I started this work because the record kept forgetting to mention the women.
I did not set out to write about the goldfields. I set out to find one name in a parish register, for a project that had nothing to do with fiction, and kept finding the same shape of absence: a man recorded by trade, occupation and claim number, and the woman beside him recorded, if she was recorded at all, as “wife of” or not recorded at all.
That absence became the work. I read ledgers the way other people read novels — slowly, and for the gaps as much as the entries — and I have come to think the gaps are where the interesting people were standing.
The work now sits in three places. I write novels built from the archive. I speak, mostly to libraries, schools and history societies, about how to find the people the record left out. And I keep building the teachers’ notes and reading lists that let the research travel past the page.
I am not trying to correct the record so much as widen it — the diggers and the assayers still belong in the story, they just do not need to be the only people in it.
I work mostly from old newspaper archives, parish registers and a very large stack of index cards.
- Regular speaker, local history-society talk series (fictional)
- Author of a teachers’ notes pack used in secondary history classes (fictional)
- Researcher working primarily from parish registers and assay-office ledgers
- Four published novels set on the Victorian goldfields
- Talks delivered to libraries, schools and history societies