Reclaiming Hill End.(Book Review)

Hill End: An Historic Australian Goldfields Landscape, by Alan Mayne; Melbourne University Press, 2003, $34.95.

THE 1940S AND 1950S saw a renewed interest in some of the founding myths of Australian culture. The early novels of Patrick White, the explorer poetry of Francis Webb and the paintings of Sidney Nolan and Russell Drysdale represented a renaissance in Australia's cultural life. The heroism and apparent futility of man's struggle against a harsh environment, resilience and humour in the face of extreme adversity, and the egalitarian ethos that developed out of experiences on the goldfields and pastoral frontier, had been central concerns for the Bulletin school of writers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The artistic developments of the mid-twentieth century represented a re-appropriation of such themes, albeit infused with the more sophisticated and ironic aesthetic modernism, evoking Australian landscapes and the experience of those who inhabited them in a way unprecedented in Australian art.

Alan Mayne's new book, Hill End." An Historic Australian Goldfields Landscape, makes a significant contribution to our understanding of national history. Yet it is not so much a contribution to the grand narratives of settlement, exploration and the political dynamics of governance, but an analysis of a specific region in the context of broader historical trends. And one of the most important topics of the book is the role that Hill End played in the cultural resurgence of the mid-twentieth century.

Hill End, about 200 kilometres west of Sydney, had a population of 80,000 during the gold rush era, but now can only boast approximately a hundred residents. The town captured the interest of Drysdale and Donald Friend during the 1940s and 1950s. As Friend wrote in his diary, during August of 1947 he and Drysdale drove from Sydney to the tablelands beyond Bathurst in search of "deserted ghost towns left empty by the gold rush". What they found were people seemingly unaware of a world beyond their own communities, a town inhabited by "a handful of rather sordid, jovial mad peasants who live by fossicking and rabbiting".

For Drysdale and Friend, Hill End became a cultural time capsule. Yet the community not only represented a living link with Australia's past and the economic boom of the gold rush era. It also possessed an elegiac charm that resonated with the artistic sense of lost simplicity, and the accompanying desire to escape the complexities of the nation's emerging metropolitan centres. Hill End was the colonial equivalent of a European ruin or abandoned village, and it became the focus of meditations on temporality and cultural change similar to that evident in the gothic and picturesque aesthetic of the Romantics.

The encounter with the region resulted in Drysdale's Golden Gully (1949) and Friend's Hill End Landscape (1951), which according to Mayne evoke "the desolation of Hill End's mine-scoured landscape". In this sense the emphasis on negativity and social decay echoes the reactionary strain of the Romantics, for whom the relics of the past became the objects of a nostalgic longing for simpler times.

MARNE'S BOOK is not only informative because of his discussion of the significance of Hill End in Australian cultural life. His historiographical approach offers a critique of the ways in which we construct history and what perspectives and experiences are excluded from our accounts. Since 1967 Hill End has been managed by the New South Wales National Parks and Wildlife Service, primarily because of its importance as a cultural heritage asset. Yet this reconstruction of the town's history has been underpinned by a number of approaches to the past, many of which Mayne suggests possess neither faithfulness to fact nor the methodology of genuine historical enquiry.