From the eve of the Eureka insurrection to the beginnings of depression, this work charts the creation of a civilization, but it is also as much about the symbolism of place, the politics of streetscapes, the social economy of house-plots, their gardens, the everyday artifacts that make a home, in a sense of duration - time - that gives an ephemeral existence a history. It is about the ideas that permeate a culture; thoughts half conceived, or formed but not acknowledged; it is about the history assumed and consumed, about avarice and endeavour, kindness and cruelty; about the claimed gods and those rejected, and is therefore about a spiritual domain and the nature of rationality: as much about the metaphysics, then, as of the non-too-solid earth under the feet and above the heads of those who lived on a 19th Century goldfield.