SBS On Demand: New Gold Mountain
Who and what to look out for in New Gold Mountain
Leung Wei Shing, played by Yoson An.
SBS’s wild western - set in the Australian goldfields of the mid 1800s - is complex, brutal and racially charged. Here’s your cheat sheet.
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About this contentWed 13 Oct 2021 08.54 AEDT
Australia’s gold rush was a multilingual melting pot of cultural diversity – but a period of racial harmony it was not.
The continent’s immigrant population more than doubled in the decade after February 1851, when a prospector first plucked gold flecks from a Bathurst waterhole. By 1852, more than 500,000 feverish miners – from as far afield as Britain, Ireland, China, eastern Europe and the Americas – had flocked to the world’s richest alluvial goldfields. Their centrepiece? The newly sprawling Victorian boomtown of Ballarat, where life was cheap, grog was cheaper, and desperation could cost you everything.
All of which makes the period the perfect backdrop for a Downunder Deadwood. A murder mystery set against an often overlooked historical backdrop of racial tensions and search for elusive riches, SBS’s new four-part series, New Gold Mountain, combines Hollywood gloss with grittier, more intimate, colonial complexities.
New Gold Mountain will redefine our perception of frontier Australia.Corrie Chen, director
“As an immigrant and non-European settler, I am particularly excited to be directing a show that will finally let me put Chinese-Australian cowboys on screen and revise the canon of the classic western.”
“[It’s] the seminal immigration story that will redefine our perception of frontier Australia,” says director Corrie Chen, whose previous work includes Wentworth. “As an immigrant and non-European settler, I am particularly excited to be directing a show that will finally let me put Chinese-Australian cowboys on screen and revise the canon of the classic western.”
Here’s who – and what – to look out for.
The headman: Leung Wei Shing (Yoson An)
New Gold Mountain’s mining camps are racially segregated. This is a nod to the division between Chinese and European diggers that occurred following the deadly Lambing Flat Riots of 1861, when a mob of white diggers attacked groups of Chinese miners. As headman of the Chinese, Shing’s job is to keep the peace – however he can – and allow taxes to flow to the British.
Ethically ambivalent, perhaps redeemable (or not), he is on a personal crusade to secretly enrich himself, and his brother, Sun, by skimming the profits. A killer, charmer and pragmatist, Shing is the core of the four-part series, and his discovery of a butchered white woman in Chinese dress is the tinder for an inevitable conflagration. “What do you think will happen,” he says, “if gweilo [whites] find a murdered white woman in Chinese clothes?” Hint: it’s a lot.
The reporter: Belle Roberts (Alyssa Sutherland)
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Recently widowed and facing bankruptcy, Belle seeks to make a go of the printing press left to her by her husband.
Belle Roberts played by Alyssa Sutherland.
Cleverly identifying a gap in the market for a Chinese language newspaper, she grows closer to the often-vilified Chinese miners. But her investigations into the dead woman are as inflammatory – and occasionally flawed – as they are perceptive.
The widower: Patrick Thomas (Christopher James Baker)
Patrick is a man with a past; a sort of pre-psychology bundle of PTSD, angst, and flashbacks so harrowing they’d make anyone feel like spending life in a hole hitting rocks with a pick was preferable. He’s both sympathetic and savage; a juicy, conflicted role.
The ruthless fixer: Cheung Lei (Mabel Li)
Headquartered overseas but with powerful influence among the Chinese diaspora, “the Brotherhood” is the power behind the scenes. It’s based on the Heaven and Earth Society, or Hung League – a real-life hui, or secret society, headquartered in Guangdong, the source of the vast majority of Chinese migrants to Australia.
Cheung Lei played by Mabel Li.
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The organisation expects its cut from Shing’s miners – a cut that’s been much diminished by Shing’s embezzlement – and despatches a deadly, decisive and especially dangerous envoy: Lei, the daughter of a rich but ruthless businessman back home. Lei is a literally lethal investigator, if of an overly torturous bent, and Mabel Li, a 2019 NIDA graduate, is a bona fide breakout star.
The Chinese protector: Frederick Standish (Dan Spielman)
A genuinely larger-than-life historical character, the real life Captain Frederick Standish was made Chinese protector in 1858, a role that made him the immediate boss of Chinese goldfields headmen such as Shing. Maligned for his alcoholism, credited for conceiving the Melbourne Cup, the actual Standish was reputed to have taken the Duke of Edinburgh on a tour of Melbourne brothels.
Dan Spielman plays Frederick Standish.
New Gold Mountain’s fictionalised version demonstrates some of the real Standish’s vices, but is also shrewd, manipulative, and not so blinded by racism as to miss Shing’s intelligence. Standish’s insistence that a Chinese miner – any Chinese miner – be hanged as a scapegoat for the death is astute, depressingly of-the-time, and problematic for Shing.
The brother: Leung Wei Sun (Sam Wang)
Duplicitous or devoted? Conflicted or casually corrupt? The role of Shing’s brother, Sam, deepens as New Gold Mountain unfolds – but in a narrative in which every character’s future feels as fraught as that of a Game of Thrones extra, his motivations remain typically murky well into the third act.
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Sun is another potential murderer in what the real-life Frederick Standish might have called a stacked Cup field. Having risen to chief commissioner of police in Victoria, the real Standish died of cirrhosis in 1883, aged 59. Whether Sun – or any of New Gold Mountain’s fraught cast of characters – might live as long rarely seems certain. But over four solid hours, getting there is more than half the fun.
SBS’s new four-part Australian drama, New Gold Mountain, is available to stream free on SBS On Demand.
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