When Claire Lovering read the script for Gold Diggers, she thought she’d been miscast. Gert Brewer was described as “a sociopathic, alcoholic hornbag, liberated and robust and brash”.
“I thought, I don’t really think that’s me. I usually play quite neurotic characters, or low-status characters, because that’s where my comedy leans,” Lovering says. “And Gert was described as having ‘man hands’ – I’ve got little dainty hands.”
Despite such differences, Lovering – fresh from appearing in Class of ’07 and Wellmania – managed to tap into the indomitable spirit of Gert. She’s a gold-rush era Fleabag; a grifter just like her sister Marigold, played by comedian Danielle Walker. The pair are determined not to become what they call “tent trash”, so when they reach the gold rush town of Dead Horse Gap, Victoria, they fake their way into polite society.
This new ABC comedy is a romp made with CBS, with plans of also hitting the US market. It’s a breakneck Blackadder; clever, with just the right flavour of ham. Creator Jack Yabsley peppered the script with contemporary references, such as when Gert tells the little girl who wins the annual Miss Dead Horse Gap pageant that “the only winner is the patriarchy”, and when a “tent doof” goes off in the camp.
“We had a historian who came and read some scripts and we thought he was going to tear us apart for how silly and rude some of the ideas were,” Yabsley says. “He was like, no, no, go for it. This [era] was like Glastonbury every night. It was muddy and shitty, and people were partying. ‘Oh shit, things are going down at the Russian camp!’ or ‘The Hungarians are throwing this thing!’”
When Guardian Australia visits the set – an expansion of Porcupine Township, a gold rush replica village in central Victoria – the comic timing between Lovering and Walker is dizzying. Peering at the monitors in the “video village” behind the set, the crew can’t keep from laughing.
Filming outdoors and in shacks can be gruelling: Lovering and Walker spent half a day knee-deep in a local creek, their characters splashing each other in girlish glee to get the miners’ attention: “Danni’s a bush girl and way harder than me – she was barefoot, I was in booties,” Lovering says. On another day, she also spent hours floundering in a horse trough.
“Sometimes the note from the director would just be ‘More joy, more energy, smile more!’” Lovering says later. “You can’t sit back in it, or be sarcastic or ironic … I was burning a lot of calories and drinking a lot of Coke Zero.”
Yabsley’s credits as a director and producer include mainstream fare such as Gogglebox, but he started as a host on kids’ programs such as Totally Wild, and created children’s shows Prank You Very Much and Mikki Vs the World. Maybe that accounts for the madcap feel of Gold Diggers. Yabsley himself doffs his cap to Veep, “with that Englishness transported into the American optimism and that breakneck speed”.
“When I started out writing, a lot of Australian comedies were quite cynical and sarcastic, presenting that as the Australian sense of humour,” he adds. “That wasn’t ringing true for how me and my friends spoke and saw the world. So I just love to watch something that bounces along.”
Before filming commenced, Lovering asked for some of the language in the scripts to be toned down – “sluts” and “skanks”, words that are repurposed in an empowered way but that still made her wince – but the irreverence and energy of Yabsley’s characters remains intact. He was the only white man in a writers’ room filled with First Nations and Chinese Australian talent who informed storylines that reflect how multicultural these camps were.
In the early days, the goldfields were as egalitarian as crypto. “When the gold was closest to the surface, anyone could turn up and get lucky, but then it started to get a bit more ‘colonised’, where you needed money and labour to dig deeper down. So we set it in those egalitarian times before taxes, bad cops, bad politicians and bad white men basically came in and took control,” Yabsley says.
“Hundreds of thousands of people were coming to this land and they all genuinely thought that they were going to get rich, which is kind of delusional – and I use ‘delusional’ with so much affection because delusional people are some of the best people in the world. A lot of people who had bottomed out, or were in a class that they didn’t feel like they should have been in, or were fighting against something in society, they were all there with a bit of a dream.”
Many of the cast are seasoned theatre actors, such as Megan Wilding, Eddie Perfect, Brandon McClelland, Heather Mitchell, Luke Mullins and Tom Wren – but there are some new faces too. Semisi Cheekam, who plays the young entrepreneur Kelvin, is still in year 11 and not sure if he wants to be an actor or a rugby player. Perry Mooney, who plays fur trader Vic, is a Yuwi person with a background in modelling and stage performance. All are given full rein to gallop their characters to Fawlty Towers-levels of lunacy.
Yabsley recalls reading the real diary of a miner’s wife who shared her judgment of many of the larger-than-life characters she met in the camps, which gave him the green light to think big.
“There’s one woman, who she describes as completely decrepit, who is selling sly grog and her hair is wild and she’s cracking jokes at everyone. To me and to the writers in the room, that woman is the story,” he says. “She’s branded a business. She’s found something she loves. She sounds like she’s absolutely nailing life.”
Gold Diggers starts on ABC and ABC iView at 9.10pm on 5 July
