The History Man by Maxine Alterio

By A History of Kindness - Kirstie McKinnon | Posted: Monday Feb 23, 2026

a guest post

The History Man by Maxine Alterio - by Kirstie McKinnon

A solitary man walks through the gorge on foot, carrying a backpack and a torch. For ten years, he has studied topographical maps from the gold rush era and examined the habits of miners who worked with pans, cradles, and sluice boxes, as described in letters and diaries held in museums and public collections.

History stains him like printer’s ink. Even his skin has an archival hue.

Today, his eyes glimmer with anticipation, and his usual steady heartbeat pulses erratically, for he feels close to finding the gold a canny, white-bearded prospector was rumoured to have hidden over a century ago. At the time, the local newspaper published firsthand accounts of a ferocious storm battering the area. When the old-timer failed to return to his shack, townsfolk assumed he had slipped during a river crossing and been swept away.

The same article mentioned two Irishmen drowning inside a collapsed canvas tent and likewise three Chinese in a sod hut. He tips his cap in respectful remembrance.

Late in the afternoon, the history man spots wisps of smoke emerging from the mouth of a cave partially camouflaged by briar. He stops, wipes his brow with a trembling hand and listens. Beneath his feet, the ground trembles. Moments later, he hears what he thinks sounds like a glacier splitting into a million ice-clattering tongues.

Warily, he enters the gloomy cave and switches on his torch. Moss brushes against his face as tiny birds land on his shoulders and chatter in high-pitched tones. Others flying in formation guide him through a labyrinth of passages towards a cavernous space. Ahead, on a central stone slab, gold nuggets of different shapes and sizes sit alongside a display of religious relics. He moves towards them, unaware of a distant echo, another set of footsteps, the beat of a second heart. The birds congregate on a ledge, sing in sweet angelic voices, and lift their wings, rhythmically to pulsations that the history man recognises come from an ancient hymn.

Hurriedly, he stashes the nuggets into his pack as the passageways he’d walked through moments before close silently behind him.