Spinning Gold: Nuggets, Narratives, and Raw Materials in the Victorian Gold Rush

In this essay I take up Jane Bennett’s invitation to “think slowly” the idea of matter as “passive,” “inert,” and “raw” by focusing on a specific—and overlooked—material category: the “raw material.” Taking as a case study the gold mined in Victoria, Australia, in the 1850s and beyond, I argue that the “raw material” is not an inevitable “fact” of nature, simply awaiting its inevitable transformation into capital. Instead, it is a narrative construction deliberately designed to suppress or erase (often violently) the sheer range of alternative meanings the same matter might hold. Gold is an especially useful material for exploring this idea, since it is a key example of Marx’s “primitive accumulation,” a resource extracted explicitly in order to construct a new settler colony. It is also a material with a long history of fabulation and fantasy. Reading Charles Reade’s settler-colonial novel It Is Never Too Late to Mend (1856) alongside the Indigenous writer Kim Scott’s Benang: From the Heart (1999), I argue that the novel is a particularly adept form for registering the multiple, rich alternative stories we might tell (or that have long been told) about “raw materials” and their dissonant, recalcitrant meanings.