Mirandi Riwoe is the award winning author of the Fish Girl, which took out Seizure’s Vive la Novella award as well as a short listing for the Stella Prize. Mirandi also writes Victorian era detective fiction under a nom de plume and she has a new novel out called Stone Sky Gold Mountain.

Now novels come to us in strange ways and sometimes a novel just finds its time. There is so much about Stone Sky Gold Mountain to discover and I think the humanity and the fact that it is a novel about outsiders and the way we, as a nation, have treated people outside the mainstream has some things for our current time.

Stone Sky Gold Mountain transports the reader to the Queensland gold fields of the mid nineteenth century. Siblings Ying and Lai Yue have left their homes in China and travelled to Australia to seek enough money to restore their family.

Ying must disguise herself, passing as a boy, lest her gender see her taken advantage of and brutalised. As a male she discovers freedoms but also sees the restrictions she lives under.

When the pair realise they cannot survive on mere gold dust they move to Maytown; the settlement established to furnish the goldfields.

In Maytown, Meriam and Sophie live on the outskirts. Meriam longs for her old life and bristles at the town’s treatment of her as the maid of a sex worker.

Stone Sky Gold Mountain is separated from us by a century and a half but it is immediately apparent that our present has not diverged so far. Ying and Lai Yue’s story highlights a long history of racism against Asian and specifically Chinese Australians that we still see rising up indiscrimatorily in response to Covid 19. It’s a racist response that seems all the more strange when we consider that Stone Sky shows us English and Chinese migration to Australia is not so separate in time and a mere speck in the thousands of years of history of the traditional owners of this land.

The book is lyrical and heartbreaking. As we move through terrain that is beautiful and beautifully wrought and see it through the eyes of those who must endure it as their lives are an endurance at the hands of the men who control so much of daily existence.

As I said books find you at strange times. Stone Sky Gold Mountain has arrived at a time when we cannot go outside to transport us in time and space and show us a beauty and land that has been marked with brutality. So at a time when we are seeing the best and worst of people, Stone Sky shows us something of both and perhaps offers us a chance to be better.