This is a gem,' said the librarian at the State
Library as she hands it to me ... and I am inclined to agree. ‘Rosalie’s
Reward’ begins with a poetic description of Ballaarat that evokes both mood
and time. The house that the impoverished mother and child come to live in
stands in ‘gloomy silence’ while the sounds of mining are clear and
eerily evocative.
‘Shrill whistle heard so clearly in the
silence that called the miners to midnight toil.’
The resurrected English style cottage garden is the
perfect place for a group of fairies that the reader doesn't meet until page
six of the story. There is an energetic discussion by the fairy folk
about what is prized more as a reward: beauty or gold. Not surprisingly, in a
gold mining town, it is gold. Rosalie’s reward for her kindness to the fairies
is being left a fortune by the dying gold miner who owns the cottage. He
fortunately arrives at the cottage hours before his death to bestow on Rosalie
a golden future in Melbourne. There were many nationalities on the goldfields of
Australia in 1870. 'Gumsucker' (a pseudonym that was also a
colloquialism for a resident of the Colony of Victoria) uses dialect
to establish identity: the miner/traveller has a Scottish accent; the fairies
speak in an upper class English tone. Within her text there is clear social
commentary that suggests neighbourhood urchins are destructive villains and
comments on the ‘unequal’ contest of gold-digging. Again colloquialisms
remind us that this is a mining community: the phrase ‘Old Jack’s on his
last shift’ refers to Jack’s impeding death.
Fairytale motifs reflect life on the goldfields and
include: being in limbo - Rosalie is left alone by her mother who has to earn
money by being a governess; the hero -Rosalie who pours water on the tangled
dying garden, saving the fairies and zephyrs, the fairy godmother is now a
non-magical Scottish miner prompted into action by the fairies; and of course,
no fairy story would be complete without a hero’s reward. In this Australian
fairy tale, Rosalie's palace is a home in Toorak, a wealthy suburb of
Melbourne. Now she has money Rosalie wastes no time in leaving the cottage
and Ballarat fairies to live in Melbourne, as after all... Melbourne is the ‘fair
Queen city of the Southern Sea'.
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