Gold Rush Societies and Migrant Networks in the Tasman World by Daniel Davy (review)

THIS IS A NEW STUDY of the Otago gold rushes. It responds to Erik Olssen’s 1987 call for future scholarship to account for the Victorian foundations of the rushes, meaning the Australian colony of Victoria. Daniel Davy contrasts his approach with previous work that positioned the gold rushes as a New Zealand story or, perhaps more commonly, as a footnote to that story. Accordingly, he threads throughout a critique of studies that have been concerned to reveal something fundamental about colonial New Zealand – whether understood as its transient individualism, its foundational, egalitarian masculine culture, or its lawlessness and licence. Davy interrogates and qualifies such claims, but his larger goal is to position gold rush history differently, for assessing these episodes for their national significance is ‘the least useful context for understanding gold rush cultures and societies’ (p.6).

This is an important contribution to Tasman World history, which, as Davy recognizes, is still less developed for the second half of the nineteenth century when compared to the decades that preceded or followed. The Tasman World – here, principally Victoria and Otago and the crossings between them – is further situated within transnational frames, connected to Britain, Ireland and China and their respective diaspora. Gold Rush Societies might be read productively alongside the 2018 collection, A Global History of Gold Rushes. Both the foreword to that volume and the series editors’ foreword to Davy’s book draw attention to a multiscalar approach – a sensitivity to the local and the transnational – as a particular strength in a new wave of gold rush historiography.

Across six chapters, Davy explores migrations, place and environment, work cultures and settler memory and commemoration to show how men confronted and adjusted to their new circumstances in Otago as they continued to nurture trans-local bonds. Letters, newspapers and forms of entertainment sustained them. Letters are perhaps not the first association with gold rush societies, yet almost 300,000 were sent from Otago to the United Kingdom between 1861 and 1864. By centring chains of correspondence between far-flung family and friends, Davy offers rich insights into motivations, aspirations and daily struggles. A compelling body of first-hand accounts leads us to also imagine the communicative power of letters not written and hoped-for-replies never received, especially those containing remittances. As one Chinese miner explained, ‘if you wrote me wanting money and I had none to send, I would not reply’ (p.183). For some miners that could hold true for years.

While enlivened (or not) through networks of paper, gold rushes, as Davy speculates, were more grounded in natural environments than any other activity in the nineteenth century. He skilfully renders Central Otago landscapes, watercourses and weather in evocative, vivid prose, and shows how such environments influenced the ways in which men related to each other. These locations could also bring miners close to the edge, struggling to sleep in the damp and cold, fending off rats the size of cats, succumbing in snowdrifts or watching from riverbanks as decaying corpses drifted past. The battle for comfort punctuated letters more readily than accounts of paydirt. Indeed, gold itself tends somewhat to recede. We learn of its formation over millions of years, are told that it ‘laid dormant’ for centuries, and that men newly coveted it ‘because their society valued it as money’ (p.97), ‘their society told them it was valuable’ (p.107). Wrapping gold in such mystique risks leaving implicit the broader political and economic forces that drove contingent notions of value at this historical juncture.

To return to the Victorian dimension, while 90% of miners in Otago arrived directly from the Australian colony, the common curtain-raiser reference – ‘they came from there’ – does not fully account for Victoria’s significance. Davy develops these connections, showing that miners assessed their circumstances in Otago based on their prior experiences in Victoria, applied knowledge from those environments to their work and that many...