New Gold Mountain, the Chinese who sought their fortunes in Ballarat

Little remains of Ballarat’s rich Chinese heritage but SBS series New Gold Mountain gives us a privileged insight into the migrants who came to find their fortune.

SBS’s New Gold Mountain was largely filmed at Sovereign Hill.

Filmed in historic heritage site Sovereign Hill and around Melbourne and regional Victoria, New Gold Mountain is an epic four-part series from Goalpost Pictures celebrating an often forgotten part of Australian history. Set in Ballarat, it’s the story of the Australian gold rush in the 1850s from the perspective of Chinese miners, many of whom are said to have walked to the Victorian goldfields from Robe in South Australia to avoid the harsh government taxes made to limit Chinese migration.

The miners referred to Australia as New Gold Mountain, after the Californian gold rush where San Francisco was called gam saan, Gold Mountain. And like their counterparts in California they endured an epidemic of violent racist attacks, a campaign of persecution and murder. It’s a reality a little at odds with the still accepted notion that the gold discoveries in the 1850s ushered in a democratic golden age. The English and Irish diggers might have stood strongly for independence and equality but the democratic spirit did not include their “scruffy celestial” brothers.

The series was produced by several idiosyncratic and experienced creatives including Kylie du Fresne, whose work ranges from features such as Neil Armfield’s Holding the Man to acclaimed TV shows such as Cleverman; and Elisa Argenzio, whose credits encompass the Underbelly franchise and Wolf Creek.

The creator and writer was New Zealander Peter Cox, whose first series was the highly successful The Insider’s Guide to Happiness, and while not all that well known here he has received many awards in his own industry for shows such as TV thriller The Cult and mockumentary The Pretender.

Director is the talented Corrie Chen, who most recently directed episodes of the explosive final series of Wentworth and who also has worked on series as diverse as Five Bedrooms, Sisters and the remake of SeaChange.

Historian Sophie Couchman, who has published in the field of Chinese-Australian history for many years and previously was curator at the Chinese Museum in Melbourne, collaborated on the production, as did historian Benjamin Mountford, whose published works include Britain, China & Colonial Australia.

The series is certainly historically dense as it explores the reality of the unruly evolving bush frontier of the Victorian goldfields of the 1850s, where settlers and new immigrants improvise the structures of governance in an environment that acknowledges it is the abrogation of everything but brute force.

It was conceived, according to du Fresne, as a kind of local version of David Milch’s Deadwood, though it lacks the baroque language, abstruse profanity and rococo storytelling of the American TV classic. Milch calls himself a “way station for all sorts of influences” – channelling Melville, Hawthorne and a touch of Lenny Bruce perhaps – and the writing for New Gold Mountain could have used a little more invention.

But it does provide us with an intriguing murder mystery within the context of a revisionist western, with the lead character, Wei Shing, inspired by a captivating historical figure, Fook Shing, who became famous as “Melbourne’s Chinese detective”. He’s played brilliantly by Yoson An, an actor fluent in Cantonese and Mandarin as well as English, who came to fame as the romantic interest of Hua Mulan in Disney’s live-action remake of Mulan.

Fook Shing was an intriguing investigator, according to historian Mountford, who kept a pistol under his pillow for when extra-legal methods were required to protect his followers. “For the (heavily Irish) Victorian police force, who relied on interpreters of mixed quality, were befuddled by Chinese names and struggled to identify Chinese criminals, men like Fook Shing proved invaluable on the goldfields,” Mountford, who has written extensively about this alluring investigator, says.

But more than anything, as Chen suggests, New Gold Mountain is about the search for belonging, “one of the oldest stories we tell ourselves, but one that never ceases to feel particularly urgent and captivating”. And “as an immigrant and non-European settler, I am particularly excited to direct a show that will finally let me put Chinese-Australian cowboys on screen and revise the canon of the classic western”.

As in the great westerns, Chen gives us a beautifully realised symbolic landscape, a point of encounter in which the old and the new confront each other, and individual actions may tip the balance one way or another, thus shaping the future of the whole settlement.

Chen’s hero, the morally grey Wei Shing, the local “headman” or “chief of the Chinese”, finds himself between the old life and the new with responsibility for taking those actions that will bring about the destruction of the life he knew and the establishment of a settled society.

All this is set against the brutal, baffling, resistant Australian landscape and a racist social environment, and the profound irony of an emerging colonial society celebrating immigrants alongside a foundational violence against “others”.

“For creating drama, the period is fascinating with its collision of forces – with the old world trying to assert itself, with modern ideas such as the theory of evolution and the self-made man, with immigration from all corners of the earth,” says Cox. “It was a moment of friction and conflict and a fascinating world to explore.”

Cox’s script explores it by initially economically setting up several overlapping storylines, adroitly handled by Chen and her cinematographer Matthew Temple, working cleverly with light and shadow, contrasting the formalism of Chinese cinema with what Chen calls “flourishes of movement” that give us the sense of the classical western.

It begins in Golden Point Mining Camp in Ballarat in 1857, a time when an estimated 9000 Chinese people were scraping out a living on the tent and shanty goldfields. Their unpopularity with other miners leads to designated Chinese camps, where they live under the safety of “Chinese protectors” asked to pay for the privilege.

Chinese women are rare, and historian Yvonne Horsfield describes the men as “male isolates, chained together by the combined circumstances of class, ethnic choice, cultural and economic necessity, a diminished minority, dislocated, often ethnically demoralised, denigrated and misunderstood by the European society”.

Yet the Chinese still develop a tightly woven, self-sufficient style of social organisation.

Wei Shing, the charismatic leader of the Chinese operation, stoically struggles to remain in control in the mud and clay, not above looking to line his own pockets. When he finds the body of a European woman wearing Chinese clothing it’s imperative the discovery is kept secret, given the level of hostility between the two camps, as he attempts to investigate her death.

He’s also worried Chinese secret society the Brotherhood, the obsessively cagey and closed criminal fraternity that controls the Chinese from their homeland, might discover his involvement in skimming gold.

Complicating matters is recently widowed Belle Roberts (Alyssa Sutherland), who is drawing attention to herself through the local newspaper she has inherited and who is determined to develop the Chinese as her paper’s constituency. Another woman arrives in the town, glamorous Cheung Lee (Mabel Li), who it quickly turns out is the formidable, ruthless daughter of Master Cheung of the Brotherhood, sent to investigate the camp’s finances. Then there is the mysterious Indigenous woman Hattie (Leonie Whyman), who survived the massacre of her Tasmanian family and is intimidated by no one, European or Chinese.

Chen and her colleagues do a convincing job handling one of the largest and most diverse casts to be assembled on Australian screens, with more than 65 speaking roles in numerous languages and with more than half those roles filled by Australian actors of Chinese descent.

Paddy Reardon’s design is not only cleverly useful, providing lovely spots in which Chen can stage her tableaus and set pieces, but also adds a wonderful authentic hue to the look of the show, his Chinese village sporting live pigs, vegetable gardens, working kitchens and an array of authentic huts built of bark and wood.

And constantly counterpointing the movements of Cox’s plotting is Caitlin Yeo’s magnificent original soundtrack providing what she calls “a unique off-kilter twist to the revisionist wild west”, mixing Chinese instruments such as the dizi, pipa and guqin with western sounds from steel string guitars and low Irish whistles and fiddles.

It’s some achievement, the story of the shadowy Chinese men and women who still hover over the history of the Australian gold rush. There’s little testimony left and subsequent histories only now are starting to give us some idea of how these people, fleeing poverty and famine, might have imagined their difficult lives in Australia. Little remains of Ballarat’s rich Chinese heritage, but a show as elaborately realised as this one give us a privileged insight into the violence, ritual, humour and social practice of their lives, and does so in the most entertaining of ways.

New Gold Mountain, Wednesday. 9.30pm, SBS.