AustLit

'The plot unfurls slowly in Mirandi Riwoe’s Stone Sky Gold Mountain, which opens in the Palmer River goldfields in early colonial Australia. Disguised as a man for her physical safety, Ying toils with her brother Lai Yue in the hope of procuring enough of a fortune to take back to China, but life on the fields is relentless. They soon realise that gold-digging is untenable, and head to nearby Maytown in search of more stable work. There, second-generation British settler Meriem has been banished from her home town after an unwanted pregnancy. Now a housekeeper for sex worker Sophie, she is shunned by the townsfolk. After Lai Yue leaves for an overland expedition and Ying begins working as a shopkeeper for local Chinese man Jimmy, Meriem’s and Ying’s paths converge. They embark on a friendship coloured by caution and curiosity, an archetypal interracial tale of differences as both protagonists awkwardly feel their way around each other.' (Introduction)

'In this multi-perspective novel, Mirandi Riwoe trains her piercing postcolonial gaze on Gold Rush-era Australia, lending richness to the lives of the Chinese settlers who are often mere footnotes in our history. Ying and Lai Yue are outsiders before their arrival in Far North Queensland, where they have gone to find their fortunes after their younger siblings are sold into slavery. While Ying struggles with hiding her gender in the male-dominated goldfields, Lai Yue is haunted by his betrothed, Shan – killed in a landslide back in China – and by his failure to protect the family from penury. Meanwhile, in nearby Maytown, a white woman, Meriem, grapples with her exile from respectable society while working as a maid to local sex worker Sophie.' (Introduction)

'Australian nationalism often promotes a history in which the colonisation of Aboriginal lands was somehow complete before the white patriot turned his attentions outwards to the threat of the non-white foreigner. It’s a deliberate trick.' (Introduction)