The Miner's Right

By Rolf Boldrewood

The Miner's Right, as 'A Tale of the Australian Goldfields', is the counterpart of Boldrewood's bushranging classic . Written out of the author's immediate experience as Goldfields Commissioner at Gulgong in the 1870s, it also casts back to the Chinese riots at Lambing Flat, to the robbery of the gold-escort at Eugowra, and to some aspects of the Eureka stockade. While these events are set in the romantic framework of the nineteenth-century novel, the democratic sentiment of the time is reflected to a greater degree than Boldrewood himself could have realised. The Miner's Right is both an example of the colonial romance, and an account 'from the life' of conditions on the Australian goldfields in a time of social and political change.

Macmillan, 1890, 397 pages