Tommo & Hawk (62 page)

Some of these gold getters look eager and impatient to arrive while others are thoughtful, or wear a dogged, abstracted air. A few men smile sheepishly as we pass, as if half-ashamed of their errand. These men tend to be of the syndicates with cash behind them. Their equipment is new, and their firearms look unused, the butts glossy with varnish. Their horses too are stout, and wear harnesses fresh from the saddler's hands. But as Caleb Soul observes, these smartly turned out men are no more likely to find luck than the humblest man they pass on foot.

Some of those on foot are still in their city clothes. They are clearly clerks and shop assistants, their coats over their arms and their once-white shirts grimy with the dust and dirt of the open road. It's as if in the middle of adding a column of figures, or while selling a customer an ounce of shag tobacco or a set of suspenders, they have cast aside the task at hand and set off to seek their fortunes down the Parramatta Road.

Others are working men, wearing trousers tied with a lace below the knee. They already seem hardened to the pick. No doubt they too dream of finding enough gold never to have to return to their previous station in life.

Several push wheelbarrows loaded with all their possessions and such miner's tools as they can afford. Those who have already adopted the clothes of the miner wear gay-coloured woollen shirts and comforters and Californian sombreros of every hue and shape.

All these men have one thing in common. In every head resides a dream of riches, of castles in the air with flags flying from the turrets. Alas, most will return to their homes poorer than when they left, to find their wives bitter and their children starving. All this I'm told by Caleb Soul, who has observed every aspect of life on the goldfields and has not yet been tempted to give up his job at Tucker & Co. for it.

In fact, as he reveals to us, Caleb has quite a different ambition. He hopes one day to return to the art of pills and potions, to work as a pharmacist as he was trained to do. 'Liquor makes 'em sick and my pills and potions will make 'em well again!' He'll work at selling grog to the goldfields until he has sufficient to start in the chemist business. He laughs. 'It's the same business but at different ends, so to speak!'

Caleb now suggests, though perhaps only half seriously, that we should both come in with him in the chemist business, as he knows a great deal about medicines and selling, but very little of keeping books. 'Hawk, you will be the bookkeeper. I hear naught but good things about your penmanship and accuracy. Captain Tucker says your ledgers are a veritable work of art.'

'And me?' jokes Tommo. 'What a partner I would make! Good for nothing but cards. I'm most grateful you got the poppy paste for me, Caleb, but that's about all I ever wants to know about chemicals.'

It seems as good an opportunity as any, and so I tell our friend of my decision to turn prize-fighter and the real reason for our journey. Caleb greets my announcement with enthusiasm, and my fight becomes the focus of many a discussion.

We move southwest on the road to Lambing Flat along with a vast troop of men. There are almost as many men returning from the diggings as there are going to them. Their clothes are tattered and they appear half-starved. They are sullen and withdrawn and seldom respond to our greetings. Occasionally one will shake his head and spit at the ground as he passes those headed for the diggings. Mostly they stumble on unseeing, too disillusioned to care about the many fools who follow in their footsteps. Still, I notice that not one of our gold-seeking compatriots turns back at the dismal sight of these broken men.

*

After six and a half days on the road, we are well past Goulburn and have entered gold country. We hope to arrive at Lambing Flat shortly past noon. In the morning, we travelled through forested countryside, but it is now as if we have taken a journey to the moon. Dirt mounds and holes abound and not a single tree can be seen. What was once a wilderness of green and living stems has been chopped down to become hoists, crude shaft-heads, sluices, cradles, cabins, rough fences - dry sticks doing service to man's greed for gold. It rained last night and the dust has settled which, from all accounts, is something to be most thankful for. I am amazed to discover that a town, albeit constructed mostly of shanties of canvas, has risen so quickly on what must have been a wild and sylvan landscape not so long ago.

There must be ten thousand tents here, some with crude huts adjoined to them, most with bark chimneys of every sort sticking out from the canvas. Some even have small yards with fences and chicken coops, while others are not much more than bark and flour bag humpies. A few shanties have walls of no more than three feet, made from stones piled up together with a pole at each corner, and a canvas roof. We pass a wattle and daub cottage with a single glass window set somewhat askew in the wall, the most solid residence to be seen.

For every tent or shelter, there appears to be a hundred holes in the ground. If you were to look down from one of the rolling hills which frame the valley, and which themselves are almost as pocked, punctured and scraped raw as the flat ground below, it might seem as though some ragged alien army is camped here.

The town itself is chock-a-block with miners in woollen shirts and Californian sombreros, these items of headwear being almost as numerous as the ubiquitous cabbage-tree hat. Visitors and newcomers are easily recognised, dressed as they are in their grey or black city clothes, looking as drab as a convocation of curates.

The main street - if the largest of Lambing Flat's bumpy thoroughfares may be so called - was churned to mud early in the day. Now the noon sun has baked it dry, and it is so rutted and crowded that we cannot proceed any further. Caleb Soul pulls up beside a large tent.

'We'll stay around here,' he announces. 'Find a spot to pitch our tent nearby. The tucker here is good and the helpings plentiful. It's only mutton and damper mostly, Hawk, but I know you'll fancy their bread pudding with plenty o' plump raisins. They also make an Afghani curry which is delicious taken with rice.'

'How do we reach the centre of town?' Tommo asks.

'Not sure there is such a place, lad,' Caleb Soul laughs. Then, understanding why Tommo asks, he adds, 'Tommo, you must allow me to find out about a card game for you. Don't do it yourself, or it will be immediately concluded that you are a cardsharp. A mining camp may look like mayhem, but it has its own rough kind of order that must be observed.'

Tommo has grown to respect Caleb Soul during- the course of the journey and nods at this advice.

'Why don't you accompany me on my rounds tomorrow and get the feel of life at the diggings?' Caleb suggests.

He takes out his hunter watch and clicks it open. 'I will meet you back here for dinner at six o'clock. In the meantime, perhaps you lads could pitch the tent and tether the horses. I'll arrange for hay to be brought, as there's no green grass anywhere about! It will be a little cramped for the three of us in the tent, but we shall manage well enough if you can bear my snoring.'

He moves away, then turns back to us. 'Oh, mind you don't pay more than two shillings a night rent to the cove on whose claim we stay. Explain to him why we're here or he'll become suspicious.' He grins. 'Everyone in the diggings is suspicious of everyone else, and doubly suspicious of a couple of faces they don't readily recognise.'

'Such as a seven foot nigger and a little dandy?' I ask.

Caleb Soul laughs uproariously on his way as Tommo punches me hard in the stomach.

We soon find a cove nearby who agrees we may put up our tent on his claim and after some argument agrees to a rent of three shillings. I am about to pay him when Tommo stops me.

'Wait on,' he says to the man. 'Show us your claim licence, then.'

'What licence would that be?' replies the man cockily.

Tommo points to a board nailed to a small post which has a figure written upon it. 'The licence what shows that number.'

'Oh,' he says, 'that licence. Me mate what's working another claim has it in his pocket. I'll show it to you at sunset.'

'Right, I see,' retorts Tommo. 'That must be the mate what struck it rich in the claim what he staked out the other side of sunset? Garn, piss orf, will ya!'

The man grins. 'It were worth a try. Couldn't lend me a shilling, could ya?'

'Bugger off,' says Tommo, 'before me brother belts ya one.'

So we wander on until we come across a woman outside a bark shanty. She's feeding a cat scraps from a tin plate and it's questionable who looks mangier, the cat or the woman. For two shillings she agrees we may pitch our tent and, for another, we may tether the horses to a stump on her claim. She goes in to fetch her claim licence and asks upon her return if we'd like a cup of tea. 'It's bush tea but not too bad if you closes your eyes and holds yer nose!'

We laugh but refuse politely.  Our bones ache from sitting too long in the trap and we are both eager to stretch our legs and look around. 'There'll be a cuppa here when you gets back, then,' she says. 'No sugar though, run out weeks ago.'

We set off and find what we take to be the centre of the town, though as Caleb has said it's hard to think of it as such. It's a hodge-podge of shacks and holes and people -many more people than I had ever supposed.

Caleb Soul has told us that Lambing Flat, known to all as the poor man's diggings, is the most profitable market for Tucker & Co. outside of Sydney. As he explained, almost every man who is prepared to work hard and who owns a pick and shovel can make a wage here and some, occasionally, make much more. 'In the grog business,' he observed, 'a lot of men with a little money in their pockets is much more advantageous than a few men with a lot. There are over fifteen thousand souls in this district, nearly all of 'em drinkers.'

Caleb does not have a very high opinion of the folks to be found here. He says Lambing Flat contains the human dregs from all the other diggings where fossicking for gold is more hazardous. Here, the easiest gold can be found at three feet or less, and the very hardest from sixty to eighty feet. Every soul in these diggings can make a go of his claim if he is willing to put in a good day's work.

Unfortunately, many are not prepared to make the effort. While the Chinaman is not afraid to bend his back and does not expect to come by his wealth easily, his European counterpart is not so fond of small earnings and hard work in the hot sun. Every day he looks to strike it big and will take up a new claim with great expectations. He works it for a few weeks, grows impatient at the small pickings and abandons the site for what he believes is a more propitious one elsewhere - whereupon the  Chinaman, who  seldom starts a claim from scratch, moves in to rework the ground the European has abandoned. When the European is again disappointed and returns to his old quarters, he finds the Chinaman has worked it at a nice profit to himself, and so he demands it back!

Their hard work has made the Chinese the subject of the white man's resentment and hatred. The Miner's Gazette scurrilously describes them as 'filthy, immoral, treacherous and quarrelsome, heathen celestials, who waste water, steal gold, ruin good digging ground, spread leprosy, and practise secret vices on the bodies of white women and white boys.' It is firmly believed by many that the Chinese rape white women and children at every turn, without an ounce of evidence to support it - although some men will swear blind they've seen them.

Caleb Soul takes umbrage at this. 'It is often enough said that the Chinese are lesser beings than the white folk, but I count them a better breed than most of the European rabble at Lambing Flat. This particular diggings has the worst class of men of any goldfield I've seen. It's crawling with adventurers of the lowest type,' he confided to us before we arrived.

'I had hoped for the worst class of man with a pocketful of gold to lose at the card table,' Tommo had replied. 'Poor men with a little to spend may be good for your trade, Caleb, but for mine they be a disaster!'

Caleb Soul laughed at this. 'There are sufficient here who've struck it rich to fill your pockets ten times over, lad. Some of these men did not once have five pounds, and are now worth thousands. Poor men who grow rich overnight are careless with their money.'

At my suggestion, Tommo and I go into one of the general stores, to see what the trading is like here. The shop we enter is a tent like any other, but a bit larger and squarer, with a flag flying from the tent pole to denote that it is a shopkeeper's establishment.

I am unprepared for the scene that meets us within. Laid out before us is a collection of every known object used by man in the course of living. How such an accumulation of contradictory merchandise may be gathered in a lifetime defies the imagination. Yet the storekeeper has obviously managed to bring them all together here, to one of the remotest regions of New South Wales, from all corners of the globe. From sugar candy to potted anchovies, East India pickles to bottles of Bass's pale English ale, slippers to stays, babies' booties to picks and shovels, every form of mining equipment, household essential, foodstuff and frippery is here. A pair of herrings hangs over a bag of sugar. Nearby lie raisins, dried sausages, saddles, harnesses, ribbons and bonnets. Cheeses in the round and loaves of bread are stacked on the floor next to bars of yellow soap. Tins of every conceivable type of vegetable, fish and meat, and even a crate of champagne, line one side of the tent. All this I see in my first casual observation. A closer inspection would reveal a thousand more of these et ceteras, I'm sure.

The shop is crowded with men swearing and guffawing, children bawling and squealing, and women wagging their tongues - their shrill voices rising above the buzz. Banter, blubbing, brouhaha, laughter and earnest talk fill the tent.

In one corner stands the storekeeper. He seems undismayed by the cacophony around him and is buying gold from a miner, no doubt using every trick known to cheat a free fraction of an ounce from the precious hoard for himself. The storekeeper has put a priority on dealing with the miner and ignores the crowd waiting to be served. Not wishing to buy anything, we take our leave.