SBS On Demand

At a pivotal moment in the new SBS miniseries The Australian Wars, director and presenter Rachel Perkins takes us to a place she says is ‘etched in the memory of my family. A place called Blackfellas Bones.’ Perkins turns to talk directly to camera: ‘You know, we turn away from things that we don’t want to see. We all do it. And I admit that I actually didn’t really want to make this documentary series because I knew that I’d have to spend years going through the horror of it. But … making this film has led me to this place … a place where many members of my family were killed. But my great grandmother survived to tell the story.’

Prior to watching New Gold Mountain, the only account I had come across of the gold rush of the 1850s from a non-white perspective was in Monica Tan’s memoir, Stranger Country (2019). On a six-month road trip around Australia, Tan met Eddie Ah Toy, an elderly, fifth-generation Chinese-Australian man whose ancestors came to Australia to work on the goldfields. Recently for SBS, Tan wrote, ‘I belong to a new wave of Chinese-Australian creatives who are patiently sifting through the footnotes of Australian history and carrying on the restoration and revival work of those that came before us. Only time will tell if our work repositions the experiences of our community as central to Australia’s origin story.’