Recently I have been sorting through photographs taken over 40 years or so in the vicinity of my home village, Sutton, NSW, Australia: a place which almost never was and the historical remains of which are ephemeral. As Canberra, the national capital, creeps ever closer to our rural backwater, many of the traces have disappeared within my own lifetime.
Gold has played a great part in Australian historical consciousness. The gold rushes caused towns and cities to develop, fortunes to be made, or not, and political changes to occur. Desperate and largely unsuccessful searches for gold also occurred in hardscrabble places, especially when things were not going so well on the land. Thus it was in Sutton, a place which was virtually non-existent for most of the 19th century, but was just a bunch of farms.
Along Mac's Reef road were once to be seen the remains of a few shafts, but nothing else really. A reef it wasn't. My kids, now in their forties, went on the odd primary school trip to learn about the olden days hereabouts, but hardly anybody knew they were there.
Since the land around there has been divided up into rural commuter blocks with new elegant houses, I don't know what has happened to these.
A little further away was another ephemeral goldfield, Bywong town. Founded in 1895 long after the crazy mad gold rushes of richer fields, it got as far as having some streets laid out and some buildings put up in pioneering style, but its existence was also shortlived. They found some gold there but nobody got rich and they all went back to raising sheep and the like. This was also a place of a few abandoned relics.
As well as holes there were a few remains of above ground machinery at the pit heads.
There was also a gold stamper and a couple of traction engines which had been removed from the site and installed in the grounds of Sutton Primary School for the edification of the pupils and to preserve them from vandalistic damage.
The merest relics of habitations remained on the site, apparently cobbled together from assortments of stones, slabs, pise, iron sheeting and whatever else could be scratched together locally. Much of this was seriously battered and gone by the 1970s.
Some time in the 1980s the site was opened as a heritage attraction, mainly aimed at school children, but with weekend tours for the general public. The miners' habitations and buildings of the town were constructed in authentic looking style, no doubt based on the more elaborate heritage gold sites like Sovereign Hill in Ballarat or Hill End in New South Wales. The gold stamper and traction engines were returned from the school and assorted old stuff accumulated for theatrical effect. My older son worked as a weekend tour guide there while at university around 1990.
So it was part historical site, of a very insignificant piece of history; no Eureka Stockade events here, no world famous nuggets unearthed. Just a few hungry farm workers trying to scratch a few bob out of the ground. It was also a heritage reconstruction of things that had never been there, but were probably like things that were there. It did serve a useful educational purpose, showing young folks just what tough rural life was like in the days of their ancestors.
OK, they probably didn't use kids to work the bush made windlass back in the mining days. They would have used a horse. I presume.
It was never hugely popular as an attraction, somewhat overshadowed by the tourist delights of Canberra, and closed down some years ago. In 2015 the whole place was put up for sale. As far as I can ascertain, it is still for sale. Apparently nobody wants a run down old heritage attraction that would cost vast amounts to get it functional again, and it seems nobody wants to live in a site that is part genuine history, part modern reconstruction. The other properties in the area house horse studs, alpaca farms, vineyards and modern rural mansions - all the modernities of rural suburbia near a major city.
It all leads to wondering how you do preserve a sense of the past for younger generations, while still living in the ever changing present. So many little two room huts made from slabs, mud or sheets of iron have disappeared from around here. Only the most gracious homesteads survive, much modernised for habitability. Schools, pubs, post offices, rustic churches have all disappeared. That's what happens everywhere, I guess. Those beautiful old stone English churches with the angels in the architecture are the aberrations, not the norm.
