Golden Soak

TWO

It wasn’t much more than a couple of miles out to the airport, but it seemed a lot longer with Culpin sitting morose and tense at the wheel, not saying a word. And I was thinking of my interview with Petersen, wondering whether to ask questions or keep my mouth shut.

When Culpin had dropped me in Macdonald Street, I hadn’t gone into Western Mining or the School of Mines, but had made straight for Petersen Geophysics, which was in Maritana, close by the railway bridge. Petersen was in, and when I showed him the samples, he agreed with me that it looked like antimony. He was a big man with a long sun-tanned face and hair the colour of bleached straw. He put one of the samples under a microscope and nodded. ‘The gold looks goot, at least fife ounces.’ His accent was strong, his manner non-committal. ‘The antimony — ‘ he shrugged. ‘That is for the laboratory to say. You want I do you an analysis?’

I nodded and asked him how soon he could do it. ‘Ve are snowed under, if you can say that in this goddammed country.’ Big teeth showed in a grin. ‘Also, this is a different kind of yob. Most of our lab tests are for nickel. We never before haf been asked for antimony tests.’ However, he agreed in the end to do it as a rush job, I think because he was intrigued. And once that was settled I asked him about Blackridge.

‘Blackridge? You ask about Blackridge — why?’ His slate grey eyes looked up at me over the top of the microscope. And when I told him I would be going out to look over the mine that afternoon, he said, ‘Blackridge is not like this.’ He held up the samples. ‘This is reef quartz, no? But Blackridge is surface dust. Half the work of my laboratory is concerning itself with dust picked up on the surface. This is an old country geologically and because a handful of dust picked up on the surface can indicate the rock structure below ground, men are easily fooled. You know Chris Culpin?’

I nodded and he stared at me a moment. Then he seemed to make up his mind. ‘Okay. You ask Chris where that dust come from. I ask him — last night in the Pal. I say is that yob you give me on the level? Ja, I tell him, there is nickel there. But there is also some rumours. You know what he say to me?’ The big teeth opened, a grin so wide that he looked like a horse about to laugh. ‘Pete, he say, you mind your own bloddy business or I’ll ram those tombstones of yours so far down your throat they’ll bite you in the arse.’ The horse’s mouth gaped wide, a gusty roar of laughter. ‘So I t’ink that is a yob I don’t want any more of. Nickel — pah!’ He had risen to his feet and he patted me on the back, still roaring with laughter, his fist like a pile driver. ‘I tell you because you are new here and I like your country. England is goot with green grass and trees like Sweden, eh? So be careful. This is better.’ He was looking with interest again at the sample in his big hand. ‘I tell my feller you want the results tomorrow. Mebbe you get it, mebbe no. Ve do our best, eh?’

The plane was late, the parking lot already thick with cars as we drew in. Culpin switched off, then turned to me. ‘I dunno what Ferdie has in mind, but this deal’s important, see.’ He stared at me a moment, his hands gripping the wheel. Then he got out and I followed him into the wood-verandahed passenger terminal.

The special flight was northbound after Kalgoorlie and the building was crowded with men headed for the bush or back up to the iron ore company towns. They were in shorts or khaki longs, with wide-brimmed hats, some with packs. There were a few women and children, and others like ourselves meeting people off the plane, but the place still had a frontier atmosphere. The interior was dark after the blinding heat outside. Culpin started talking to a station manager bound for Wittenoom and I went back on to the verandah where it was cooler, the ghost of a breeze raising dust on the airfield.

Soon I could hear the drone of a plane coming in from behind the terminal. In a few minutes Kadek would be stepping out of it, expecting me to help him sell a dud mine. Oh yes, I’m not going to pretend it was sprung on me so that I didn’t know what I was doing. I hadn’t wasted the few hours I had had on my own that morning.

The plane when I saw it was low on the horizon. I lit a cigarette and leaned on the balustrade, watching it as it started the wide circuit of the airfield. One of the Cessnas parked on the apron in front roared into life. It had loaded a survey party and now it was off, scuttling for the runway end. My gaze switched back to the incoming plane, a glint of silver in the sun.

I watched it turn on to the flight path for landing, and my mind was still undecided. I was thinking of what the English geologist I had seen at Western Mining had said. Carter had given me the better part of an hour, I think because he had heard of Trevis, Parkes amp; Pierce, and I had used the name of my old firm as an introduction. ‘It’s unique,’ he had said. ‘Most of Australia is unique, the flora, the fauna — and the geophysical nature of the country. It’s flat and it’s dry. Erosion occurs in situ, from wind and violent changes in the temperature. There’s no surface movement of the soil, no draining away in river beds.’ He had digressed for a moment, talking about the gold finds that had been made earlier in the century. They had been made over an area of about a million square miles, mainly in the mafic and ultra-mafic rocks of the greenstone belt. The same rocks that could produce nickel. These were Archaean rocks of the pre-Cambrian Shield which covered almost half Australia, outcropping in the Yilgarn Block, an area in the south-west that was about the size of Britain, and also in the smaller Pilbara Block, and continuing right through to the Centre, where the Shield was overlaid by sand and gravel. And then he was repeating what Petersen had said — ‘You can walk the Yilgarn and the Pilbara in the certain knowledge that what you find on the surface is a fair indication of the rock formation below ground.’

He talked about the stock market and the hangers-on in the Palace bar, but he saw it in perspective as an inevitable side-product of the boom, and the morals of it didn’t worry him. The fact that the mass of Australians had gone gambling mad and would get their fingers burned didn’t make any difference to what was happening on the ground, except that a lot of barren areas were being proved to be just that.

The plane was landing now, its wheels hitting the runway with a puff of smoke from the sun-hot tyres. Kadek belonged to the world of money that thrived on rumours, on leaked information and the dubious reports of scouts. Yet his world and Carter’s were all part of the same turmoil of excitement that had begun with Kambalda and a man called Cowcill searching the rock specimens in his garage more than a decade ago when uranium was what everyone was looking for.

I stubbed out my cigarette as the high-winged Fokker Friendship turned at the runway end, a bright blaze of metal in the sun. I was thinking of Petersen again, the way he had looked at me when I had asked him about Blackridge. I wished I had never mentioned it to that ugly Swede. It only complicated the issue. And now the plane was here, the roar of its engines drowning all sound as it swung into its parking position. The noise died to a whisper, the props stopped turning, then the fuselage gaped as the gangway was thrust against it and the passengers began to emerge. Kadek was one of the first, his dark face shaded by a panama hat and wearing a light blue suit.

He saw me, nodded and came across, nursing a slim briefcase under his arm. ‘Glad to see you again. You got my telegram? Good. Chris told me you had arrived.’ He gripped my hand, his eyes on mine, cold and calculating. And then he was introducing his companion, a quietly dressed man with a round friendly face. ‘This is Les Freeman. He’s chairman and managing director of Lone Minerals, a small but very go-ahead Sydney-based company.’ He glanced back at me, something in his eyes — a question mark, a challenge? ‘Les, I’d like you to meet Alec Falls of Trevis, Parkes amp; Pierce. He’s out here for one of the big London mining houses. Blackridge is one of the prospects he’s been asked to look over.’

I should have denied it straight away, but I was so stunned by the barefaced lie that I just stood there, saying nothing.

He was watching me closely, the thin line of his mouth just as I remembered it, like a steel trap. And he had remembered the name of the firm I had been working for when we had last met. ‘Have you been out to Blackridge yet?’ I heard myself say No, and he nodded. I could see the wheels turning in his mind, the way he was going to handle it. And I just stood there, silent, wondering what sort of a man I was. Later, of course, I told myself that it was Freeman’s fault for being so dumb. But that doesn’t give you absolution, and Freeman was a nice enough bloke, even if he was an accountant.

‘Where’s Chris?’ Kadek peered inside the terminal, saw him and gave a sharp, imperative jerk of his head that brought Culpin out in a hurry. ‘Did you book us in at the Palace?’

Culpin nodded. ‘I was lucky, a cancellation. But it’s just the one room. You’ll have to share.’

Kadek glanced at Freeman, who nodded. ‘Good, then let’s go.’ As we moved out to the ute, he dropped back beside me, speaking quietly. ‘Les knows nothing about mining. But his company badly needs a prospect, something he can feed the market with.’ He gripped my arm, squeezing it. ‘Don’t push it too hard. And keep it scientific. Your observations a little beyond his grasp. But not too far. Understand?’

I nodded. I understood all right. ‘We’ll talk about it later.’ I said. ‘After I’ve seen the mine. And I’ll want samples of my own analysed.’

He stopped then. ‘Why? What d’you mean?’ He was looking at me, his features hard and tense. But then he smiled, a conscious effort. ‘Nothing for you to worry about,’ he murmured, patting my arm. ‘The analysis is correct. And it was made by an independent firm.’

‘I know. I’ve seen Petersen.’

‘Then what’s your worry?’ His voice grated.

‘Surface dirt,’ I said.

‘And you want to dig down — do your own checking, eh?’ His face was still arranged in a smile, but I could feel his anger. ‘Well, let me tell you, I’ve done some checking myself. You start being awkward and I’ll be on to the Commonwealth Immigration Department right away. I don’t play for this sort of money with the gloves on.’ And then abruptly he offered me $2,000 — to help me find my feet out here. He smiled. It was a straight bribe and we both knew it, our eyes locked, each assessing the other, calculating. ‘Nothing for you to worry about,’ he repeated. ‘Petersen Geophysics has a good reputation.’ He glanced ahead to where his partner and Freeman had stopped by the ute. ‘And if anybody takes the can, it’s Chris.’

It was said cold-bloodedly and with no suggestion of any regret.

‘You mean, in the event of trouble, you’d — ’

‘I don’t mean anything,’ he snapped. ‘I’m just telling you. Freeman can get any geologist he likes. The surface dirt he picks up will confirm Petersen’s nickel percentages, and you’re in the clear whatever happens, Now, d’you want the money or don’t you?’

I hesitated. I’d less than twenty dollars left and that analysis to pay for. It was manna from heaven and I heard myself say, ‘Have you got it on you — cash?’

He nodded, still watching me closely as we moved on to join the others. ‘Alec’s coming out to the mine with us,’ he called out to Freeman. ‘Unless you’ve any objections? He hasn’t seen it yet, only the assay figures. He was out at the Geophysics lab checking with Petersen this morning.’

It was a thirty mile drive out to Ora Banda and I was in the back with the sun blazing down. At Broad Arrow we turned off the Leonora highway on to a dirt road, the dust streaming behind us and the truck rattling over the ribbed surface. It was a hot, uncomfortable ride. I was alone in the back, my shoulders braced against the burning metal of the cab, my eyes half-closed against the glare, watching the gums streaming by on either side, the sweat drying on my body as I thought of what I could do with that two thousand, and Golden Soak another Balavedra. It was the prospect of a fresh start that had sustained me through the long shipboard hours coming down across the world, and now the chance was there. I had always thought of myself as lucky, the man who could reach for the stars and grab hold where others were too scared, a loner to whom success was the essential life force. Maybe that’s why I had chosen mining. The pot of gold at the rainbow’s end.

If my younger brother had lived it might have been different. But he was stillborn, and after that my mother couldn’t have any more children. So I was the only one and had to make up for all the others. At least I think it was that, the need to live up to my mother’s expectations. And so, whenever I didn’t succeed I talked myself into believing that I had. My mother again, for my father was a local government official, a surveyor in the planning department, and she cast me in the role of buccaneer, somebody who could live on his wits and go right to the top. She was ambitious, and living always a little beyond our means, money had been tight. So money became important, particularly after I’d acquired Rosa.

Rosa! It wasn’t love. I realized that now. She was just the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen. And because other men wanted her, I had to have her for myself. I closed my eyes. God! How I longed for her, that slim beautiful body, the perfect breasts and the way she’d sit, quite naturally, but her legs unconsciously arranging themselves in open invitation. It seemed incongruous to be thinking of Rosa on that bumpy, dusty ride, but I hadn’t had a woman now for over two months and in this hot country I was feeling the need. I wanted a drink, too. And then I was thinking of the rock samples I had left with Petersen, and that girl — gold and antimony and the snub nose, all those freckles like specks of gold. The heat blazed and my blood throbbed, but it wasn’t the same — no vision there to meet my need.

I was still dreaming of Rosa when the gums fell back and I saw the pockmarks of old mineworkings in the red soil either side of us. The truck slowed. A car passed us and through a haze of dust I saw the wood facade of an hotel, empty and desolate. We were in a wide dirt street then, flanked by empty buildings; an old concert hall, and opposite it, on the other side, more empty buildings — a meat factory and the words Ora Banda Dining Rooms on a faded noticeboard. Two or three homesteads, and that was it. A ghost town, the buildings all of wood, tin-roofed and surrounded by a rusty litter of discarded household equipment and old abandoned vehicles.

Up the slight rise we passed the State Battery with its crusher and a small tailings dump. It looked as though it were still in use. Shortly afterwards we turned off the dirt road on to a track that wound haphazardly through the bush, the red gravel overlaid with black drifts like the scatterings of a coal cart, and everywhere mounds of earth marking the shallow shafts of departed gold diggers, the rusted debris of their camps. We swung round the end of a trenched line of diggings and stopped beside two abandoned tip trucks that lay on their sides flaking in the sun. The track on which they had run was rusted, half buried under a thin layer of windblown sand. We were in a grove of bronze-barked gums.

Culpin climbed out, looked up at me, his eyes squinting against the glare. ‘Hot enough for you?’ He grinned at me. ‘Do with a drink, eh?’ He reached into the cab and tossed me up a can of beer. I opened it and took a long swig, then climbed out and joined the others. They were standing in the shade drinking beer and eating sandwiches, looking across a flat area cratered with old workings to a timbered shaft head standing above a gaping hole, and Culpin was saying, ‘I remember it before the war, when the Three-eight was opened up. It had a cricket team and a football team then, and that hotel was fair humming with life.’ He was talking about Ora Banda. ‘Wouldn’t take much to start it humming again — just a nickel strike, instead of gold.’

Kadek didn’t say anything. Nor did Freeman. They were looking towards the mine with its poppet head and the rusty drag-wires coiled above the tailings dump. Flies crawled and it was furnace hot, the beer too warm and sweet. There was black grit under my feet and small pieces of quartz glistening white in the sun. I bent down and picked up a handful of tiny pebbles, dull black with a metallic look and smooth like well-Ducked lozenges. I had seen specimens very like them only that morning in the glass cases at the School of Mines museum. Australites?’ I asked, holding them out to Culpin.

But he didn’t know. ‘Meteorites, they say — debris from outer space. Ground’s thick with them all round here.’ He looked at Freeman. ‘You want to have a look at the mine first? Then I’ll show you where Petersen’s man picked up the dirt that showed traces of nickel.’ We left our beer cans winking in the sun and walked to the mine in a cloud of flies. But for the flies and the sun, and the rusty litter, it would have been an idyllic spot, the gum leaves flickering to a breeze and the boles silver through to bronze.

Freeman might not know very much about mining, but he had a shrewd business mind and he asked the right questions. Kadek played it very cool and quiet, as though he didn’t much care what the outcome was, deferring all the time to me and leaving Freeman with the impression that bigger fish than his little company were after the bait.

The mine itself had been abandoned in 1959, and though the shoring timbers around the top of the shaft were still sound, it had collapsed in on itself about thirty feet down. The area that had yielded nickel-bearing samples was about five hundred yards north-east of the mine shaft. It looked no different from all the rest of that country, except it was slightly higher, on a ridge that ended at the mine. ‘It’s all part of the property,’ Culpin said. ‘They called it Blackridge because of the Black Range, which is all the higher ground north of here.’ It was the australites, of course, that had given it its name. They lay very thick here, black drifts that emphasized every slight undulation of the surface.

Kadek, standing beside me, mopped his brow. ‘Remember I wrote you about my Newsletter? It’s launched now and all I need is a first-rate geologist. You interested?’ He gave me a quick sidelong glance. ‘You’d make a lot of money backing the shares we tip.’ He smiled, a conspiratorial smile as though we were already in it together. Then he turned to Freeman. ‘Just telling Alec about my Newsletter. Maybe I’ll do something on Lone Minerals in a month or two.’

The bait was so obvious I couldn’t believe Freeman would rise to it. But that sort of talk interested him a lot more than the geological theory of ultrabasics. He’d seen the assay figures, read Peterson’s guarded letter, but the ground on which we stood was much the same as the ridge, red gravel interspersed with quartz and drifted with the black australites. ‘What’s your opinion?’ he asked me.

I shrugged. ‘I’ve told you what I can about the geology of the area. Beyond that I don’t know any more than you do.’

‘But you’ll be sending a report in to your firm.’ He seemed to take my silence for confirmation. ‘Anything else you want me to see while I’m here?’ he asked Kadek.

‘No. Don’t forget this isn’t a claim. Whoever buys Blackridge owns the land, everything — a total of over a square mile. It’s a point to bear in mind.’ Kadek smiled. ‘Look well in your next report.’ And he nodded to Culpin and they started back towards the ute.

That left me alone with Freeman. ‘You’re looking over a number of prospects, I take it?’ I didn’t answer and he added, ‘In fact, Blackridge isn’t of any great importance to you.’

‘I can’t answer that,’ I said. ‘Not until we’ve run either a geochemical or an IP survey. Then any anomaly we struck would have to be proved by drilling.’

‘Of course,’ He was silent for a moment. And then he said, ‘I’d like to put a proposition to you.’

The others were out of earshot and I still can’t make up my mind whether Kadek put him up to it or whether it was his own idea. What he offered me was the option on 5,000 Lone Minerals shares at their present price of 29 cents if I’d sign an independent report setting out in geological terms the prospects for his acquisition of Blackridge. In short, he was suggesting that I act as mining consultant for his company. ‘In a private capacity, of course.’ And he added, Ferdie’s Newsletter already has an influential following. If the prospect looks good on paper and he tips it, the shares will move up sharply the way the market is right now.’ Those were his exact words, the offer made quite openly as though it were the most natural thing in the world. ‘Well, what do you say?’

What could I say? There was no point in refusing when I was already in deeper than he knew. ‘Where do the shares come from?’ I asked.

‘From my own holding. I’ll give you a letter, of course.’

I must have been out of my mind. If I hadn’t accepted his offer … But what the hell! It put money in my pocket when I needed it, and you can’t have it both ways. ‘Okay,’ I said, and he nodded as though it hadn’t occurred to him that I might have moral scruples.

We got back to Kalgoorlie just after four and I wrote my report in the stuffy little room that had been booked for them at the Palace. It was at the end of a rambling corridor that ran the whole length of the building and the single window looked out on to a yard and the sound of pigeons drowsing on the rooftops. Kadek came up and read it through, then he had me change one or two phrases, add a paragraph or two. ‘That should clinch it,’ and he peeled off the cash he’d promised me from a wad of notes he had in his briefcase. ‘You invest that in the shares I tell you and you’ll have no difficulty in maintaining yourself out here.’ He wanted me to move into the Palace Hotel as soon as possible and mail him a weekly report on the information I picked up. ‘Got anything on that copper deposit rumour? No? Well, I’ll let you know from time to time the prospects I want you to take a closer look at.’

I suppose I should hate the man. But I don’t. It’s difficult to hate a man who has the drive and energy, the sheer guts to try and build a financial empire on nothing more substantial than his wits. Clever, selfish, cold-bloodedly ruthless — he was all that. And the mess I am now in was of his engineering. Yet I don’t blame him. He was part of the rawness of that part of Australia.

He had the report typed on hotel notepaper by the girl in Reception. This guaranteed that it would be all over the Palace bar within the hour, which was probably why he went back up to his room to make a phone call.

While he was gone I had a couple of drinks with Freeman and he wrote me a note covering the option. ‘That was a good report,’ he said. ‘Just what I needed — especially that bit about Blackridge being in an area of singular promise with a built-in infrastructure.’ This had been suggested by Kadek, a whole paragraph elaborating on the cost advantages of its proximity to Kalgoorlie with an experienced labour force, water, highways, the railway, every facility, in fact, for bringing a mine into production without the enormous expenditure involved in equivalent prospects deep in the outback. ‘I think you’ll find the option I’ve given you will more than repay you for any trouble you may have with your firm.’

I should have been warned by that, but he was already asking me what other prospects I had been instructed to examine, and I was thinking of Golden Soak. ‘You find something good, then let me know. Lone Minerals is a new flotation. We’ve got the cash and you won’t be the loser. Okay? And he gave me his card with the Company’s address in Sydney.

Kadek rejoined us, smiling and ordering drinks. ‘Well, Les. here’s to Blackridge being a bonanza.’ And he raised his glass He knew the deal was as good as settled. ‘And I meant it about doing a piece on Lone Minerals.’

We had more drinks, then he told Culpin to leave Freeman and himself to sort the details out. ‘Come back about eight. We should be through by then.’ He looked at me, ‘See you in the morning maybe. We’ll be catching the seven-fifty flight back to Perth.’ Then he turned to Freeman and suggested they had some food, dismissing both of us from his mind.

Culpin drove me back to his home in silence. All down the Golden Mile he never said a word and it wasn’t until we were through Boulder that I realized what was on his mind. ‘Ferdie said you’d be moving into the Pal. Gonna act as his scout, eh?’

‘Something like that,’ I murmured.

‘An’ what about me? Where do I come in?’ He was glowering at me. ‘Two thousand he gave you, right? Jesus! I don’t make much more’n that out of the deal and it was me wot found Blackridge for him.’ He was working himself up into a rage, afraid I was muscling in on the partnership. ‘Well, I’m warning you. Ferdie’s a ruthless, bloody bastard. And I’m not being edged out just because you’ve got a better education, see. You’ll get your ruddy neck broken one dark night if you try that sort of thing out here.’

You don’t have to worry,’ I told him. But I don’t think he believed me. He was a mean bugger and nursing a grievance was like a drug; it deadened the pain of failure.

‘Now if you’d got a line on that fellow McIlroy.’ He was eyeing me shiftily, an ingratiating smile on his coarse face. ‘You told me you were in Nullagine an’ you saw that abo.’

‘Yes.’

‘And he told you nothing?’

‘Nothing that meant anything. The man you want is Phil Westrop and you won’t get anything out of him.’

‘A prospector, eh?’ He peered at me, then slammed the gear lever into second as we turned on to the loose grit track. He didn’t say anything more, nursing his grievance in silence. That sense of grievance would have been difficult to stomach all evening if his son had not been home. He was sitting on the verandah steps and he looked up as we drove in, the face a little thinner than the face in the photograph, and peeling from the sun, the hair longer, but still the likeness to his mother clearly stamped.

‘You just got in?’ his father asked.

”Bout an hour ago.’

That was their greeting, and neither in their faces nor in the tone of their voices was there any sign of affection. ‘You’ll have to bed down on the sofa. Alec here’s got your room.’

The boy nodded, staring at me very directly out of pale greenish eyes. ‘So I gathered.’ He smiled and held out his hand. ‘I’m Kennie.’ The smile stretched the scab of a sore at the corner of his mouth, his eyes crinkling, a depth of interest in them that was very personal.

‘Have you had your tucker yet?’

‘No. Mum said to wait for our guest.’

Culpin grunted and pushed open the fly screen, calling to his wife. Then he turned back to his son. ‘See anything interesting up there? Any likely prospects?’

‘We were doing an aerial magnetic. You don’t see prospects from a whirly bird, not when you’re watching the instruments all the time.’ His mouth twisted in an impish little grin. ‘Saw a lot of roos though. Reds mainly.’

‘Chrissakes! You bin having a dekko at the nickel country north of Leonora and all you can talk about…’ Culpin checked himself, eyeing his son suspiciously. ‘Well, when you weren’t observing the wild life,’ he said sarcastically, ‘mebbe you found time to have a drink with some of the Poseidon boys.’

‘Sure.’ The boy nodded, standing there, not volunteering anything.

‘Well, what did they tell you?’

‘Nothing. They were drillers, that’s all.’

The hostility between them was obvious, and it wasn’t a generation gap — this was a conflict of personalities. Culpin hitched at his trousers. His back was towards me, the dark leathery skin of his neck a network of creases ingrained with red dust. The anger that had been building up in him all the way from the Palace would have broken out then if his wife hadn’t appeared at the flyscreen door to say that supper was ready ‘What happened today?’ she asked. ‘Did that man Mr Kadek brought with him buy Blackridge?’

Culpin nodded. ‘They’re sorting out the details now.’

‘Well, that’s something,’ she said tartly, and I glimpsed how tight things had become in this dilapidated house.

We went into the kitchen then and all through the meal Culpin hardly spoke a word. It was Kennie who did the talking, his mother listening, the two of them obviously very close. It had been the first aerial survey and he was very full of it. After the meal, when his father had gone back to the Palace, he came out and sat with me on the verandah in the fading light and for a while he talked about his survey, not as he’d talked about it over the meal, but as one geologist to another. They had been searching for nickel and copper over a lease area of nearly 300 square miles, and when I asked him whether they had found anything, he shrugged:

‘One area that’s possibly anomalous. That’s all. But we won’t be pegging. Not yet. There’s a strong rumour the government intends to clamp down on all new claims. If that happens the Company will have more time to complete the survey. They’ll be starting geochemical work as soon as the magnetometer results we got on this trip have been analysed.’

He picked up a stick and began drawing an emu in the black grit. He wanted to get a job up in the North West next. He’d heard a lot about it from his father and now geologists were Baying it would be the next area to attract the attention of prospectors. ‘You’ve just come down from there, haven’t you?’ And because he was the sort of boy he was, bubbling over with theory that he now desperately wanted to put into practice, I told him a little about the Garretys and how Golden Soak had been discovered.

That’s the mine my father was making enquiries about.’ He looked up from his drawing. ‘You trying to buy it? Is that why you were up there?’ And when I asked him why he thought it was for sale, he said, ‘Just something I heard last night. We were at the Hotel in Leonora, celebrating the end of our survey, and this bloke I was talking to — he was from Marble Bar, some sort of property dealer, I think — he was talking about it. I don’t remember all he said, I’d had a lot to drink by then, you see, but it’s antimony, isn’t it?’

I suppose I should have realized that people up in the Pilbara would know all about the mine, but it still came as a shock to hear him refer to the antimony content so casually. He knew about the price of antimony, too, even knew the reason for the sharp rise in the mineral’s value: ‘The main source is China and they’ve cut off supplies to the West, stockpiling against the possibility of war with Russia.’ And then he asked me again whether the people I was acting for were going to buy it.

‘I’m not acting for anybody,’ I said. ‘And anyway it isn’t for sale.’

He began tracing the outline of a kangaroo, his head bent in concentration. ‘You’ll be going up there again.’

I didn’t answer for a moment, thinking of Jarra Jarra and what it could mean to them. ‘That depends on the analysis.’

He looked up, a quick movement of the head that tossed his fair hair back. ‘You’ve got samples then?’ His voice was eager, his eyes shining with genuine interest. In the end I took him into his room and showed him a piece of the Golden Soak reef quartz. He had a cheap students’ microscope and he took it out on to the verandah, where the reflector could catch the last rays of the setting sun. His excitement when the specks of gold showed as minute chunks of metal embedded in the quartz crystals was infectious. But even under the microscope the grey smudges of the antimony still showed only as smudges. ‘If the analysis is good and you do go up there again, can I come with you?’

I laughed. ‘I can’t afford an assistant.’

But he didn’t want to be paid. He just wanted to learn. ‘It wouldn’t cost you anything and I could organize things for you. There’s a friend of mine got an old Land-Rover he’d let me hire, and if you’re camping out…’ He gave a self-conscious little laugh, knowing he had let his enthusiasm run away with him. ‘I’ve never done a practical survey under the direction of somebody with your sort of experience.’

‘We’ll see how the analysis works out,’ I said. And after that we talked of mining generally. He’d worked on an IP survey at St Ives — ‘That’s the other side of the causeway that crosses the salt lake called Lefroy, south of Kambalda.’ He had done a geomagnetic on a prospect near Mt Yindarlgooda to the east of Kalgoorlie, another in the Laverton area. He talked of microprobe analyses and how they indicated the cobalt content of pentlandite and the nickel content of pyrrhotite. This was laboratory stuff, all very technical, and soon we were deep in the nature and origins of sulphides and ultrabasics. There was a little breeze out there on the verandah and we stayed there talking until his mother called us in for coffee and home-made cakes.

I went to bed almost immediately afterwards, but the room seemed airless and I didn’t get to sleep for a long time. I was woken about midnight by the slam of the flyscreen door, the murmur of voices. They rose and fell, half inaudible; then suddenly Culpin’s voice loud and slurred with drink: ‘You say that again, boy …’

Silence and the hot breeze rattling at the pale square of the window. Then the hoarse voice started again, wheedling at first, then rising quickly in anger: ‘I work my guts out, risking me neck to give you things I never had, and you throw it in my face. You silly little fool, you don’t know what life’s about. Now, come on — ‘ There was the sound of a scuffle, followed by a blow and the crash of something falling.

I was out of bed then, but though I moved fast, Edith Culpin was ahead of me, the parlour door open and her figure framed in the light of a torch. Beyond her, I could see the rumbled bedclothes on the couch and Culpin standing over his son, his big hands gripping his shoulders, shaking him. A small table lay on its side, a china vase in pieces on the floor. And Kennie, his lip cut and blood oozing, speaking in a whisper.

Edith Culpin screamed at her husband, and he turned and stared at her, his bull of a head thrust forward. ‘Go back to bed, woman.’ His voice, still heavy and slurred, had a hard core of authority in it, and when she flew at him, he flung her back. She fell on to the couch, a breast flopping white above the pink nightdress, her hair dishevelled, sudden hate flaring in her eyes.

And then he saw me. ‘Thought to keep it to yourself, did you?’ He was swaying, his face glistening with sweat, the small eyes greedy. He’d had a lot to drink. ‘Think I don’t know the price of antimony?’ He let go of Kennie and took a step towards me, his lips pursed in a little smile. ‘You come between me and my son, an’ I’ll break your neck for you.’ His eyes were mean now, anger feeding on the alcohol in him. He was suddenly dangerous. I stood there in the doorway bracing myself to meet him.

Kennie was looking at me, the cut lip swelling and his eyes scared. ‘I’m s-sorry,’ he mumbled.

I started to say something and then I turned away and went back to my room. I knew it was no good. He was afraid of his father and there was nothing I could do to stop him talking. No point now, anyway.

I heard Edith Culpin go back to bed, the sound of her crying audible through the partition. Shortly afterwards her husband’s footsteps passed my door. No words between them, only the sound of his movements as he undressed and got into bed beside her. Then silence, the house gripped in stillness. Even the breeze outside seemed to have died.

The sun was up when I woke, shining hot on my face, and the kettle whistled in the kitchen, footsteps padding in the passage outside my door. Culpin was halfway through his breakfast when I went into the kitchen. Small and bloodshot, his eyes glanced at me quickly, then back to his bacon and eggs He ate with concentration, and his wife at the stove didn’t look at me, didn’t speak. She was clammed up tight as though desperately trying to keep a hold on her emotions. There was no sign of Kennie.

The smell of coffee, and the bacon frying, were the only good things about the kitchen that morning and I ate in a silence that was tense with unspoken words. Edith Culpin was in her dressing gown, a shapeless cotton print, and sitting there, drinking her coffee, her large greenish eyes fixed on her husband, she sudden!) banged her cup down. ‘Kennie’s gone.’ Her voice trembled.

He finished his coffee and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. ‘Time that boy grew up.’ And then he looked at her ‘If you hadn’t dropped your second, you wouldn’t have spoilt him the way you have.’

They stared at each other a moment, hostile and without understanding. Then Edith Culpin began to cry, the tears dripping from her tired eyes, soundless.

We left for the Palace almost immediately, Culpin driving in silence. After he had parked the ute, he didn’t get out, but turned to me and said, ‘I bin thinking, about this Golden Soak. You gonna mention it to Ferdie?’

‘No point till I know what the analysis is.’

‘But if it’s good and the mine comes up for sale — ‘ There was a crafty, eager look in his bloodshot eyes. ‘I remember the old Comet. That was a de Bernales mine, one of the few good ones he ever had. Up the track from Marble Bar, just beyond Chinaman’s Pool. I was a youngster at the time. Went up there to make my fortune and ended up serving behind the bar at the Ironclad.’ He was smiling to himself, the eagerness still there so that for a moment he looked a younger man. ‘That’s how I know about de Bernales and his Commonwealth Finance.’ He gripped my arm, suddenly urgent. ‘My cut of the Blackridge deal will be through in a week or two, and this Golden Soak mine’s unsafe, Kennie says I always wanted to go back to the Pilbara an’ if we could get it cheap — ‘ He left it at that, apparently content that he’d made his position clear. ‘You think about it, eh?’ And he climbed out and went into the hotel.

Ten minutes later we were all four of us at the airfield. And the last thing Kadek said to me before he boarded the plane was, ‘You put half of that two thousand in Lone Minerals. But don’t wait. Do it today.’ He was relaxed, almost jaunty. ‘I’ll tell you when to sell. And keep in touch.’ He handed me a card. ‘There’s my phone number. Ring me in Perth if there’s anything urgent. Otherwise a weekly report by letter.’

We drove back by a different route, past a big caravan park, washing listless on the line and the heat already heavy. ‘I’ll be in the Pal midday,’ Culpin said as he dropped me off at Petersen Geophysics. ‘We can talk about it then over a beer.’ The hide of the man was almost unbelievable.

Petersen was already in his office. ‘Is all right, your analysis.’ He gave me a toothy grin and a heavy slap on the back. ‘Gold 53/4 ounces average. Is about what I t’ink. The antimony is not so good, more variable — 2.1 per cent, 3.4, and on the third sample 0.2 per cent. Okay?’ He handed me the analyst’s typed report, together with my samples, and I paid him his fee from the wad of notes Kadek had given me. ‘Now you go t’ink about what you do next, eh?’ He seemed genuinely pleased that the results were good. ‘Also, I haf a letter for you — is delivered by Chris’s son Kennie this morning.’

I read it as I walked towards the centre of the town. It was a long, unhappy explanation of his relations with his father, and finished up: I realize what you told me was in confidence, but he’s capable of anything when he’s got a load on. I must get away from here now, so if you ‘re going north again, please let me come with you. He gave the address of the friend he was staying with and I wondered whether it was the same friend who had the Land-Rover for hire.

The local stockbroker’s office was a travel and insurance agency in the brick section of the Palace building. I arranged for the purchase of 3,000 Lone Minerals as soon as the market opened in Perth and then I went across to the Kalgoorlie Miner in Hannan Street. It was an odd place, a shop selling stationery, books and postcards, the newspaper produced from poky little offices in the rear. A girl eventually produced the file copies for 1939, and when I told her I wanted to look up their report of Mcllroy’s disappearance, she found it for me immediately. ‘Funny thing, you’re the second person to ask for it. There was a man in here about a week ago.’ She even remembered his name — Kadek. ‘I never heard a name like that before.’ She was a big girl, about twenty-five, and she hovered over me while I read the accounts, which covered about three weeks. ‘All the time I’ve been here, nobody’s asked me for the 1939 file, and now two of you inside a week.’

I turned the pages, reading quickly. It gave the name of the aborigine who had found the empty abandoned vehicle and I wrote it down, also the name of the constable who had examined the truck and organized the search for Mcllroy’s body. He had had a well-known native tracker with him on the job, but he had found nothing. The empty truck had been discovered on June 2 and McIlroy had last been seen alive at Nullagine five months before, on January 5. He had then announced that he would be heading out into the blue on an outback track that branched off the line of the telegraph at Ethel Creek, but the people at the Ethel Creek homestead said he had not called there and they had not seen his vehicle or any sign of tracks. And then this paragraph:

Inevitably the mystery surrounding his disappearance has given birth to a number of rumours. The most persistent of these is that, instead of heading east from Ethel Creek, he went first to the Jarra Jarra homestead of his partner, Big Bill Garrety, and that it was from there that he finally set out on his ill-fated attempt to locate his fabulous monster. There is no evidence to support this and in view of the relationship between the two men following upon Pat Mcllroy’s misuse of the bank’s money this seems most unlikely. Indeed, the police have a statement from Mr Garrety categorically denying it. ‘I’ve got some notes, if you’d like to see them.’ I could feel the warmth of her body leaning over me. ‘I read up on everything we’d printed on McIlroy the other day. It’s such an odd story I thought maybe I could sell it to a magazine.’

Her notes were typewritten and very comprehensive. Not only had she included details of his association with Bill Garrety and his investment of the bank’s deposits, but his background as well. And it was there, in the information about his private life before he’d come to Kalgoorlie, that I was brought up with a jolt, the name Westrop staring at me from the typescript.

McIlroy had been born in the King’s Cross district of Sydney in 1901, the eldest of seven children. Both his parents had been Irish and his father had been a bookie’s tout. He had grown up on racecourses. In 1926 he had become a stockbroker’s clerk and the following year he had married Elspeth Julia Westrop, daughter of a wool buyer for an English company. They had had two children, both boys, and it was after the birth of the second that he had left Sydney and gone to make his fortune in Kalgoorlie.

‘What happened to the family?’ I asked.

She shrugged. ‘They never came out to West Australia. The two sons died in the war, the wife in 1984.’

‘Do you know anything about the wife’s family? Had she any brothers, for instance?’

But she didn’t know. ‘There’s only one person here who was at all close to Pat McIlroy — I would guess she was probably his mistress for a time. She is a bit of a hag and too fond of the bottle, but she might be able to tell you.’

She gave me the woman’s address and I got a taxi and went there right away. It was a small, rusty-coloured shack at the bend of a dirt road with a view across the workings of the old Iron Duke. She was frail and none too clean, her head wobbling as she spoke, words slipping out in little gasps. Yes, she remembered Pat McIlroy, but she sounded unsure of herself and I guessed he had only been one of many. His wife? She shook her head. ‘Pat didn’t like her. Nor her family. Called them a lot of bleedin’ sheep stealers.’ She fixed me with a thirsty, calculating eye. ‘You pop round to the ‘otel, dearie, and ask them for a bottle of Gladdy’s usual. Mebbe I’ll remember some more then.’

But I didn’t think she knew much more and I was just on the point of leaving when she wobbled her head at me and said, ‘Her brother come here once raising hell. I remember that now. He was a tall mean man and I was young then.’ She smiled, nodding. ‘More ways of fixing a man …’ The smile became a snigger. ‘I got a dose of clap at the time, see.’

Had she given it to McIlroy, too? Or perhaps it was the other way round. I couldn’t bring myself to ask her that. It’s a nasty business, trying to glimpse the nature of a man who’s been dead more than thirty years through the eyes of an aged tart. But walking back into the centre of Boulder I couldn’t help thinking that venereal disease might account for the recklessness he had shown at the end in gambling with his own life.

I got a taxi, still feeling unclean, as though I had been in contact with the woman myself, and drove to the Culpin home to pick up my suitcase. Edith Culpin looked as though she had been crying again, her face very pale and the eyes red-rimmed. ‘If you see Kennie, tell him to come home. It’ll be all right.’ And she added, ‘He’s all I got really.’ The sadness in her voice was the sadness of loneliness.

Driving back into Kalgoorlie I tried to concentrate on Golden Soak and what I would say to Ed Garrety when I reached Jarra Jarra. But the memory of those two women seemed to dominate my thoughts — so different, yet both of them facing lives that were empty, a dead end. And Westrop. If he was really Mcllroy’s nephew, then his presence in Nullagine only made sense if he knew something nobody else seemed to know.

It was almost midday and I stopped off at the broker’s to find he had had to pay 32 cents a share. ‘You’re lucky,’ he said. ‘They’re quoted at 34 on the Sydney Exchange.’ He gave me a contract and I paid him cash, and I arranged for him to wire me the money when I instructed him to sell.

That contract, a little piece of paper — it’s difficult to explain what it meant to me. Bull walked out of there a new man. Twenty-four hours ago I had been just about broke. Now I had cash in my pocket and a stake in the country. I was part of the Australian mineral boom, sharing the excitement of other market gamblers. It gave me a feeling of extraordinary confidence as I got back into the taxi and was driven to the address Kennie had given me. It was at the corner of Cassidy and Cheetham, a green-painted verandah house overlooking the recreation ground, and there was a dusty, battered-looking Land-Rover standing outside.

Looking back on it now, I cannot blame Kennie for deciding to come north with me. He wasn’t hard-hearted or any more inconsiderate than other young men of his age. And he was deeply attached to his mother. But he had his own life to live and he refused absolutely to go back and face his father again. ‘It wouldn’t work. It never has, it never will.’ His lips were trembling as he said that and his eyes looked scared. ‘I got to get away. Please …’ He looked so like his mother I couldn’t help thinking that the two of them, so close all those years, had been a factor in Culpin’s desperate urge to strike it rich, the need to prove himself.

The young man he was staying with had been a fellow student at the School of Mines. His father was Jim Morris, a lapidary with a shop in Hannan Street where he sold semi-precious jewellery he had made himself. The business was now established so that other enthusiasts were bringing the stones to him. He and his son no longer had to go out and fossick for them, hence the availability of the Land-Rover. That and Kennie’s enthusiasm decided me.

The rest of the day passed quickly as we checked the vehicle and shopped around for the stores and equipment we needed. Mrs Norris gave us an early meal, and as the sunset flared to a lurid purple, I drove out of Kalgoorlie, taking the road north to Leonora, Kennie sitting beside me, tight-lipped and silent.