The Golden Soak (7 page)

So the Monster was real. At least to him. Real enough for him to risk his life to find it, and he had died in the attempt. A fly crawled at the corner of my nostrils. I flicked it off, pulling the sheet up over my head, and then I was dozing, picturing that Irishman dying of thirst by the edge of a salt lake and babbling to himself of a mountain of copper somewhere to the east. It sounded incredible. Incredible that it could remain unexplored all these years. But anything was possible … anything at all in this extraordinary country.

TWO

I woke shortly after six to the sound of horses. It was cooler now, a slight breeze reaching me from the shutters. And my mind was made up. Somehow I had to get myself to Nullagine. The decision was a subconscious one, made while I had slept.

I got up, had a quick wash, and when I was dressed, I went out through the french windows to find Tom and two blacks unsaddling their mounts, the camel watching them and the galahs flocked in the trees above. The horses were thin and very tired, their heads drooped, their bodies covered in sweat and dust. They were turned loose and I followed them as they moved dejectedly to join the others up among the ghost gums.

From this higher ground I looked down at Jarra Jarra, the house and outbuildings golden in the slanting rays of the evening sun, and sitting there among the white boles of the gum trees, with the horses browsing near on the hard, dry vegetation, I realized how much effort had gone into the building of this settlement deep in the bush. Now the eagles kept voracious watch; I could see three of them circling slowly on stiff-spread wings, and everywhere I looked, from the hills behind me to the long brown plain with the track winding through it, it was all brown, an arid, burned-up, waterless brown.

I sat there for a long time, nothing moving, only the wedge-tailed eagles in the sky and no sound except the horses behind me. The sense of solitude was immense. It was difficult to picture it in the old days with the bunkhouses full and the distant boundaries of the property a week's ride away. The sun set, the sky flared, a flame of fire slowly darkening to the colour of blood, and the land reflecting the sky's violence. A shiver ran through me. I was gazing eastward, the endless vista of the dried-up land turning to purple, the purple and the red divided by a hard line where land met sky. I was thinking of McIlroy again. A gambler. I was a gambler, too – both of us desperate. Somewhere out there, beyond the sharp line of the horizon, his bones lay white in the emptiness of the desert. And beyond his bones, still deeper into the emptiness.… I was thinking of the Monster, seeing in my mind's eye the curved back of a hill shimmering on the edge of visibility.

I got suddenly to my feet. I must be mad even to think of it. I was a stranger in a strange land, alone, with no money and nobody to help me. The Monster was just a dream.

I went quickly down the slope, back to the house, knowing it was crazy, yet still under the spell of its fascination. Mt Isa, the biggest copper mine in Australia, way over on the other side of the country – somebody must have discovered it. And if there was a mountain of copper in the trackless wastes of northern Queensland, why shouldn't there be one in the empty quarter between Great Sandy and the Gibson?

Janet met me, her pale frock glimmering in the dusk as I came between the sheds to the little patio. ‘I was getting worried about you. Tom said you'd gone up on to the Windbreaks.'

‘I went up to see the sunset.'

‘I suppose you thought it beautiful.' Her voice sounded flat and weary. ‘But you'll get used to it. It's like that night after night here in the dry. In the end you'll feel as I do – you'll hate it.' She turned and went inside. ‘Would you like a beer while we're waiting for Daddy? He's listening in on the radio. Port Hedland. It's the evening schedule. Soon as he's finished we'll have dinner.'

The cool house was cosy now, the light on and a generator humming in the distance. There was a white damask cloth on the table, silver candlesticks and wine glasses of cut crystal. ‘Do you always dine like this?' I asked.

She laughed. ‘No, of course not. We're usually going to bed about now. Saves running the generator, and anyway this last month we've all been away by first light.'

‘You shouldn't have altered your routine for me.'

‘Why not?' Her eyes were bright, a glow of excitement. ‘Besides, it's New Year's Eve. I do believe you had forgotten.' She gave a little sigh. ‘We might have forgotten it, too. We haven't much to celebrate, have we? But you've given us an excuse. And we've earned it. Oh, my goodness we have.'

Sitting there, drinking ice-cold beer and seeing that girl, so young and gay – it was hard to realize that they and the station, the whole world her grandfather had created was on the brink of final disaster. ‘What exactly did McIlroy do?' I asked.

But she didn't seem to know. ‘I could never get Daddy to talk about that. Y'see the world he grew up in was so different to the world he inherited after the war. Before the crash, Jarra Jarra was the centre of the social life of the Pilbara – they had race days here and balls, a way of life that is quite unbelievable now.'

‘And you don't know anything about McIlroy's Monster?'

She shook her head. ‘I'd never even heard of it until you mentioned it today.' She was staring at me, her eyes wide in the harsh glare of the naked light bulb. ‘Why? You're not taking it seriously, are you?'

I slid away from that, asking her instead about the Journal. But apparently the Journal she had typed didn't refer to it. ‘It doesn't mention McIlroy either. There's a reference to closing the mine, but only because it was running at a loss. The mine was closed long before the crash, about a year I think. And there's no mention of financial difficulties. It stops before then, y'see.'

‘So it's not complete?'

‘Oh no. It goes up to October 1938. Then it stops. The last entry is about a trip he made out of Port Hedland in a pearling lugger. He was very interested in pearling and the coastal fisheries and owned a number of boats operating out of Port Hedland and Broome. The last words are:
Picked up the news about Munich on the wireless as we were coming into Port Hedland
– and that's all. It just ends there, abruptly.' She bent to light the candles and I was suddenly conscious of her femininity. ‘I'll show you after dinner. A lot of it isn't really interesting at all, not to you at any rate – about the family and the people round, life generally. But it does give a picture of what it was like living here on one of the biggest stations in Australia, and there are bits that are really quite graphic, particularly the early pages. How he discovered Golden Soak, for instance. I thought at one time of sending it to a publisher. But that'd mean Sydney, and though he was a great figure here in the Pilbara, I doubt whether anybody's ever heard of Big Bill Garrety over in the East.'

Her father came in then with a bottle of wine, holding it carefully. ‘I don't know whether it's still drinkable,' he said. ‘It's been here a long time now – one of the few bottles left after the old man died. It's from the Barossa Valley in South Australia.' It was a red wine and I looked at the label as he poured it – St Emilion 1942. ‘A lot of our wines have been given French names – silly, when they're quite different.'

Janet had cooked the meal herself, steaks with salad and chips. ‘Quite like old times,' her father said. He was smiling, his face younger and less careworn in the candlelight. ‘Well, here's to you and the success of your visit to Australia.' He raised his glass and I saw it was less than half full.

Janet nodded and she too raised her glass. ‘I have a feeling …' She hesitated, smiling at me over the wine – ‘I've a feeling now you're here things will change. Here's luck – to us all.' And she drank, quickly.

A shadow moved in the patio entrance behind her and in the darkness outside I saw Tom standing, squat and black. Ed Garrety had seen him, too, and he rose and went outside. He stood talking there for a moment, then he came back and sat down again, his face sombre as he started in on his steak.

‘What is it?' Janet asked. ‘Couldn't they shift that bunch but of the gully?'

‘They shifted them all right. Got them through the Gap.'

‘Then what is it?'

‘A vehicle of some sort. Down by the old shearing shed. They saw the lights when they were on the Robinson slope.'

‘Heading for the mine?'

He nodded. ‘That Toyota I wouldn't wonder.' The twitch was back at the side of his mouth. ‘I'll go down there after dinner and rout them out. Those damned prospectors think they own the country.' And he added, his face darkened with anger, his voice trembling, ‘That's the curse of this mineral boom. Having a mine that's marked on every map – you might just as well put a notice up on the Highway saying “Prospectors Welcome”. They don't realize it isn't a lease. We own Golden Soak and the flat land to the east of it, the mineral rights as well. That was one thing my father did get out of the government.'

We ate in silence after that, the mood changed, all the pleasure gone out of the meal. It made me realize how isolated they were, how vulnerable to intruders.

Later, when we had finished and were sitting over our coffee, Ed Garrety began to talk about the old days when he was a boy and there were over a dozen men working at the mine and some twenty blacks with their families living around the homestead, anything up to a hundred thousand sheep roaming the station. I think he was just talking to put the thought of intruders out of his mind, and he went on to describe what it had been like when he took over, after he had come back from Java at the end of the war. That was when I learned about his son. It was his room I was occupying and he had been killed in Vietnam. ‘Perhaps it's as well,' he murmured. ‘Henry loved this place and I wouldn't have wanted him to see it as it is now.'

‘D'you think I like it?' Janet snapped.

‘No. No, of course I don't. But it's different for a girl.'

I saw two spots of colour flare in her cheeks and I said quickly, ‘He was in the Australian forces then?'

‘That's right. Infantry. He was a real fighting boy, At eighteen this place wasn't big enough to hold him. He wanted to see the world, wanted action. Then we got ourselves involved in Vietnam. He was one of the first casualties.' He drained his glass, but didn't refill it, only ours. And then he got to his feet without a word and went through into the passage. He came out a moment later with a rifle in his hand. ‘Be back in time to see the New Year in with you,' he said to his daughter. And then to me, ‘We listen in to it on the wireless, y'know. Makes us feel we still belong to the world outside.' He nodded. ‘Back inside of a couple of hours.'

‘Would you like me to come with you?' I asked. But he shook his head. ‘They'll go as soon as they know we own the mineral rights. The entrance to the mine is boarded up anyway. It's unsafe, y'see.' He went out then, calling to Yla, and a moment later we heard the Land-Rover drive off.

‘I'm glad you didn't press him,' Janet said, adding with an impish gleam, ‘I know you'd rather be driving down to the mine than sitting here with me.'

‘I'm sorry if my disappointment showed.'

‘Oh, don't worry.' She was grinning, a flash of white teeth. ‘I'm used to men who think mines are more important than women.' And then, suddenly serious again. ‘Daddy's quite hopelessly possessive about that bloody mine. Won't let anybody go near it.' She got up. ‘I'll get you the Journal. Then at least you can read about it – how it all started.' She came back a few minutes later with an old box file full of typed pages. She opened it and placed it on the table in front of me. ‘You'll learn more from this than you would from Daddy. Sometimes I think he's scared of Golden Soak.'

‘Because it's unsafe?'

‘No, it's more complicated than that – a love-hate feeling he has.' She was turning the pages of typescript. ‘I can't explain. I don't really understand it myself. But when he was a young man, think how exciting it must have been for him. Going down there, working with the miners – it made a change from riding fences and working sheep in the heat and the dust. And the miners themselves, he always says they were a different breed. He got a great kick out of the fact that we had a mine on the station.' Her fingers smoothed a page. ‘There you are. December 22nd, 1905, and a drought every bit as bad as we've got now. Start reading from there.'

‘But why should he hate the mine?'

‘I think you'll understand when you read some of the later passages.' Her hand was on my shoulder, her breath on my cheek, and I heard her sigh. ‘He won't talk about it. But I know he does hate it.' She straightened up. ‘You've got to remember what a drain Golden Soak has been. It never made money, not after the first few years. And yet, owning a mine like we do, there's always the hope at the back of our minds – that one day it'll turn out beaut and make our fortunes and we'll be rich and live happily ever after.' She was laughing, a note of wistfulness. ‘You read that while I clear the things away. Then you'll understand how my grandfather must have felt, why we all have this stupid, quite illogical feeling that we're sitting on a fortune, a sort of Pandora's box, if only we knew how to open the lid.'

‘The official price of gold hasn't changed in thirty years,' I said gently.

‘I know that. But it doesn't make any difference. I still dream dreams that one day.…' She shrugged, turning quickly away and beginning to clear the table. ‘Maybe after a few days, if you can spare the time, Daddy'll get used to you being here and I'll be able to persuade him to take you down. Actually, I've never been down myself. The ladders are gone and the winch gear broken. He always said it was too dangerous.' She went out then and by the light from the single bulb and the flickering candles I began to read Big Bill Garrety's account of driving cattle from the Turee Creek area to the goldfields at Nullagine: