell into further debt due to illegal games. The Protector on each goldfield was on the alert for gambling dens, and eager to identify who ran them.

Even as the civil service was addressing the practicalities of a major influx in Chinese gold seekers, Victoria’s parliament was divided on their presence. Led by the sometime premier John O’Shanassy, who had been Ballarat’s commissioner in 1854-55, fierce opposition to the Chinese came from the Irish Catholic lobby. O’Shanassy (who was the power in parliament at the time of SBS’s drama) was for a decade the key player in legislative efforts to halt Chinese access to Victoria.

None of this figures in New Gold Mountain, and we never hear of politicians. The lack of a character based on O’Shanassy, a regular visitor to Ballarat, undercuts claims for historical accuracy.

There is good reason for the descendants of Chinese gold seekers to be concerned about SBS’s New Gold Mountain. It is not only that the commonplace racism their forebears dealt with daily is omitted from the drama. But how the Chinese are portrayed is historically untrue, and offensive.

Instead of being honest and hard-working men, Cantonese gold seekers are made to appear responsible for organised crime. We see them involved in narcotics, gambling, bribery, illegal mining, fraud, tax avoidance, theft, prostitution, smuggling, extortion, torture and murder.

No wonder some descendants of the real men from Canton are disappointed.

Linking an influx in Chinese people with the proliferation of crime and vice in Western nations is the “Yellow Peril” argument. Those in the film and television industries surely know this phobia served as the basis for Sax Rohmer’s popular thrillers about Fu Manchu, an Oriental mastermind intent on corrupting the West, later played in movies to gothic excess by Boris Karloff, then Christopher Lee. It is astonishing that this updated variant of that racist stereotype has been re-purposed by SBS as serious drama, and funded by Screen Australia.

Corrie Chen, the director of New Gold Mountain, justifies the headman character by calling him “morally ambiguous”. This strikes me as nonsense. The fictional Shing is a manipulative crime lord every bit as wicked as a young Mafia capo. That this character escapes the scaffold at the drama’s end leaves an opening for a sequel on more Chinese crime and vice in Australian history. Stay tuned to SBS.

Dr Christopher Heathcote, a frequent contributor on history and art, wrote “Clunes 1873—The Uprising That Wasn’t” in the December 2008 issue.