![]() ![]() In pursuit of their dreams, and later of each other, they pit themselves against some of the island's most hostile terrain. Joseph dreams of gold, which he believes will allow him to atone for his disgraceful secret Harriet dreams, more reasonably you might think, of 'land and children': but neither dream looks likely to come true. ![]() The novel is about hope, or the point at which hope becomes destructive or turns into madness. Tremain has said that she was moved to write about the mid-19th-century gold rush in New Zealand by the desperate flimsiness of the prospectors' tools, which she saw in a museum there, and she is particularly good at describing optimism in the face of overwhelming odds. While they are jointly occupied in scraping a living from the inhospitable soil of their farm, their marriage seems sturdy enough, despite a series of disasters, but when Joseph glimpses a way of literally scraping a rather easier living - when he finds gold dust, or 'the colour', in their creek - their shared dream begins to rupture. ![]() Joseph, apparently 'rather an ordinary man', has left England of necessity, having done something mysterious and terrible Harriet, on the other hand, is an adventurous sort, who always longed to go 'beyond the boundaries society had set for her' during her 12 years as a governess. ![]()
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