Pickle Bottle Hill

<p>1974 and the Palmer River Goldfield is roaring. Chinese miners flood in indentured laborers working for a tong panning gold to honor a family debt. Their gold will go home to China. </p><p>Young Fou Yei a pretty Eurasian girl is in the service of brothel owner Miss Kate that is until George Colley steps in and buys her bond.</p><p> Fou Yei belongs to George until she can repay the debt and an uneasy relationship develops between the pair. </p><p>Together they mine George's successful claim on the Palmer until they are drawn into the politics of Chinese/ European tensions. </p><p>Fou Yei intervenes when a tong leader is being brutalized by a European miner. George intervenes but is knocked unconscious in the struggle and loses contact with Fou Yei.</p><p>He finds her in a Joss House where Chinese miners have taken the injured tong leader. George saves the man but wants no part of the Chinese community.</p><p>The brutality of the attack adds to George's determination to turn his back on the Palmer rush and to seek the source of its gold and keep that discovery secret.</p><p>Fou Yei and George begin a search which takes them to a spot sacred to the local aboriginal people. George discovers the reef the source of the gold and collets ore samples. he is confronted by three warriors who kill him.</p><p>Fou Yei flees finds her way back to the diggings and is cared for by the Chinese community. There she has George's baby and eventually returns to China a wealthy woman.</p><p>One hundred and twenty years later Chinese gold returns to Australia with the fabulously wealthy Ophelia Lau. </p><p>She vows to have the stories of Chinese humiliation on the goldfield like that of Fou Yei erased from the history books.</p><p> In modern Australia Chinese money talks and Ophelia sets out to find willing Australian allies.</p>