Stone Sky Gold Mountain

"Yes, this is set in Queensland— The Sun Walks Down is in South Australia. Queensland has more of a tropical heat than the dry of South Australia. This book is told from the point of view of Ying and Lai Yue, two Chinese siblings. Ling is the sister, who is disguised as a boy. They’ve come to the gold fields of the Palmer River to seek their fortune. Their family is struggling with gambling debts back home in China and the two youngest children have been sold to help pay off these debts. That’s the driving force of their purpose there. There’s a third character, Meriem, who is the servant of the town sex worker and an outcast, so all three of them are maligned by white society. It’s a very, very intense and complicated world that it gives us a look into. I think it’s the complication that draws me to this book, and the sense of precariousness, and peril. The very fact of Ying disguising herself as a boy puts her at risk of discovery. Then there’s the romantic bond she forms with Meriem, which is tender and lovely, is also deeply perilous, even if her true sex is undiscovered—she’s apparently a Chinese boy getting close to a white girl. The Chinese are certainly oppressed, but then the white people and Chinese people are united in their brutalism of Aboriginal people. One of the novel’s epigraphs quotes a Chinese man who wrote to his father in 1858, saying, of white people, ‘I wish to inform you that they are only strangers in this land themselves.’ For me, I’m not drawn so much drawn to the place as to the story. For me, the place serves the story. But in The Sun Walks Down the place feels so, so present. You’re right about the diversity of the country. I live in rural Tasmania which is like another country from some of these other locations. Yes, exactly. Although as Australia moved towards federation, that white supremacy reared its head bureaucratically again. They instituted something called the ‘ White Australia’ policy , which is what it sounds like. It was an immigration policy trying to engineer a white Australia. I think because of that, maybe our national myths haven’t dealt with the true diversity of Australia, now and historically as well."