A murder mystery unearths the untold story of Chinese miners in the Australian gold rush.
In the 1850s Australian gold rush, Europeans, Americans and Chinese all race to make their fortunes. Wei Shing, the charming and diplomatic headman of the Chinese camp, keeps a thousand diggers organised — while quietly enriching himself.
Everything shifts when a murdered European woman is found, her death seemingly linked to the Chinese camp. With tensions already high, Shing knows that blame falling on the Chinese could prove catastrophic.
As he scrambles to hide the connection and uncover the truth, Shing is drawn into a web of secrets involving a widowed newspaper owner, a young Indigenous tracker, and forces determined to seize control.
A police raid opens the series, and the detail that matters comes before any violence. Sergeant Harkin has arrived a day earlier than agreed. Someone points this out. He answers with a coarse joke about what the word "raid" is supposed to mean.
The agreement was real, and so was the assumption that it would be honoured. That is where the Chinese miners of the Victorian goldfields stood in 1857: inside the system far enough to have arrangements with it, outside it far enough that the arrangements meant nothing the moment they were inconvenient.
The series is a murder mystery and uses that shape well, though its real subject is the gold rush that Australian history has largely told without these people in it. Leung Wei Shing, headman of the Chinese camp, is at the centre of it. He negotiates with the authorities. He keeps his own community in order. Neither side trusts him completely. When a white woman is found dead, his position becomes untenable in both directions at once.
The series refuses to make Shing a straightforwardly sympathetic figure. He runs an opium tent, he manages people, and he makes calculations about who can be protected and who cannot, then lives with the results. A man who survives between two powers by being useful to both cannot afford to be innocent, and the part is written that way because the job was.
Around him the camp is drying out. The good claims have been taken and the seams are failing, and men are leaving: four tents in a morning, sixteen more gone after that. The economic pressure runs underneath the whole story and explains a great deal of what people turn out to be prepared to do.
The production makes one choice that changes everything. A large part of the dialogue is in Cantonese, subtitled, spoken between characters who have no reason to speak English to each other. The effect is immediate. The story is happening among these people rather than around them, and the English-speaking world is what occasionally intrudes on it.
Corrie Chen directed it and Peter Cox created it, and it belongs to a recent strand of Australian drama willing to look at the nineteenth century from an angle other than the settler one. The gold rush drew people from southern China in enormous numbers, and the name of the series is what they called Australia. Very little popular drama has been made about them.
Four episodes, and it repays watching the negotiations more closely than the mystery.