The Golden Soak (6 page)

‘Why does he want to know about McIlroy?'

‘It's just bar talk,' I said. ‘A rumour he's picked up.' I folded the letter and put it away in my pocket. ‘I imagine Kalgoorlie is full of rumours right now.'

He nodded slowly. ‘It was all in the papers at the time. A lot of speculation – most of it nonsense.' And he added, ‘All our troubles here stem from that man McIlroy. His expedition was a desperate, hairbrained attempt to make good all the money he'd lost.'

‘Gambling?' I asked.

‘He was playing the stock market – our money, and a lot of other people's, too.' And he added, coldly and with an intensity that was almost violent, ‘Pat McIlroy was a crook. He destroyed this station and he destroyed my father.'

‘You never told me that,' Janet said.

He shrugged and got to his feet. ‘No point. As you say, it all happened a long time ago now.' He looked down at me, still frowning, his eyes bleak – ‘Lake Disappointment is just below the Canning Stock Route, between the Great Sandy and the Gibson. They found his truck abandoned there, and east of Disappointment there's nothing, only desert.'

He went out then, leaving me with questions still unanswered and the feeling that there was more to it than that. Janet also disappeared, and shortly afterwards we had lunch. It was a cold lunch – cold beef, salad and cheese. The bread was home-made. ‘Lucky your visit coincided with the monthly supply,' Janet said. ‘We try to be as self-sufficient as we can, but things like cheese and flour, salad dressing – oh, lots of things …'

‘And beer.' Her father paused in his carving. ‘Jan drinks a lot of beer, and we don't brew that.'

‘I don't drink much.' She was opening a can, and she passed it to me with a glass. ‘Help yourself. Anyway,' she added, reaching behind her for another beer, ‘I need it to keep my strength up.'

He smiled at her. ‘You realize it's making you fat?'

‘How could it, riding that camel day after day? Just because you don't …' She stopped there. ‘Besides, it's good for me. Gives me a fine healthy sweat.'

It was a quick meal, none of us talking very much, and afterwards she took me over the house. Her father had gone off in the Land-Rover to have a look for cattle, over by Deadman Hill he said.

The rooms were larger than I had expected and there was actually a drawing room, not pretentious, but nevertheless a surprisingly stately room with two portraits in oils over the open fireplace and a cut glass chandelier hanging from the centre of the ceiling. The portraits were of a man and a woman. The man was bearded, a heavy, formidable face, the blue eyes large and compelling. The woman wore a high-necked dress, her hair long and piled on her small neat head. But it was the snub nose and the freckles that caught my eye and I turned to Janet. ‘Your grandmother?'

She nodded, smiling. ‘We still have some of her dresses, including that one. I tried it on once.' She giggled. ‘We're as like as two peas.'

The furniture, shrouded in dust sheets, appeared to be of good solid mahogany and the walls were panelled from floor to ceiling with that same patterned zinc. It was painted a pale shade of green and the flower pattern was so delicate that it looked like wallpaper.

The bedrooms all led off that same dark passage and had french windows opening on to the verandah. ‘We often sleep out here,' she said. ‘It's wonderful when it's cooler. Daddy won't have a dogger on the place, so we've plenty of dingoes. Sometimes, out here, I'll lie awake listening to their calls. I've counted as many as a dozen calling at one time, all round the house and quite close.'

‘Doesn't your Alsatian see them off?'

‘Yla? No, of course not – she likes them around. But we have to lock her up when she's on heat. She got away once and you can see the result, that dingo cross, Butch. We don't worry much about him. He spends most of his time roaming the Windbreaks, and when he does come back he's worn out, just skin and bone, and serve him right. He's a womanizer.' She laughed, glancing up at me as we moved back into the dimness of the passage, where she opened the door opposite and took me into a room facing north, which was part study, part office. ‘My father's den,' she called it. Bookcases crammed with books and magazines, a rack of guns, and everywhere rock samples, most of them tabbed with a map reference to indicate where they had been picked up. There was a big mahogany desk, bare wood showing through the worn leather top, and a black upholstered swivel chair with the stuffing visible in patches. The desk was littered with papers held down with pieces of rock and on the floor beside it was a large steel canister, dome-topped and painted cream. It caught my eye because I hadn't expected to find such a modern instrument in a house that didn't seem to have changed in fifty years.

‘That's Daddy's microscope.' She took the dome cover off so that I could see. ‘It's Swiss.'

I nodded. ‘A Wild Heerbrugg.' I was puzzled because it was stereoscopic, the sort geologists use for examining core samples. ‘Does he know much about mineralogy?'

‘Only what he's read.' And she added, ‘D'you know how much it cost? – over eight hundred dollars. Enough to keep this place going for a couple of months the way we're living at the moment. And it was only a passing craze,' she added, the heat giving an edge to her voice. ‘He was down at the mine every day for almost a month, collecting samples, examining them; and then suddenly he abandoned the whole thing.' She replaced the dome.

‘When was this?'

‘Oh, about a year ago. It was just after the iron ore company took over the Watersnake lease. They had to pay compensation, of course, and he saw an advertisement for this microscope in a copy of the
Sydney Morning. Herald
somebody'd left at Andie's place.' She got out her handkerchief and touched her brow, mopping at the beads of perspiration. ‘He had this wild idea that if he spent some of the Watersnake money prospecting around Golden Soak he'd make our fortune. For a time he was like a child with a new toy, full of excitement, staying up till all hours poring over the results. He went down into the mine, too, which scared me stiff – the entrance has been boarded up for years. He was quite convinced the Watersnake people would bring him luck.' She looked at me, smiling a little sadly. ‘It's sacred land, y'see – sacred to the Pukara, the Watersnake people. Grandfather was initiated into the tribe. There's a lot about them in his Journal – their rites, their way of life, how they survived in near-desert country.' She nodded to some paddles of dark brown wood hung on the wall above an old R/T set. ‘Those are from the Watersnake. They're message sticks given him by the Pukara.' There were more in a pile on one of the bookcases, all intricately patterned. She said they had been found in a cave in a little rock gorge below The Governor. Then she took me over to a large scale map stuck flat on the wall opposite the window, an aeronautical chart that covered most of the Pilbara. The boundaries of Jarra Jarra were inked in red. ‘Like a billy goat, isn't it?' She laughed and I saw that she was right. Jarra Jarra formed the body, stretching away to the east, and the head was represented by the Watersnake, the two leases connected by the narrow neck of the Robinson Gap. The goat image was completed by a beard, a vee of land extending in a south-easterly direction and embracing the peaks of Padtherung and Coondewanna. Near the tip of it was a small hieroglyphic of crossed pick and hammer and the name Golden Soak Mine printed against it.

‘The iron ore people needed the Watersnake for the new township they're planning over towards Perry's Camp. The first thing they did, of course, was to close the Gap, and about five weeks ago, when Daddy found a mob of cattle pressed up against their brand new fence, he had Tom cut the wire. That was when we started driving. She turned towards the door. ‘Well, it's done now, all except the odd bunch. I just hope nobody finds out till we've had some rain.'

‘I'd like to have a look at your grandfather's Journal some time,' I said.

‘Of course.'

She was out in the passage now, the door held open for me, and I stood there, looking around at the clutter of things in that extraordinary, den, the radio, the paddles of patterned wood, the rock samples – I was thinking of the long hours he must have spent here, worrying about the future. And that incongruous microscope, the sudden burst of enthusiasm. ‘What made him abandon Golden Soak as the solution to your difficulties?'

She shook her head, her eyes staring at me, luminous in the dimly lit passage. ‘I don't know. I think he just came to the conclusion there wasn't any point.'

‘Suddenly?'

‘Yes. Suddenly. You do, sometimes. You have a period of wild optimism, working like crazy, then, suddenly, you run out of steam. Haven't you ever experienced that?'

I nodded slowly, thinking of Balavedra. But then I'd only abandoned hope when things had got beyond my control, and I'd found a solution – of a sort. I followed her out of the room and she shut the door. ‘I'm going to have a rest now,' she said. ‘I advise you to do the same.'

I spent the afternoon on the bed in my room, stripped to my underpants. It was stiflingly hot, but at least I could sweat in comfort, and I needed time to think, to sort out my impressions and make up my mind what the hell I was going to do. There was nothing for me here and not much hope that Kadek would assist me financially if I did hitch a ride down to Kalgoorlie. I retrieved the letter from the pocket of my trousers and read it through again:

Dear Alec:

You missed me in Perth by two days. I got here Christmas Day. Hell of a place to spend Christmas, but I'm in on a mining deal near here at Ora Banda and my partner needed me on the spot. I got your letters and I'm sorry to hear you ran out of ore. I think I told you my philosophy – if you do strike lucky, let others in on the gravy before you're scraping the bottom of the bowl. You should have floated your mine on the market while you were still into high grade ore.

I've nothing for you myself. I hire consultants when I need them. Few companies in Australia are big enough to employ experts on the staff, and those that are usually find them within the organization. I suggest you set yourself up as a mining consultant in Perth. There is still a shortage of qualified men out here, particularly those who can produce geological reports for the smaller companies that match the expectations of their shareholders. I can certainly introduce you to some useful people. I shall be here about a week, then back in Perth. Come and see me when you are next there. I have just started a mining newsletter and the services of a man of your qualifications and experience would give added weight to my recommendations. I am sure you realize how mutually profitable this could be.

I lay back, staring up at the ceiling and thinking about Kadek. I had no illusions about the sort of man he was. But though self-seeking, entirely egotistic, he had still made a deep impression on me. Partly it was his enormous vitality. But I think it was also because of his background. He was of middle European extraction, part Slav, with dark, rather saturnine features, black hair, cold, calculating eyes and a mouth like a steel trap. ‘Nobody but a fool works underground.' There had been a suggestion of arrogance in his voice as he had said that. And then going on to tell me how his father had come out from Serbia between the wars and had ended up as a miner in Kalgoorlie, coughing his lungs out in a tin shack within sight of the Golden Mile. And Kadek had watched him die, with no sense of loss or sadness, no compunction even, only a feeling of contempt for the man who had given him life and then failed to provide him with an education to match his wits.

I picked up the letter again, relieved that he didn't know my real circumstances.…

Finally, you ask about the Golden Soak Mine. Work stopped there in 1937 and it was offered for sale. It was later withdrawn, no buyers. It's gold, of course, and if it were uneconomic then, it would be doubly so now. Since you're staying with the Garrety's you'll have discovered all this for yourself by the time you get my letter. But while you're up there you might care to make enquiries about rumours of a copper deposit somewhere to the east of Lake Disappointment. Big Bill Garrety's partner was a gambler named Pat McIlroy and when they came unstuck financially McIlroy took off into the interior and was never heard of again. How he knew of the deposit and whether he ever found it I've no idea, but it's still talked about as McIlroy's Monster and there's an abo up at Nullagine claims his father was on the expedition. Chris Culpin, who is in on the Ora Banda deal with me, picked this up in the Palace bar here from a youngster who had just done a survey in the Nullagine area. The abo's name is Wally and you'll find him at the Conglomerate Hotel. It's a rum story, and even rummer that it should crop up again after all these years. See what you can find out. If there is any truth in it, I can tell you this – right now it would be every bit as good as Lasseter's Golden Reef. By which I mean it would fire the imagination of punters throughout Australia. Good luck to you!

Ferdie Kadek

McIlroy's Monster! I savoured the sound of it, speaking it aloud, my eyes closed against the slatted glare from the shutters. The word Monster conjured visions of a gigantic deposit, a mountain of ore. I remembered Mt Whaleback, huge in the dawn, sprawled dark against the sunrise, and this was copper, not iron. McIlroy was an Irishman presumably. A gambler, Kadek had said. A crook, Ed Garrety had called him, and dead for over thirty years. Yet his Monster still lived, the subject of bar talk in Nullagine. Had he invented the whole thing?

I was thinking then about the country between the Great Sandy and the Gibson deserts, the miles of emptiness, the blinding red heat of it. Christ! it was hot enough here in this darkened room. Nobody in his senses, however desperate, would go out into that, chasing a will o' the wisp of his own invention.