The history of the home is the history of private life, of the ordinary and the everyday, of the domestic. It concerns itself with the intimacy of small details. The history of the goldfields in central Victoria in the mid-nineteenth century, however, is commonly presented as inhabiting a grand scale; vast landscapes and reaching narratives of migration, masculinity and mateship, money and democracy.

Domestic history concerns itself with the ordinariness of small everyday objects and actions – a bowl to mix the bread, bread to be made every day. It is by its very nature cross-disciplinary; an understanding of the home is impossible without the input of, for example, history, architectural history, archaeology and anthropology. It encompasses all of a person’s domestic environment.

This paper will address the juxtaposition between the grand scale of the dominant historical narrative and the intimacy of the small moments that comprised everyday domestic life on the goldfields, as well as addressing the duality of scale of domestication, pertaining both to the everyday ordering of the home but also of British attempts to tame an unknown landscape in the name of Empire.