This month Stella celebrates Stone Sky Gold Mountain, shortlisted for the 2021 Stella Prize.
What book is currently on your bedside table?
Ripeness, by Sarah Moss
Can you please tell us about the creation of Stone Sky Gold Mountain? What first drew you to telling this story, and what was the seed that started it?
Firstly, my father is Chinese, my mother is Irish Australian, so I am always interested in writing about my heritage. I grew up in Brisbane in the 1970s and 1980s when there were very few first-generation Eurasians about. It wasn’t until I was in my twenties, living in Cairns, when I met people who seemed to be white Australian, but told me that their great-great-grandfathers or great-grandfathers were Chinese (going back to the time before the White Australia Policy). It always made me wonder how these cross-cultural relationships transpired at a time of stringent racist policies and attitudes against the Chinese.
Secondly, before writing Stone Sky, I had already written three crime novels set in London featuring a Eurasian protagonist in the 1860s. The first of the series came from my PhD studies about the Chinese population of Victorian London and the idea of the ‘sinister Oriental’ found in fiction of the time. I decided I wanted to write something closer to home, about the earlier Chinese in Australia, which led me to the Gold Rush period. Originally, the novel was supposed to be a simple cross-cultural love story, between a Chinese digger and an Irish Australian woman, but it turned into something quite different once I conducted the research into the conditions in North Queensland at the time.
How did you conduct your research into Chinese migration during the gold rush period?
Luckily I had some grounding in the period from the research for my PhD and previous novels. For Stone Sky in particular, I started with museum exhibitions regarding Chinese immigration (like the Museum of Chinese Australian History and the Immigration Museum in Melbourne and the Golden Dragon Museum in Bendigo). I read fiction around what I wanted to write, like Brian Castro’s Birds of Passage and Rose Tremain’s The Colour, and a lot of non-fiction and firsthand accounts and contemporaneous newspaper articles and cartoons about the Gold Rush and the Chinese. The most illuminating information, though, I gleaned from a research trip to Cooktown and Maytown. Cooktown has wonderful museums dedicated to the history of the area, which means there is a lot of information about the Chinese diggers.
Mirandi Riwoe has subverted the historical Gold Rush-era novel and provided us with a lyrical, character-driven piece of historical fiction that explores identity, friendship, belonging, and what it means to exist on a land that is not your own.
Meriem brings light and softness into Ying’s world, but she also has her own traumas. What did you want to explore through their bond, especially across cultural and class divides?
Meriem’s character came from all those family stories you hear of the past, of young women shunned due to out-of-wedlock pregnancies, and mothers who bring up their daughters’ illegitimate children as their own. Meriem has become an outcast herself, which I think is what gives her the capacity to tolerate Ying. I wanted to explore the idea of growing to love someone despite cultural, gender or class considerations – considerations or borders that were keenly observed in the period. I admire how young people today embrace the idea of finding attraction or love beyond cultural or gendered lines, which I wanted to explore through Meriem and Ying. However, in Meriem’s case, I felt there were limits to what she would accept, as well.
There’s a haunting lyricism to the book, even in the bleakest moments. How do you write the brutality with such beauty?
That’s a really lovely thing to say about my writing, thank you. I think the answer actually lies in the Australian landscape. Travelling in the traditional lands of the Gugu Yalanji people, along the Palmer River and Maytown, was incredibly inspiring. The Australian bush is stunning but can also be terribly forbidding or treacherous too. I especially wanted Lai Yue to experience the North Queensland landscape in a slightly misogynist light – the land is beguiling and unfamiliar, and that’s where its danger lies for him. Whereas for Ying, the landscape is new and thrilling. It ignites her sense of adventure.
Did you always know the fates of Ying and Lai Yue when you started writing, or did those evolve as you got deeper into the characters?
Well, originally Lai Yue was only going to be a periphery character, part of Ying’s world. But while I was conducting my research, I read one sad line in a newspaper article from around the 1860s that inspired the whole arc of Lai Yue’s story. For Ying – although I knew what would happen within the plot of the novel, I am still not entirely sure what became of her afterwards (mostly because there are so many options that a person like Ying might have taken). It makes me smile thinking of her. I am positive she went onto good things. Perhaps she will pop up in another book one day. (In fact – one of the characters from Stone Sky Gold Mountain is featured in my novel A Short History of Longans due out next year!)
About the Author
Mirandi Riwoe’s Stone Sky Gold Mountain won the inaugural ARA Historical Novel Prize and the Queensland Literary Award and was shortlisted for the Stella Prize and longlisted for the Miles Franklin Award. Her novella The Fish Girl won Seizure’s Viva la Novella and was shortlisted for the Stella Prize. Sunbirds was shortlisted for the Barbara Jefferis Award, while The Burnished Sun is a collection of her short stories and novellas. Mirandi has also written three crime novels set in 1860s London under the name MJ Tjia, which feature a Eurasian courtesan sleuth. Mirandi has a PhD in Creative Writing and Literary Studies (QUT). Her novel A Short History of Longans will be out in early 2026.
About the Book
Set during the gold-rush era in Australia, this remarkable novel is full of unforgettable characters and deals with timeless questions of identity and belonging.
Family circumstances force siblings Ying and Lai Yue to flee their home in China to seek their fortunes in Australia. Life on the gold fields is hard, and they soon abandon the diggings and head to nearby Maytown. Once there, Lai Yue gets a job as a carrier on an overland expedition, while Ying finds work in a local store and strikes up a friendship with Meriem, a young white woman with her own troubled past. When a serious crime is committed, suspicion falls on all those who are considered outsiders.
Evoking the rich, unfolding tapestry of Australian life in the late nineteenth century, Stone Sky Gold Mountain is a heartbreaking and universal story about the exiled and displaced, about those who encounter discrimination yet yearn for acceptance.
Judges Report
In Stone Sky Gold Mountain, Mirandi Riwoe has subverted the historical Gold Rush-era novel and provided us with a lyrical, character-driven piece of historical fiction that explores identity, friendship, belonging, and what it means to exist on a land that is not your own.
Told from the perspective of two Chinese recent immigrants (siblings Mei Ying and Lai Yue) and Meriem, a white woman who works for for a sex worker on the outskirts of Maytown on Kuku-Yalanji land, Riwoe creates nuanced characters whose perspectives are often absent from this particular era of fiction or used as a footnote in history. In doing so, she has injected a unique exuberance to the genre and illuminated the experiences of people during that time beyond the pervasive white colonial narrative.
With lyricism and intelligence, Riwoe writes loyally to a period of history while simultaneously reminding the reader of the parallels between the 1870s and modern Australia: the violence and racism against First Nations people and new immigrants at the hands of white settlers; the casualised misogyny; and the varying experiences of people based on their class. Riwoe is clear-eyed and unsentimental in her approach – these comparisons are not made heavy-handedly, but presented as they are: an undeniable part of Australia, then and now.
Further Reading
Reviews
“…Riwoe masterfully wields the interiority of marginalised characters to destabilise dominant colonial narratives… This is innovative historical fiction, and a vital reappraisal of an oft-glorified period in Australian history.’ Laura Elizabeth Wollett, Australian Book Review
“Riwoe’s fiction… can be interpreted as an ongoing act of overhaul. Her work retells nineteenth-century histories from the perspectives of young Asian women, bringing historically sidelined characters and stories to the fore.” Mindy Gill, Sydney Review of Books
“In its exploration of race, language, privilege, class, exile and identity, Riwoe’s novel is transcendental and transformative.” Rashida Murphy, ArtsHub
Links
Read “Five Questions with Mirandi Riwoe”, Liminal Mag
Listen to “Take Home Reading: Mirandi Riwoe” via The Wheeler Centre
Explore the latest from stella
This month Stella celebrates Stone Sky Gold Mountain, shortlisted for the 2021 Stella Prize. What book is currently on your bedside table? …
Interview: Jaclyn Crupi – 2026 Stella Prize Judge An interview with editor, author and bookseller Jaclyn Crupi. What role do you believe …
This month Stella celebrates The Museum of Modern Love, the winner of the 2017 Stella Prize. Tell us about your relationship with …
Help change the story
As a not-for-profit organisation with ambitious goals, Stella relies on the generous support of donors to help fund our work.
Every donation is important to us and allows Stella to continue its role as the leading voice for gender equality and cultural change in Australian literature.
Stella is a not-for-profit organisation with DGR status. All donations of $2 or more are tax-deductible.
