'Tragic family circumstances force siblings Ying and Lai Yue to flee their home in China to seek their fortunes in North Queensland. Life on the gold fields is hard, and they soon abandon the diggings and head to nearby Maytown. Once there, Lai Yue finds a job as a carrier on expeditions, taking him far away from his sister. Ying remains in the township, where she works in a local store and strikes up an unlikely friendship with Meriem, a young white woman with a troubled past. Maytown is a place where violence frequently erupts and, when a serious crime is committed, suspicion falls on all those who are considered outsiders.
'Evoking the rich, unfolding tapestry of Australian life in the late nineteenth century, Stone Sky Gold Mountain is a heartbreaking and timeless story about those exiled from family and place who encounter discrimination yet yearn for acceptance.' (Publication summary)
Epigraph: To search for gold was like trying to catch the moon at the bottom of the sea. - TAAM SZE PUI
I wish to inform you that they are only strangers in this land themselves. Many of them have only been here a few moons, and none for more than one or two generations.
JAN CHIN FROM A LETTER TO HIS FATHER IN SHANGHAI, THE SIDNEY MORNING HERALD, 1858
'Readers know that the very act of reading can transport you away, well beyond the walls of your home. And with millions of Australians in lockdown, it's more important than ever to find a book that'll take your mind on an adventure.' (Introduction)
'Mirandi Riwoe’s second novel triumphantly recreates Australian history through Asian eyes.'
'Australian nationalism often promotes a history in which the colonisation of Aboriginal lands was somehow complete before the white patriot turned his attentions outwards to the threat of the non-white foreigner. It’s a deliberate trick.' (Introduction)
'The plot unfurls slowly in Mirandi Riwoe’s Stone Sky Gold Mountain, which opens in the Palmer River goldfields in early colonial Australia. Disguised as a man for her physical safety, Ying toils with her brother Lai Yue in the hope of procuring enough of a fortune to take back to China, but life on the fields is relentless. They soon realise that gold-digging is untenable, and head to nearby Maytown in search of more stable work. There, second-generation British settler Meriem has been banished from her home town after an unwanted pregnancy. Now a housekeeper for sex worker Sophie, she is shunned by the townsfolk. After Lai Yue leaves for an overland expedition and Ying begins working as a shopkeeper for local Chinese man Jimmy, Meriem’s and Ying’s paths converge. They embark on a friendship coloured by caution and curiosity, an archetypal interracial tale of differences as both protagonists awkwardly feel their way around each other.' (Introduction)
'In this multi-perspective novel, Mirandi Riwoe trains her piercing postcolonial gaze on Gold Rush-era Australia, lending richness to the lives of the Chinese settlers who are often mere footnotes in our history. Ying and Lai Yue are outsiders before their arrival in Far North Queensland, where they have gone to find their fortunes after their younger siblings are sold into slavery. While Ying struggles with hiding her gender in the male-dominated goldfields, Lai Yue is haunted by his betrothed, Shan – killed in a landslide back in China – and by his failure to protect the family from penury. Meanwhile, in nearby Maytown, a white woman, Meriem, grapples with her exile from respectable society while working as a maid to local sex worker Sophie.' (Introduction)
'Australian nationalism often promotes a history in which the colonisation of Aboriginal lands was somehow complete before the white patriot turned his attentions outwards to the threat of the non-white foreigner. It’s a deliberate trick.' (Introduction)
Mirandi Riwoe
Astrid Edwards
(interviewer),
2020
19326758
2020
single work
podcast
interview
'Mirandi Riwoe is the author of 2020's Stone Sky Gold Mountain, as well as the novella The Fish Girl, which won Seizure’s Viva la Novella V and was shortlisted for The Stella Prize and the Queensland Literary Award’s UQ Fiction Prize.
'Mirandi also publishes under the name M.J. Tjia, and she is the woman behind the Heloise Chancey historical crime series She Be Damned, A Necessary Murder and The Death of Me.
'Her work features in Best Australian Stories, Meanjin, Review of Australian Fiction, Griffith Reviewand Best Summer Stories.'
Source: The Garret.
'Readers know that the very act of reading can transport you away, well beyond the walls of your home. And with millions of Australians in lockdown, it's more important than ever to find a book that'll take your mind on an adventure.' (Introduction)
