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Giselle AuNhien Nguyen

New Gold Mountain 

SBS On Demand
by
09 November 2021

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.’

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The proliferation of trauma writing in the past few years is a double-edged sword. While giving public voice to subjects once relegated to the dark lessens stigma and creates agency, there is almost an expectation for women writers to reveal or perform their trauma, as well as a risk of exploitation and retraumatisation.

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Go to any suburban shopping centre and you will find a metropolis of consumption. ‘Buy, buy, buy’, it screeches, whether you are contemplating fast-fashion T-shirts, new-age solutions to age-old problems, or services and pampering you don’t really need, all in the harsh glare of white lights and a controlled climate, temperature just right. The shopping centre, uniform and tidy, is where you can get everything you’ve ever wanted while also getting nothing at all.

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