ISBN to come
, written by Peter Macinnis, published by
in Australia, released
This is a place holder for later detail.
Find it on Amazon
For information from the publisher, to come
This book is written for adults, and the main strengths are social history, explained in terms of the technology and science of the eras visited.
Chapter headings (open to revision past chapter 7)
An unusual metal: gold's odd properties;
The early gold finders: who came before Hargraves;
Prelude to a rush: some social history, looking at how a rush is managed and manipulated;
Rush!: what goes on in the wild confusion;
Moving along: what kept people heading from one rush to the next;
Routes and attractions: How they got there, what made them choose;
Winning gold by fair means: working as a digger, methods, tricks, procedures;
Winning gold fairly without digging: the traders, the blacksmiths, the others who both supported and profited;
Winning gold by other means: the alchemists, the con men, the mine salters;
Staying alive: disease, health, nutrition, injuries and rescues;
Law and order: the bushrangers, the tent-slitters, licences, race relations and daily life;
Rough justice: filling the mouth with molten gold, lynch law and other fun;
The down side of gold mining: slavery, cultural harm, genocide, labor shortages, wage and price hikes;
Ruination: sluicing in Spain, California, Australia, sludge commissions, ghost towns and more;
A peroration of sorts: TBA
Progress report, August 2012
As sometimes happens, the ms turned sullen and nasty, because the story line was sloppy. I completed the draft and went ugh! On the side, I have been planning a series of histories for young readers, and I decided gold would be a good topic there. So I took the material I had, and picked the eyes out of it to produce a 30,000-word book called Rushing for Gold (working title). It uses the same research material, but is an entirely different book. I like it! There are a few doubts: at the moment, there are 304 source footnotes which probably have no place in a book for this age, so I will probably lift those out and create a companion web page. I really do want young readers to have the option of checking my quotes and looking for the context or reading more. That said, it works really well.
So I have decided to go back and look critically at the other material I had, either in the complete Hunger for Gold ms of 70,000 words, or in the base research material (>250,000 words), and while keeping the story line that works, produce a more detailed and complex work for older readers, by bolting back on some of the discards, like the material on the "alchemists" and their fraudulent tricks.
This file is http://members.ozemail.com.au/~macinnis/writing/gold.htm
It was created on January 1, 2012,
revised 22 February 2012, when the first draft was about 60% complete. On March 30, the first draft was complete, but there will be a load of thinking going on in the next few months, so I won't revise the chapter list just yet. Last revised August 20, 2012.
If you email me at macinnis at ozemail.com.au, you will reach a spam trap, but be read, eventually. If you put my first name in front of that address, you will reach me direct. This low-tech solution is to make email harvesting difficult.