This boisterously amusing new comedy series from the ABC, set during Australia’s gold rush, is one of those shows that make you want to visit the set for yourself, so you can amble around and explore its nooks and crannies. Much more so than SBS’s New Gold Mountain, which is based in a similar location during the same period and rather more serious. (Murder and brutal racism really make for different vibes.) Gold Diggers plays this time and setting for shits and giggles, constructing a cartoonish half-reality that is more Saturday Night Live than historical document. Tonally, it feels like an innocuous simulation: a Westworld theme park, sans the vengeful robots.
Much of Gold Diggers was shot in central Victoria’s Porcupine Village (so you can, in fact, visit the set for yourself), which combines era-original buildings with replicas. The old “walk and talk” technique is deployed multiple times to whisk us through the space, establish the plot on the run, and introduce the protagonists, whose role is to break decorum in an already indecorous place. They are Gert (Claire Lovering) and Marigold (Danielle Walker) Brewer: two sisters who’d happily sign up for reality TV dating programswere they not about a century and a half too early for the likes of Farmer Wants a Wife.
The Brewer sisters have arrived in the town of Dead Horse Gap (sounds like a lovely place!) on a mission to, as Gert puts it, find “newly minted dumb-dumbs and/or dying aristocrats”. Despite the plethora of blokes around, this proves easier said than done. When Marigold suggests a possible change of plan – that they could get among it and do some panning – Gert shoots back: “Nah fuck that, my back could never.” This early line establishes Gold Diggers as subscribing to the Deadwood mode of the old frontier: importing modern language and zhooshing up old settings with contemporary sensibilities.
Every version of history narrativised on screens recreates the past through the prism of the present. The creator and co-writer Jack Yabsley milks this for comedy, past and present somehow in cosmic temporal alignment, with modern-day issues projecting a reverse shadow on to history. There’s a joke in the first episode (this review encompasses the first three) about the “savage rental market”, with the sisters lucky to find a crap hut-like structure falling down around them. In the third episode, hard-partying outlaws arrive who are culturally au fait; one comes to the defence of one of the sisters, telling the local cop that “she doesn’t need a cis white man to tell her what to think”.
The writers (Yabsley, with Erica Harrison, Shontell Ketchell, Amy Stewart, Alex Lee, Sara Khan and Wendy Mocke) extract some humour from juxtaposing the sensitivities of modern society with a festy old world riddled with danger; for instance, when Gert proclaims that she represents a “new generation” of women who “want liberation, and rights, and multiple orgasms”. But the sketch-like comedy often isn’t particularly well-layered and that gag about rights and orgasms, like several jokes in the show, feels half-finished, as if they are missing a satirical underlay. As a series, Gold Diggers is loose and scattershot, and could do with more pronounced storylines.
But what the show does have is verve, energy and two very entertaining lead performances. Lovering and Walker nail bubbly effervescence: their dynamic pops like a freshly opened champagne bottle. The to and fro between their characters is always pretty fun, Lovering having the more outrageous character – aptly described as a “a sociopathic, alcoholic hornbag, liberated and robust and brash”. Gold Diggers’ gleefully anarchic spirit and kicking rhythm makes it pleasantly dispensable.
Gold Diggers starts on ABC on Wednesday 5 July at 9.10pm and will be available on ABC iview
