Accessibility Tools

  • Content scaling 100%
  • Font size 100%
  • Line height 100%
  • Letter spacing 100%

Sludge: Disaster on Victoria’s goldfields by Susan Lawrence and Peter Davies

by
October 2019, no. 415

Sludge: Disaster on Victoria’s goldfields by Susan Lawrence and Peter Davies

La Trobe University Press, $34.99 pb, 320 pp, 9781760641108

Sludge: Disaster on Victoria’s goldfields by Susan Lawrence and Peter Davies

by
October 2019, no. 415

Drive not too far inland from Melbourne in most directions, past thick bands of ordered suburbia, and you’ll reach bush localities that shiver on breezy days with the sound of gumleaves. At dusk, you might glimpse kangaroos slinking like grey ghosts through blocks of steep, rocky land. Despite this poetry, these bushland escapes represent nature in a third life – a scenic recovery from an industry that left behind a pock-marked, sliced-up, hosed-down moonscape.

Damage is the twin of the lustre of the Victorian gold rush that surged from 1851 and turned this small wedge of south-eastern Australia from a pastoral economy founded on the dispossession of Aboriginal Traditional Owners into a mining stronghold. ‘Two per cent of all the gold ever mined in the world has come from Victoria,’ declare La Trobe University’s Susan Lawrence and Peter Davies. Yet, as they show in Sludge: Disaster on Victoria’s goldfields, such riches cost the newly minted Colony of Victoria a relentless slurry of mining waste that travelled far from its source to distant locations.

Historians have previously noted the environmental toll of the gold rushes, but Lawrence and Davies combine archaeology, archival research, digital-mapping technologies and aerial-imaging systems (LiDAR) to build a timely case study that guides us through both mangled bushland and the long political stoush between aggrieved land users and an industry deemed economically indispensable. The battle at times seems starkly contemporary.

Alexandra Roginski reviews 'Sludge: Disaster on Victoria’s goldfields' by Susan Lawrence and Peter Davies

Sludge: Disaster on Victoria’s goldfields

by Susan Lawrence and Peter Davies

La Trobe University Press, $34.99 pb, 320 pp, 9781760641108

You May Also Like

Leave a comment

If you are an ABR subscriber, you will need to sign in to post a comment.

If you have forgotten your sign in details, or if you receive an error message when trying to submit your comment, please email your comment (and the name of the article to which it relates) to ABR Comments. We will review your comment and, subject to approval, we will post it under your name.

Please note that all comments must be approved by ABR and comply with our Terms & Conditions.