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Book Review
| Alan Mayne, Hill End: An Australian Goldfields Landscape, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, 2003. pp. xvii + 173. $29.95 paper.
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| Hill End is a town with a rich economic, spatial and cultural history. Founded by get-rich-quick gold rush miners in the 1850s it has had a long, complex and varied historic and cultural existence. It is a landscape that has managed to preserve an extraordinary amount of its use by humans. There is still a presence of the pre-contact history when the area that became Hill End was populated and enjoyed, for thousands of years, by aboriginal peoples. Relics of all its uses and of all its inhabitants remain; from carved stones and aboriginal artefacts, to gold mines, mullock heaps, rusty mining machinery, crumbling houses and to wild, English-style gardens. In its contours and artefacts is the history of aboriginal people, of Australian mining's shift from alluvial gold to deep-shaft mining, from European and Chinese diggers, to struggling farmers and shopkeepers and to a trickle of artists who paved the way, eventually, for tourists. In this isolated locale, strangely, the impact of humans is everywhere apparent. |
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