An Oak on Maiden Hill

From the eve of the Eureka insurrection to the beginnings of depression this work charts the creation of a civilization but it is also as much about the symbolism of place the politics of streetscapes the social economy of house-plots their gardens the everyday artifacts that make a home in a sense of duration - time - that gives an ephemeral existence a history. It is about the ideas that permeate a culture; thoughts half conceived or formed but not acknowledged; it is about the history assumed and consumed about avarice and endeavour kindness and cruelty; about the claimed gods and those rejected and is therefore about a spiritual domain and the nature of rationality: as much about the metaphysics then as of the non-too-solid earth under the feet and above the heads of those who lived on a 19th Century goldfield.