Australian History/Sociology
Book Details

Hill End

An Historic Australian Goldfields Landscape

Alan Mayne

The Hill End Historic Site is one of first cultural heritage sites to be reserved in Australia.

Awards

Special Mention, Centre for Australian Cultural Studies Awards 2003

Opinion

'Why does the brief gold boom of the 1870s define the received historical portrait of Hill End? Mayne's answers are passionate, perceptive and pertinent. He keeps his own theoretical scaffolding out of the reader's eye-line, focusing on the interwoven nature of social time lines, including marginalised and silenced people in history.' (The Age, 30/8/2003)

Hill End's 'acknowledged history has reduced in the past half-century to a narrative of one sudden boom and one sudden bust. Enter academic historian Alan Mayne who, on stripping legend away from fact and on considerably broadening the time frame under focus, reveals a much richer and more coherent understanding of settlement at Hill End.' (The Australian, 1/10/2003)

About this Title

The history of the Australian gold rushes is full of exaggeration: the First This, the Richest That, the Largest Something Else.

Hill End unravels the myths surrounding the gold rushes in order to reveal the hidden histories of the Wiradjuri people, of the graziers and convicts who occupied the Wiradjuri lands, of the multicultural gold-boom community and of the subsistence community that endured for generations after the boom had passed.

Hill End is perched high on the New South Wales Central Tablelands, some 300 kilometres north-west of Sydney. The Hill End Historic Site, which was proclaimed in 1967, is one of first cultural heritage sites to be reserved in Australia. This is a book that digs past Hill End's gold rush façade into the lives of the people who lived through its history.

Table of Contents

Table of Contents

Preface (NPWS)

Foreword
Part I: Contexts

1. First Impressions
2. Actualities
3. Realities
Part II: Landscapes
grid
4. Before the Rush for Gold
5. Boom Town
6. Poor Man's Diggings
7. Heritage Place
Afterword

Bibliography

About the Author

Alan Mayne is an Associate Professor in the Department of History at the University of Melbourne. He is a specialist in urban and regional history.

978-0-522-85076-5