New Gold Mountain is part of that restoration and revival. Directed by Corrie Chen (Homecoming Queens) and with writers such as Benjamin Law, the ambitious four-part miniseries presents a revisionist view of 1857 Ballarat through the eyes of the Chinese miners. It centres and examines the experiences of the ‘other’ during one of the country’s richest historical periods – and the first major wave of Chinese migration to Australia. 

The series straddles different genres: western, period drama, murder mystery. It contains many narrative arcs, but it is a slow burn – the pace only picks up from the third episode onwards. Until then, much of the plot is gleaned through conversations rather than action. Patient viewers will be rewarded, as each thread is unspooled, with controlled narrative tension, to reveal confronting truths about the characters and their societies.

The ensemble cast is led by Yoson An as anti-hero Leung Wei Shing, the headman of the Chinese mining camp. Resourceful and cunning, he skims profits for himself and his brother, Sun (Sam Wang), unbeknown to the Brotherhood, the overseas syndicate overseeing the whole affair. But when Cheung Lei (Mabel Li), daughter of a Brotherhood boss, arrives to investigate Shing’s operation, things get a little thorny. Hattie (Leonie Whyman), a young Indigenous tracker, is processing family trauma. Belle Roberts (Alyssa Sutherland), the widow of a newspaper proprietor, has revived the press and approaches Shing to set up a Chinese-language section. Tensions peak when the body of a white woman, wearing traditional Chinese clothing, is found. The Chinese and Indigenous residents of the town fear that they will be blamed. Belle and Shing become unlikely comrades in a search for the truth, though he is also aware of the danger his people are in.

Alyssa Sutherland as Belle Roberts and Yoson An as Wei Shing in New Gold Mountain (photograph via SBS On Demand)

Shing is a beguiling, morally ambiguous figure – his multitudinous character is emphasised through An’s carefully controlled acting and expressions, never giving too much away. Well-educated and multilingual, Shing is the bridge between worlds – he code-switches easily, speaking Chinese to his fellow miners and note-perfect English to the white Australians. ‘You say he talks,’ a white theatre-goer says when Belle and Shing attend a show together – he is held up as a spectacle, an oddity. Yet it is this Westernisation that allows him to be respected at all in white society. This duality is something that continues to be experienced by Asian people in Western society today; it’s fascinating to see this transmuted to an older time period, and sad to think about how little has changed. 

Racism is a recurring theme in New Gold Mountain, though the show’s clever writing subverts Australian television norms by making the Chinese characters more complex, and many of the white characters broad and indistinguishable. The heat is turned up further when it is revealed that the dead woman, Annie Thomas, was having an affair with Sun and had fallen pregnant. One of the series’ main villains, Dr Grayson (David Woods), is the only person who knows about this, as Annie had approached him for abortion advice. Here’s where it all falls down a little: one memorable shot of Shing sees him sitting in front of saloon-style posters advertising talks by Dr Grayson, one of which is titled ‘Eugenics: Are You Fit to Marry?’ But the term ‘eugenics’ was not coined until 1883, and Are You Fit to Marry?, a silent film about the topic, wasn’t released until 1917. Though the idea of prejudice isn’t new and was certainly an issue at the time, small inaccuracies like this break the spell, reminding the viewer that modern concerns and agendas can make their way into scripts in a way that doesn’t reflect the era. 

Visually, New Gold Mountain is beautiful, showing off the breadth and richness of the Australian landscape. The costumes, by Cappi Ireland (The Dry), expertly combine Eastern and Western elements; the sight of An in a wide-brimmed Akubra is one of the show’s most striking visuals. There are some beautiful cinematic moments, too, such as a chaotic theatre performance, in which a woman makes herself orgasm much to the horror of sophisticated spectators, juxtaposed with an equally spirited scuffle between the racial groups outside. All of this is accompanied by Caitlin Yeo’s swelling score, with music that marries the spheres expertly. 

Though New Gold Mountain ostensibly revolves around the mystery of the white woman’s death, the plot is only a springboard to explore control, greed, and race relations in a time of social unrest and upheaval. Further focus on the Indigenous characters might have provided more insight, but this unique series is a welcome change of pace in Australian television, providing a much-needed alternative perspective to this slice of colonial history. 

New Gold Mountain is streaming on SBS On Demand.