Our land of adoption: seeking home in a gold rush landscape

Abstract

This article investigates the relationship between domesticity and colonisation on the Victorian goldfields. Emigrants to mid-nineteenth-century gold rush Victoria often sought to recreate the comforts of home within an unfamiliar landscape, with the intention of adopting the land as their own. By drawing on memories of home to make the unknown familiar, gold rush settlers attempted to produce stability and comfort in the shifting gold rush landscape. This process often started, however, with mostly male emigrants co-opting local Indigenous techniques for making home. This article argues that many gold rush settlers arrived on the goldfields seeking home as well as gold, and, as a consequence, enacted domesticity and domestication in ways that solidified dispossession and colonisation.