The Golden Soak (15 page)

‘Yuh bin a long time on that third level.' She was leaning down towards me, ‘Find anything?' I was almost level with the top of the shaft, and looking up at her, the beam of my lamp showed her eyes bright as beads. I heaved myself out, glad to be on firm ground again. ‘Well, what did yuh find?' She had seen the bulging haversack and her voice had a grasping urgency.

I handed her a piece of the quartz and she picked up her torch, bending over it, examining it eagerly. Her hands trembled, the glitter of the gold exciting her. ‘Where did yuh find this – on the third level?' She looked up at me, her thin dry hair in wisps across her face and her eyes gleaming. ‘Is this from the reef?'

I knew then that I wasn't going to tell her what else I'd found, the footprints, the evidence of work in that gallery. ‘Yes. There's a section of the reef exposed. But it's quite unworkable.' And I explained about the state of the mine.

It took a little time to convince her. Gold still has a powerful attraction, and having made money out of one claim, She was eager to peg another, insisting that we try our luck higher up the gully. Even when I told her what the grey smudges in the quartz could mean, I don't think she really believed me – she didn't want to. ‘Yuh get it analysed,' she said finally. ‘Then we'll see.'

This was obviously the next step, and when I asked her where the nearest laboratory was she said, ‘Kalgoorlie.'

We collected our gear then and went back down the adit to the mine entrance. The sun was already well up and the heat hit us as we went out into the red glare of the gully. I closed the door and screwed the bolt back into place. It was just after eight as we drove down the tramline track to the mine buildings. ‘If wot yuh say is true and it is antimony in that quartz, then it explains why they never made any money out of the mine.'

‘Yes.'

She had obviously been thinking it over.

‘And I bet that sample runs out at near on six ounces to the ton.'

She was a woman who didn't give up easily and she was talking about it all the way to the cut-off by the paddock fencing. I didn't say much, for I was driving and wondering what I'd tell Ed Garrety if I met him coming down the track from Jarra Jarra. But we didn't meet a soul and shortly after nine-thirty we pulled into Lynn Peak, a mobile drilling rig the only vehicle there We were both of us very tired by then and I was glad Andie was out seeing to one of his wind bores. His wife cooked us breakfast and while we were waiting for it I picked up a copy of the
West Australian
somebody had left and turned to the financial page. It gave the London price of antimony – £1130 per ton. Only a few months ago it had been £340.

The bacon and eggs came and we ate it with the children on the floor at our feet and the four drillers at the next table. They were ‘dust' drillers and their rig was a rotary percussion drill, a Mayhew 1000 that relied on compressed air instead of mud to bring the rock chips to the surface. They were on their way from Mt Goldsworthy to a temporary job at Mt Newman. Georges Duhamel, the owner of the rig had been born in the French island of New Caledonia and all through breakfast he was telling me how important it was for Britain to retain her Pacific colonies. ‘Some day Australia will need those islands as bases against the pressures of Asiatic populations – the Chinese, the Japanese, mebbe the Philippines, too. You give everything away. Why? Do you no longer believe in the future? Perhaps you think there is no future, hnn?' He was a wiry, dynamic little man with wild penetrating eyes under a thick dark thatch of hair, and a quick, explosive way of speaking. Listening to him, I felt that being an Englishman in Australia had its disadvantages; I seemed to be a target for everybody who had a gripe against the Old Country. But at least he could tell me something about the cost of drilling in this part of the country. It worked out at around $6.50 a foot dust drilling and went up to about $16.50 if he used a diamond drill.

Later, two drivers came in. They had a refrigerator truck loaded with fish from the coast and were headed for Perth by way of Meekatharra and Mt Magnet. From Meekatharra Prophecy said I should have no difficulty in getting a lift to Kalgoorlie, and shortly after eleven I left her sitting there in the Andersons' diner clutching the samples I'd given her, a dreamy look on her face. I had asked her to say nothing to anybody until I had had the analysis done, but as we started out on the long haul south, three of us crammed into the stifling heat of the truck's driving cabin, I thought it was too much to expect that she'd be able to keep her mouth shut.

Four

ORA BANDA

ONE

There has never been anything quite like it in Australia, probably never will be again. Gold rushes, yes. But the nickel boom is something different. Poseidon, its symbol, was rocketed from 7s. 6d. to £112 on the London market, and gamblers in faraway Britain caught nickel fever, calling it the Windarra Wonder and rushing to buy the shares of any company with a hole in the ground and the faintest whiff of ultrabasics. So many claims have been pegged recently that mining registrars have been unable to cope and rumour has it that the Perth Government's Minister of Mines is considering a ban on further pegging until the backlog has been cleared. The Windarra Range is not much more than a hundred miles north of Kalgoorlie, and with Western Mining's Kambalda nickel mine already in production twenty miles to the south, this old gold town became the focal centre of the boom. When I arrived there late on the Saturday afternoon the place was seething with scouts and newspaper men, stockbrokers, business executives, survey parties, crooks, drillers, gamblers, anybody with money enough and a place to lay his head.

The hub of all this feverish activity was the Palace bar. In quieter days it was no doubt adequate enough, but now it overflowed on to the pavement, a mob of men in every conceivable garb, talking, arguing, drinking in the slanting sunlight. The survey truck in which I had travelled the last stretch from Leonora had dropped me at the corner of Hannan and Maritana, and as I crossed the broad intersection the roar of voices almost drowned the traffic. It was the same across the street outside the dark cavern of a bar where a florid Edwardian design in frosted glass proclaimed it
Church's Exchange Hotel
–
The Young Jacksons of Kalgoorlie
. It was a town of white-wood buildings with verandahed sidewalks, and Hannan Street, with brothels virtually at one end of it and the Mt Charlotte gold mine at the other, was wide enough for camel trains to turn in. The whole place was a municipal monument to Hannan's discovery of 1893 and the Golden Mile.

The Palace was half wood, half brick, and extended through several buildings of different vintage. The main entrance was in Hannan Street, in the wooden section, the door to the bar on the left and Reception a dark cubby-hole of a room below the staircase with its balustrade ending in a poor digger's version of the Statue of Liberty. A tired girl stood at the phone, fanning herself against the overpowering stuffiness, and when at last I managed to catch her eye she shrugged her shoulders helplessly at my request for a bed. The hotel was full. They had men sleeping two and three to a room and it was the same all over town. I left my suitcase with her and fought my way into the bar. Ceiling fans stirred the turgid air without cooling it.

I was tired and hot and dusty. But at least the beer when I got it was cold. I drank it watching the hot animated faces reflected in the mirrors behind the bar. ‘The London price closed at 106½.' Two men talking about Poseidon close beside me, one of them a youngster in a starched white shirt, the other in bush khaki. Between the mirrors were faded prints of old-timers and wagons and camel trains, a pictorial record of the first rush, when it had been gold, not nickel. ‘Newmetals is a better bet – or Tasminex. What about Tasminex?' The beer had disappeared into me like water into parched earth. I ordered another and asked the barmaid if she knew Chris Culpin. Her tired eyes ranged the smoke-filled bar as she filled my glass again. ‘Chris is over there talking to Smithie.' She indicated a heavily-built man in a faded shirt with a sweat-grimed hat thrust on the back of his head.

They were at the far end of the bar and when I reached them they were in the middle of an argument. ‘They've no business fossicking around the Blackridge.' Culpin's voice sounded belligerent. ‘Who told them?'

‘You don't have to tell those blokes.' The other was a thin man with a long leathery face and very pale blue eyes. He was swaying slightly, his voice slurred, his long face glistening with sweat. ‘Christ! It was all round the bar here last night.'

‘That bloody Swede – I'll murder him.'

‘It ain't Petersen's fault, Chris. You send samples to the lab for analysis …' He stopped there and Culpin turned, both of them suddenly aware of my presence.

‘You want something?' Small eyes stared at me out of a brick red face, his belly sagging over the broad leather belt that supported his trousers. He hadn't shaved and the collar of his shirt showed an unwashed line of red dust.

I told him who I was and he nodded. ‘So you made it.' There was no welcome in the way he said it.

‘Where's Kadek?' I asked.

‘Ferdie's in Perth.'

The thin man leaned towards me, the pale eyes staring. ‘You from the Old Country?'

I nodded.

‘Geologist?'

‘Mining Consultant.'

‘Consultant, eh?' He was suddenly angry. ‘You Brits. You're all over us, and we got Swedes, Wops, Kiwis, even Yugos. Wot the hell they teaching them at the School of Mines? Don't reckon there's a real Aussie geologist between here and Dampier.

‘You must be joking, Smithie. There's my boy Kennie for one. He's out with a survey party –'

‘Pegging for himself, I'll bet. Claim crazy that's wot they are, the whole lot of 'em. I seen 'em come into my office registering claims before they even passed out of the School.'

‘Kennie's not like that.'

‘No?' The long sweaty face leaned down, the pale eyes peering under Culpin's hat. ‘Think you know your own son, eh? I betyer, when he gets back, he'll throw up his job and be off up there again inside of a week pegging his own claims.' The thin lips opened, a cackling laugh. ‘Wot d'you expect when he sees his old man flogging a bloody mine that's bin dead for years –'

Culpin grabbed his arm. ‘You shut your mouth, Smithie – or by Christ I'll shut it for you.'

The other man stood there swaying slightly as the threat sank into his fuddled brain. ‘Mum's the word, eh?' He smiled thinly. ‘Okay, Chris. But wotchit, feller.' He leaned forward, a confidential whisper, ‘There's talk already, an' if those boys find …'

‘Shut your bloody mouth I said.' Culpin turned abruptly, jerked his head at me and moved into the crowd, heading for the street. ‘Silly bastard,' he said as we reached the doorway. ‘He's drunk, an' when he's drunk he's full of gossip as an ol' woman.' Outside the reflection of sun on the white wood buildings was blinding.

‘Where are we going?' I asked.

‘My place. You won't get a bed anywhere else.' His voice was sullen, a brooding anger in him. I got my suitcase and followed him across the wide expanse of Hannan Street. He had a battered ute parked in Maritana, and as we drove off, he said, ‘First time I met Smithie he was a mining registrar up north of here. Know how much he's worth now? Half a million at least. That's what Poseidon's done for him. Bought 'em for under a dollar and now he's hardly ever sober. Spends most of his time in the bar there.'

We were headed towards Boulder with the tall stacks and workings of the Golden Mile on our left. ‘You don't want to take any notice of that stupid bastard,' he went on. ‘Anyway, it wasn't me who sent those samples in for analysis. It was Rip Pender, one of Pete's boys, acting for Lone Minerals.' He gave me a quick sidelong glance. ‘Ferdie says you got a degree.'

‘Yes.'

‘Okay. But you try and muscle in on this deal …' He was silent for a moment. Then he said, ‘I ain't got no degree, but I know a lot you don't – I was born out here, see. At Coolgardie.' He nodded at the wasteland to our left ‘That's what killed Coolgardie – they all decamped to the Golden Mile. But my Dad, he stayed on the bloody old fool. You'd think living in a ghost town would have taught me to keep clear of prospecting. But I got it in the blood, see.' Again that sideways glance. ‘You known Ferdie long?'

‘I met him four years ago in Spain.'

‘We was kids together.'

He was silent after that. But as we ran into the sprawling town of Boulder he said, ‘I used to stay with an aunt of mine here. There was nine of us and my mother died. That's how I come to be at the same school as Ferdie. Undersized little runt, but clever as a dingo. He did the thinking, I did the fighting. In the end he ran his own gang and we found an adit leading into the old abandoned workings of the Perseverance, going down ricketty ladders and crawling through winzes you wouldn't think a grown miner could cut ore outa. That's how Ferdie got his first break.' And he went on to tell me how they'd found a rich pocket of ore, half concealed by the wooden shoring of a stope. They hadn't dared knock the timbers away, but Kadek had gone down on his own night after night and cleared the pocket out with his father's mining tools, humping the pay dirt up through the mine in sacks and selling it to the government stamping mill at Ora Banda. ‘The dirty crooked little bastard!' It was said without rancour, almost affectionately. ‘Never let on to us. Just took off for Sydney and I didn't hear of him again till he came to Kal 'bout a year ago looking for nickel prospects for some piddling little company he'd formed.' He eased his crutch, then leaned forward and squashed a fly on the windscreen with his thumb. ‘So you got a degree.' It seemed to rankle. ‘Well, you just remember this, Alec – but for me there wouldn't be any Blackridge prospect.' The small eyes stared at me from under the battered hat. ‘I found it, see.'