Cultural Landscapes reflect the interactions between people and their natural environment over space and time. Nature, in this context, is the counterpart to human society; both are dynamic forces, shaping the landscapes.¹

In August 2006 a research team from the University of Melbourne set out across country Victoria in pursuit of the Golden Dragon.² The purpose of the field trip was to interpret historical locations relating to the Chinese in Victoria and to evaluate cultural landscape analysis as a tool of historical inquiry. Cutting a path across the state, the group examined sites ranging from the highly interpreted Gum San Centre in Ararat and Golden Dragon Museum in Bendigo to the remnant mining landscape of Vaughan Springs and the Chinese Graveyard in the Buckland River Valley.³

The field trip confronted the complexities of exploring cultural landscapes and raised a number of questions that form the basis of this article. How could landscape analysis and documentary investigation be synthesised in order to reveal new historical interpretations of the colonial gold rush era? How might the group attempt to unpack distinctive landscapes set across more than a thousand kilometres of the Victorian countryside? What relationship would new cultural approaches have to the world of archival research, which participants were proposing to step outside of, both physically and conceptually?⁴

The first stop on the Heritage Workshop field trip provided a reflection on established practice. Supported by the research of the Ararat Chinese Heritage Society, the Gum San Chinese Heritage Centre 'bring[s] to life the history of the immigrant miners of the Victorian Goldfields in the late 1800s'.⁵ The centre uses historical re-enactment, interactive displays and interpretive text panels to guide the visitor through its circular exhibition space.⁶ Like much of the recent historiography of the Chinese in Victoria, Gum San weaves together a core selection of documents and images, to reconstruct the experiences of communities and individuals.⁷ In challenging the traditional omission of ethno-historical perspectives in Australian history, Gum San mirrors academic attempts to seek out Chinese Australians through the fragments of evidence in which colonial society documented their existence.⁸

In recent years, historians of the Chinese in Australia have sharpened their focus, directing their efforts towards more detailed investigations of communities and locales. These studies are creating new 'geographies of knowledge', which enrich our understanding of Chinese Australians and offer fresh insights to nuances and regional variations in the nature of cultural exchange.⁹ The most innovative and illuminating of these histories have adopted complementary approaches, synthesising traditional archival research, material culture studies and spatial investigations. Constructing 'ethnographic collage[s]', these works marry rigorous documentary analysis and cultural investigations to fashion new and evolving historical methodologies.¹⁰ These advances in Chinese-Australian history as a discipline have pointed to a number of avenues for the exploration of Victoria's relic mining landscapes and the Chinese on the diggings.

A tangible and immediate expression of these new opportunities for investigation can be found at the Chinese village at Butcher's Gully, Vaughan Springs.¹¹ In the fading grey light of a winter's evening or the bright sunny haze of an August morning, Vaughan's landscape broods with a sense of significant human traffic, long since departed.¹² The tranquil bush setting which characterises the area masks a history of bustling activity, of market gardening, of produce, trade and small teams of European and Chinese diggers working in close proximity on alluvial claims.¹³

This remnant mining landscape, dotted with evidence of prior habitation and the ruins of the Chinese village, has been gradually reclaimed by nature as human impact has waned. Despite the encroachment of the bush, however, the remains of clay jars, solid buildings, diggings and agriculture, all attest to the area's vibrant past.¹⁴ Taking this cultural landscape and setting it as a framework for historical exploration, we can begin to unpack the complex history of this idyllic setting. Vaughan's Chinese inhabitants have left behind a network of interweaving historical trails, both paper and physical, through which it is possible to ascertain some sense of the day-to-day life of the Chinese on the Loddon. Here, a complementary approach that considers impressions left in both the landscape and the archive facilitates the development of a more complex history of the Vaughan Chinese than would otherwise be possible. ¹⁵