Eureka! Stories from the goldfields brought back to life
A new book of "ripping yarns" from the Australian goldfields of the mid-1800s has put the tumultuous times and tales surrounding the Eureka Stockade rebellion back into the popular imagination. The book has been curated by academics at The Australian National University (ANU) and draws on thousands of fictional stories published in newspapers at the time. The Eureka Stockade uprising of miners and prospectors against government forces in Ballarat, Victoria culminated on 3 December 1854. During this time newspapers, then the only form of mass communication, carried serialised fiction with a rich seam of tales from the diggings. These included repeated lucky gold strikes, adventure and mis-adventure, romance on the goldfields and the interaction of colonial white Australians, Indigenous Australians and Chinese and other migrants drawn by the lure of gold. ANU Associate Professor Katherine Bode and bibliographer Carol Hetherington used new digital computational methods to search the National Library of Australia's Trove database to uncover the tales. They found over 21,000 fictional stories published in Australian newspapers between 1828 and 1914.
