Ingeniously, the prospectors develop mining techniques and Heath Robinson machinery, strange contraptions to separate tiny amounts of gold from the earth that holds it, drills and windlasses and sluice boxes. There are extraordinary - and grimly intriguing - descriptions of the business of trying to find gold. This is where the traditional work of the novelist-as-researcher comes to life. He leaves the farm to his wife and his mother and we follow him to the goldfields of the Hokitika River on the west coast. Joseph becomes one of the country's desperate prospectors. It is enough to give him the fever for "the precious thing they called 'the colour' " - the visible trace of gold in clay or gravel.
Their farm makes them a small, hard living, but Joseph's hunger for something better is fed by his discovery of tiny amounts of gold on his land. Harriet loves the wilderness to which she has been brought, but she comes to feel something like hatred for her husband. With great economy, Tremain creates a place swept by winds and bleached by weather, variously liberating or unconsoling to her characters. These three try to make "a small world" where everything around them is vast, impervious to their efforts. His mother, who has been ruined by his father's gambling, is with them out of bleak necessity. He has saved her from that terrible fate of clever, impecunious Victorian women: a career as a governess.
Joseph, we are slowly led to understand, has fled something terrible in his past - fled, indeed, into his marriage to Harriet. They do so with little of the optimism that should be brought to a new world. On a wind-blown slope, far from the nearest habitation, he has built his house and there the three of them will try to make a new life. Joseph Blackstone has emigrated to New Zealand with his wife Harriet and his widowed mother Lilian. Everything is bareness, blankness, a world without established habits and values. In the first part of The Colour, the historical setting provides the opposite of what we expect from such fiction.
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