Forgotten histories and lost objects of Australia: this is a five-star title for a three-star book of essays. Several of the essays are slight and pedestrian, and overall the subject of gold gets a patchy treatment; the contributors write about their specialties and we are not given much help to reach a new understanding of the whole phenomenon. But there is much that is interesting here; and some of the material is arresting. The editors have fulfilled their modest intention – ‘to illustrate, amplify, complicate or update’ well-traversed themes.

Only one essay, the first, deals broadly with the history of gold in Australia. Among several stimulating suggestions, David Goodman points out how quickly social order was re-established after the initial turmoil of the first rushes. Conservatives were worried about the collapse of deference and the hierarchy of ranks, but the capitalist market soon reimposed its discipline. The gold-miners, too, looked on mining as a means to an end, in particular the acquisition of land, not as a permanent life. ‘It was only in late nineteenth-century nostalgia for the “roaring days” that the passing of gold-rush conditions became a matter for lament.’