The Golden Soak (26 page)

‘Now come on, Alec.' The wheedling note was stronger now. ‘You're new out here. You'd never get through on your own. And all Kennie knows about living bush is what he learned from me. I've been a dogger all through that country, see?'

‘When did you first hear this rumour?' I asked him. ‘Who told you?'

‘I don't know.' I watched him searching back in his fuddled mind, his forehead creased in a frown. ‘It was straight after the
Miner
had reported the inquest. They were all talking about it here in the bar. And then somebody – I don't remember who it was – some Company man, he said it'd be worth hiring one of the Trans-West Cessnas an' having a dekko. But nobody ever found anything just flying over the country, 'cept that fellow Hancock. Iron ore's different though, an' if it could be seen from the air somebody would've found it by now with all them survey parties skittering around. No. You've got to hoof it into the desert, and that means an abo or somebody like me who knows how to live bush in that sort of country.' He stared at me. ‘You think it over. You know where to find me. An' tell Kennie …' He hesitated. ‘Tell him to come home. Edith misses him.' His hand was on my arm again and suddenly there were tears in his eyes. ‘Tell him that, will you?'

But Kennie was still with me when I started north again two days later. If his mother had been on her own he would have stayed, but not with his father there. ‘Mebbe I lack guts,' he said. ‘But I'm scared of him. An' he's a b-bastard – a real bastard.' This was after I had passed on Chris Culpin's message, alone in the room we were sharing in the Norrises' house on Cheetham. Now, as we headed up towards Leonora, with the late afternoon sun straight in our eyes, I glanced at his quiet, serious face and realized he wasn't a boy any more. He had grown up a lot in the week we had been together.

Perhaps in saying that I am trying to evade responsibility and so lessen the sense of guilt I had before the end. Driving north that day all I knew was that I was glad he was still with me. We had grown accustomed to each other. And in my case, I think it was more than that. I had grown fond of him. He was the only real friend I had in Australia. No, not just in Australia – anywhere, in fact. I had no friends, no wife, no relations, nobody – only Kennie sitting there beside me, the young face set beneath the silky beard as he watched the tarmac reel out ahead of us, a dark ribbon between the red gravel verges. But the guilt remains with me, the feeling that I should have refused to take him. But even then I am not sure he would have gone back to his family. Anyway, he was old enough to make up his own mind. And once we had started north I had other things to think about.

The analysis had turned out much as we had expected, the rock samples blank, but some of the dirt containing a percentage of quartz granules with just a trace of gold and antimony. Enough at any rate to foster the belief that far back in geological time, millions of years ago, the reef quartz had banded the slope of Coondewanna above the gully. But the slope was still the same iron formation, and though the rainfall was minimal, it was still sufficient to have washed the reef traces down from higher up on the mountain's shoulder. Only the hollow offered a reasonable chance of the surface indications being repeated at depth.

My problem was really a financial one. I had been lucky. The broker had held off selling my Lone Minerals for another day, and by then the price had risen to 106. After taking up my option, I reckoned I had enough cash in my pocket to hire a rig and drill one hole, at most two. The alternative was an IP survey to give me readings that would register an anomaly if any existed. But I would still have to drill into that anomaly to prove that it was a continuation of the reef. So it was a question of either playing safe and proceeding step by step, or of cutting the corners and putting down a drill.

I had wired Freeman with enough information to whet his appetite. But to get a bid out of him, or even an agreement by which Lone Minerals would finance a proper development programme, I had to have reef samples that Petersen could report on favourably after laboratory tests. Allowing for one drill hole only, I would be pitting my geological wits against odds that time had made very long indeed. It was something that occupied my mind throughout that drive.

We lay up in the heat of the day and at dawn after the second night drive we left the Highway on the cut-off to Mt Newman, a black mare standing poised for flight beside a salmon gum, her neck arched above her foal. The stallion crossed the dirt road ahead of us, his tail so long it brushed the ground. ‘Brumbies,' Kennie said. ‘Plenty up here. Gone wild like the camels.' The stallion had halted beside the mare, his head up and facing us, his nostrils quivering, the three of them jet black and looking like thoroughbreds. I turned in my seat to see him shoulder the mare and her foal into the shelter of some eucs, thinking of Jarra Jarra and the stock there dying for lack of water, while here horses that had reverted to the wild looked as though they had never known a drought.

The sun came up and by then I was dozing, not waking again until the wheels were humming on tarmac and we were almost into the Mt Newman township. Kennie had been there before, but to me it was a revelation – neat rows of houses, like the married quarters of a garrison town, the lawns sprouting green with sprinklers going. It was the absolute antithesis of old Kalgoorlie with its period clapboard houses and camel train wide streets, all the ordered neatness of it set against a wild background of iron ore hills red-brown in the sun. We turned down by the administration buildings and drew up at the Walkabout, a very modern motel of Moorish design with cabin rooms built around a swimming pool, great lumps of polished rock by the glass entrance doors to the restaurant and bar. Inside it was cool with pretty waitresses in freshly-laundered mini-skirts.

Even now I can remember the mini-skirts, the girls' long legs and the enormous breakfast we ate. The coolness of it, the sense of being in some sheikh's palace, an oasis of comfort set in the middle of nowhere; what a difference it made to have money in my pocket! And afterwards, shaved and refreshed and full of food, we drove to Whaleback, where 120-ton Haulpaks thundered down the mountain loaded with ore for the crusher, the whole world a dustbowl, the sun hazed in sepia red.

The mine manager's office was air-conditioned, staffed by girls as well as men; we might have been in a city office, except for the faint background hum of giant machinery and the movement in and out of men in dust-brown overalls and yellow safety helmets. A young Australian, fresh out from his home town of Broken Hill across the other side of the continent, pinpointed the position of Duhamel's drilling rig for me and we drove on up the mountain, giving way to the loaded Haulpaks coming down, their wheels higher than the Land-Rover.

The rig was on exploratory work, drilling a test hole high up on Mt Whaleback. Across from where it was spudded in the view was of a mountainside being gnawed to destruction by blasting and giant shovels. And beyond the huge stepped gashes of industrial erosion stretched the ever-endless wastes of the Australian outback, iron hills rising red out of the prevailing flatness and the heat throbbing through a miasma of ore dust so fine it hung like a haze that half-obscured the sun.

They were adding a fresh rod when we arrived, Duhamel and his off-sider working in unison, both of them stripped to the waist and red with the grime of ore dust. As soon as the drill started up again, he came across to me, his teeth white in a grin against the dustiness of his bearded face. ‘You looking for a job or just come to see how we earn our tucker here?'

‘I want to hire your rig,' I said. I had to shout to make myself heard against the throaty throb of the diesel and the higher sound of compressed air forcing the dust from the tungsten bit to the surface.

His eyes widened a little in surprise and then he walked me along the ridge to a crumbling cliff edge where we could hear ourselves speak. Below us, on the flat platforms of the mining benches giant shovels were loading Haulpaks, a strange ballet of mechanized Jurassic monsters. Beyond them, through the haze, the twin lines of steel ran ruler straight along the valley floor.

‘One hole, eh? What depth?'

I told him seven hundred feet, at most eight, and he nodded. ‘Above the water table?'

‘Down to it,' I told him.

‘But not into it?'

‘No.'

‘And the rock?'

‘Softish till we hit the quartz – if we do.'

‘Okay. I talk to my mate. We finish our contract here end of this week. Maybe the boys want to go to Port Hedland, maybe not. We'll see.'

Kennie and I waited there while he talked it over with his off-sider, the two yellow helmets huddled close against the noise of the rig. Then Duhamel came back nodding his head. He'd have to check with his other team, but he thought they'd do it provided there was plenty of beer and somebody to do the cooking. ‘Josh'll bring his guitar and we make a party of it, see.' He was smiling. ‘And if we strike the reef first go we get double. Right?'

I didn't argue about that, or about his price. ‘When can I expect you?' I asked.

‘We pull rods here five-thirty Monday. If there is no problems then we hitch-up and go. You meet us outside the mine manager's office six o'clock. Okay?'

I nodded, but his eyes were on the bench down below. He glanced at his watch. ‘Better you wait now,' he said. ‘They'll be blasting in a few minutes and until then everything's frozen.' He walked us back along the ridge, to the crumbling cliff edge with its view of the gashed mountainside, and there we waited as a stillness, a sort of paralysis, crept over the whole scene. Benches and haul roads had suddenly become deserted. The shovels had stopped their prehistoric dance, and on the bench below us half a dozen Haulpaks had backed up against one of the expensive monsters, their empty truck bodies at maximum lift to shield it from the blast. A lone man moved quickly, checking white cable lines on an empty mining bench away to the right, then ran to his car and drove furiously up the haul road, the only vehicle in the whole of that mechanized operation that wasn't frozen into stillness.

Two minutes later the mountainside below the shot cables heaved in a series of convulsions. The noise and the air blast hit together, the ground shock thudding at the soles of our shoes as two hundred thousand tons of ore collapsed on to the next bench down in a great billowing cloud of dust. ‘Okay, mon ami.' Duhamel clapped me on the back. ‘You can go now. But don't forget – see we got plenty of beer an' the tucker's good. An' see you got the right place for us to spud in, hnn?'

We shook hands on it and then Kennie and I started back down the mountain, back to the Walkabout where we sat drinking ice-cold beer in the bar until it was time for lunch. We had brandy afterwards and then more beer, so that we were both of us in a happy frame of mind when we finally drove out across the tracks and took the cut-off to Jarra Jarra. It was blazing hot, the scrub shimmering and the leaves of the gums hanging limp, no breath of air. But I didn't care. Even the flies didn't bother me. I had the use of a drilling rig for four days and all I was thinking about was how to make the best use of it. I had two days in which to make up my mind the exact position we'd spud it in. And if we hit the reef spot on.…

I was still thinking about that as we climbed to the gap in the Ophthalmia Range, Parmelia Hill to our right and Mt Robinson a vague blur on the horizon. A piddling little operation compared with the huge ore complex I had just seen, but my own, with no outsider, no consortium of financial houses involved; I was singing softly to myself, thinking of Janet – how excited she would be.

We reached the boundary fence of Jarra Jarra shortly after six and a few minutes later I drove into the homestead, blaring the horn as I stopped under the big Mexican poinciana trees, my spirits still buoyed up by all the beer we had drunk. And when Janet came out to see what all the racket was about, I shouted to her that it was fixed – we had a rig and we were going to drill. ‘With luck you'll have a new mine for Easter.' And I picked her up and swung her round. ‘We'll call it Coondewanna.' I would have kissed her then, but she was stiff and wooden, no answering spark to my own excitement, and when I let her go I saw her eyes were sullen, her face flushed. ‘Can't you understand what I've been telling you?' I demanded.

‘You're drunk,' she said, and she looked as though she were on the verge of tears.

‘What the hell's the matter? Where's your father?' At least he'd appreciate what I had achieved.

‘He's had to go to Port Hedland again.'

‘Port Hedland?' I felt suddenly deflated, the beer and the excitement drained out of me, everything flat. ‘Why?'

‘About the Watersnake. They've found our cattle there and they're insisting we clear them off the Pukara at once.'

‘So what? Can't you understand? If we strike the reef, the cattle don't matter.'

‘But they do matter,' she snapped. And she added with slow emphasis, ‘This is a cattle station and if we have to move them they'll die.'

‘Then you get some more. If that's what you want. We strike that reef at the head of the gully …'

‘You stupid, insensitive bastard – can't you understand?' Her voice was shrill, her eyes flashing. ‘We sweated our guts out to save those animals. They've got water now. They're alive.'

‘I'm sorry,' I said. I hadn't thought of it that way. ‘It was just that I couldn't think of anything …'

‘And there's something else.' The sullen, angry look was back in her eyes. ‘Rosalind's here.'

It didn't register for a moment. ‘Rosalind?' I stared at her. ‘You mean she's here – come all this way …'

She nodded dumbly.

‘But why?'

‘To see you, I imagine.'