11 - The National Trilogy and Mining

Summary

The national epic takes very different forms across different cultural and historical contexts. At the beginning of twentieth-century Australian literary history stands the tragic narrative of a failed individual, in Henry Handel Richardson’s trilogy The Fortunes of Richard Mahony (1917, 1925, 1929). In the mid-twentieth century, large-scale fictional narratives, also in the form of trilogies, were used by some realist writers to write epics of settlement. In the case of Eleanor Dark’s The Timeless Land trilogy (1941–53) the narrative is about the catastrophic contact between Aboriginal people and the invading white settlers, and the subsequent beginning of expansion across the continent. Written at the same period, however, are two trilogies of nation-founding that, like Richardson’s, are centred on later mining history: Katharine Susannah Prichard’s goldfields trilogy (The Roaring Nineties, 1946; Golden Miles, 1948; Winged Seeds, 1950) and Vance Palmer’s overlapping Golconda trilogy, begun at the same time as his national mythography, The Legend of the Nineties (Golconda, 1948; Seedtime, 1957; The Big Fellow, 1959). These trilogies are shaped by the history of mineral extraction in Australian-settler political, environmental and economic history. This chapter analyses the under-recognised meaning of mining in narratives of settlement and nation.