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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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The account given by Alan Mayne of the multi-varied occupation of this isolated valley of New South Wales is at times exciting and complex. In fact the first half of the book is a strong, multi-layered spatial analysis of land use, of feeling, an imagined sound scape, of human use and attached meanings. His account provides insight into the meaning of place in human life and work and he skilfully uses the rich variety of documentary, archaeological and cultural material that has helped give Hill End some of its allure and fascination. In this Mayne's task was made easier by the unprecedented cultural richness of this community. Not only did it attract Australian artists of the calibre of Donald Friend and Russell Drysdale, whose work helped link Hill End with the iconography of modern Australia, but the town itself was uniquely documented photographically in the 1870s. This, the Holtermann collection, was a civic project of documentation in over 600 glass-plate images; celebrated then lost until rediscovered in the 1950s. The relics of colonial life and work are wonderfully preserved and re-presented here in a detailed and analytical way. |
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The book was the outcome of a history consultancy organised by the National Parks and Wildlife Service (NPWS), which is now responsible for the management of much of the land that was once part of the town and environs of Hill End. This commission is both a strength and weakness of the book. The project demanded the rich cultural and spatial analysis which is the backbone of the first half of the book but in the second half the demands of the commission became, at times, more insistent and intrusive. Blackberry spraying vies with the temptation to reconstruct yea old pubs and cottages. What to do with the resource that is Hill End is an important question, particularly for the NPWS. And, indeed, for the act of engaging with history. Tourism and the need for its critical economic contribution however is a hard task master; it is both a blessing and curse. How can history be recreated? Does the act of re-creation distort and manipulate the historical experience? Is re-creation a valid response to decay? The author is less comfortable with these demands or, at least, is less successful in creating a workable blueprint that might guide and mitigate the needs of the NPWS and the general public. |
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This is an interesting book, one that is at times brave in its exploration of the ambiguity and illusiveness of the past but one that is ultimately tangled by the complexity and difficulty of historio-tourism. The book certainly makes the reader want to visit and experience what is left of Hill End. It should also make every reader marvel at the unique richness of its cultural refusal to sedately disappear from our maps and imagination. |
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| Charles Sturt University |
W.M. ROBBINS | |
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