The early days after the discovery of gold at Rocky River in northern New South Wales would see potential miners of all creeds, whether labourers or more 'cultured' folk, lured to this golden landscape or ours by the 'fever of gold' and by the possibility of making a quick fortune here. The obvious diversity in the character of this fluid population could and did result in confrontations - here as elsewhere - on many occasions, leading often to more violent altercations by day and night. It is not surprising therefore for this environment to encourage rogues and villains to be part of 'our' mining scene. This book is an interlinked companion to both the work and living style of that populace, and to Victorian age gold mining generally. For it tells us much about the skills, technical processes, thoughts, actions and language of those same miners, and many others 'on the fields' in Eastern Australia, as known, observed and written about by one of the nation's most famed colonial novelists.

This work is one concerned to both explore and to give a clearer idea of the surviving evidence and related landscape records of the nineteenth century Rocky River goldfield in Northern New South Wales, but - first - to present material of a like more general matter, and one fascinating to all Australians and travellers, namely its once magistrate's full, indeed rich, texture of the related technical and social language used on all the major fields of auriferous mining as practised in this country in the nineteenth century. To avoid the excessively technical, we have focused on the numerous gold mining and fictionally plotted - yet hugely readable and colourful - texts by the same magistrate, the long Australia-domiciled and prolific novelist, Rolf Boldrewood (1826-1915), who, towards the end of his Mining Warden career, served briefly on these very New England goldfields, while in his late official career posting in 1884-1885 to the roles of Commissioner and Resident Magistrate in the adjacent Armidale, in northern New South Wales. As will be made clear below, his powerful text, 'The Miner's Right', is one penned not long before he came west to the Uralla field, and he would certainly have had various of its minimally fictionalized squabbles, claim contesting, and even racism - and worse - very clearly in mind.