Golden Soak

ONE

There had never been anything quite like it in Australia, probably never will be again. Gold rushes, yes, but the nickel boom is something different. Poseidon, its symbol, was rocketed frm 7s. 6d. to £112 on the London market, and gamblers in faraway Britain caught nickel fever, calling it the Windarra Wonder and rushing to buy the shares of any company with a hole in the ground and the faintest whiff of ultrabasics. So many claims have been pegged recently the mining registrars have been unable to cope and rumour has it that the Perth Government’s Minister of Mines is considering a ban on further pegging until the backlog had been cleared. The Windarra Range is not much more than a hundred miles north of Kalgoorlie, and with Western Mining’s Kambalda nickel mine already in production twenty miles to the south, this old gold town became the focal centre of the boom. When I arrived there late on the Saturday afternoon the place was seething with scouts and newspaper men, stockbrokers, business executives, survey parties, crooks, drillers, gamblers, anybody with money enough and a place to lay his head.

The hub of all this feverish activity was the Palace Bar. In quieter days it was no doubt adequate enough, but now it overflowed the pavement, a mob of men in every conceivable garb, talking, arguing, drinking in the slanting sunlight. The survey truck in which I had travelled the last stretch from Leonora had dropped me at the corner of Hannan and Maritana, and as I crossed the broad intersection the roar of voices almost drowned the traffic. It was the same across the street outside the dark cavern of a bar where a florid Edwardian design in frosted glass proclaimed it Church’s Exchange Hotel — The Jacksons of Kalgoorlie. It was a town of white-wood buildings with verandahed sidewalks, and Hannan Street, with brothels virtually at one end of it and the Mt Charlotte gold mine at the other, was wide enough for camel trains to turn in. The whole place was a municipal monument to Hannan’s discovery of 1893 and the Golden Mile.

The Palace was half wood, half brick, and extended through several buildings of different vintage. The main entrance was in Hannan Street, in the wooden section, the door to the bar on the left and Reception a dark cubby-hole of a room below the staircase with its balustrade ending in a poor digger’s version of the Statue of Liberty. A tired girl stood at the phone, fanning herself against the overpowering stuffiness, and when at last I managed to catch her eye she shrugged her shoulders helplessly at my request for a bed. The hotel was full. They had men sleeping two and three to a room and it was the same all over town. I left my suitcase with her and fought my way into the bar. Ceiling fans stirred the turgid air without cooling it.

I was tired and hot and dusty. But at least the beer when I got it was cold. I drank it watching the hot animated faces reflected in the mirrors behind the bar. ‘The London price closed at 1061/2.’ Two men talking about Poseidon close beside me, one of them a youngster in a starched white shirt, the other in bush khaki. Between the mirrors were faded prints of old-timers and wagons and camel trains, a pictorial record of the first rush, when it had been gold, not nickel. ‘Newmetals is a better bet — or Tasminex. What about Tasminex?’ The beer had disappeared into me like water into parched earth. I ordered another and asked the barmaid if she knew Chris Culpin. Her tired eyes ranged the smoke-filled bar as she filled my glass again. ‘Chris is over there talking to Smithie.’ She indicated a heavy-built man in a faded shirt with a sweat-grimed hat thrust on the back of his head.

They were at the far end of the bar and when I reached them they were in the middle of an argument. ‘They’ve no business fossicking around the Blackridge.’ Culpin’s voice sounded belligerent. ‘Who told them?’

‘You don’t have to tell those blokes.’ The other was a thin man with a long leathery face and very pale blue eyes. He was swaying slightly, his voice slurred, his long face glistening with sweat. ‘Christ! It was all round the bar here last night.’

‘That bloody Swede — I’ll murder him.’

‘It ain’t all Peterson’s fault, Chris. You send samples to the lab for analysis …’ He stopped there and Culpin turned, both of them suddenly aware of my presence.

‘You want something?’ Small eyes stared at me out of a brick red face, his belly sagging over the broad leather belt that supported his trousers. He hadn’t shaved and the collar of his shirt showed an unwashed line of red dust.

I told him who I was was and he nodded. ‘So you made it.’ There was no welcome in the way he said it.

‘Where’s Kadek?’ I asked.

‘Ferdie’s in Perth.’

The thin man leaned towards me, the pale eyes staring. ‘You from the Old Country?’

I nodded.

‘Geologist?’

‘Mining Consultant.’

‘Consultant, eh?’ He was suddenly angry. ‘You Brits. You’re all over us, and we got Swedes, Wops, Kiwis, even Yugos. Wot the hell they teaching them at the School of Mines? Don’t reckon there’s a real Aussie geologist between here and Dampier.

‘You must be joking, Smithie. There’s my boy Kennie for one. He’s out with a survey party — ’

‘Pegging for himself, I’ll bet. Claim crazy that’s wot they are, the whole lot of ‘em. I seen ‘em come into my office registering claims before they even passed out of the School.’

‘Kennie’s not like that.’

‘No?’ The long sweaty face leaned down, the pale eyes peering under Culpin’s hat. ‘Think you know your own son, eh? I betyer, when he gets back, he’ll throw up his job and be off up there again inside of a week pegging his own claims.’ The thin lips opened, a cackling laugh. ‘Wot d’you expect when he sees his old man flogging a bloody mine that’s bin dead for years — ’

Culpin grabbed his arm. ‘You shut your mouth, Smithie — or by Christ I’ll shut it for you.’

The other man stood there swaying slightly as the threat sank into his fuddled brain. ‘Mum’s the word, eh?’ He smiled thinly.

‘Okay, Chris. But wotchit, feller.’ He leaned forward, a confidential whisper, ‘There’s talk already, an’ if those boys find …’

‘Shut your bloody mouth I said.’ Culpin turned abruptly, jerked his head at me and moved into the crowd, heading for the street. ‘Silly bastard,’ he said as we reached the doorway. ‘He’s drunk, an’ when he’s drunk he’s full of gossip as an ol’ woman.’ Outside the reflection of sun on the white wood buildings was blinding.

‘Where are we going?’ I asked.

‘My place. You won’t get a bed anywhere else.’ His voice was sullen, a brooding anger in him. I got my suitcase and followed him across the wide expanse of Hannan Street. He had a battered ute parked in Maritana, and as we drove off, he said, ‘First time I met Smithie he was a mining registrar up north of here. Know how much he’s worth now? Half a million at least. That’s what Poseidon’s done for him. Bought ‘em for under a dollar and now he’s hardly ever sober. Spends most of his time in the bar there.’

We were headed towards Boulder with the tall stacks and workings of the Golden Mile on our left. ‘You don’t want to take any notice of that stupid bastard,’ he went on. ‘Anyway, it wasn’t me who sent those samples in for analyis. It was Rip Fender, one of Pete’s boys, acting for Lone Minerals.’ He gave me a quick sidelong glance. Ferdie says you got a degree.’

‘Yes.’

‘Okay. But you try and muscle in on this deal …’ He was silent for a moment. Then he said, ‘I ain’t got no degree, but I know a lot you don’t — I was born out here, see. At Coolgardie.’ He nodded at the wasteland to our left. ‘That’s what killed Coolgardie — they all decamped to the Golden Mile. But my Dad, he stayed on, the bloody old fool. You’d think living in a ghost town would have taught me to keep clear of prospecting. But I got it in the blood, see.’ Again that sideways glance. ‘You known Ferdie long?’

‘I met him four years ago in Spain.’

‘We was kids together.’

He was silent after that. But as we ran into the sprawling town of Boulder he said, ‘I used to stay with an aunt of mine here. There was nine of us and my mother died. That’s how I come to be at the same school as Ferdie. Undersized little runt, but clever as a dingo. He-did the thinking, I did the fighting. In the end he ran his own gang and we found an adit leading into the old abandoned workings of the Perseverance, going down ricketty ladders and crawling through winzes you wouldn’t think a grown miner could cut ore outa. That’s how Ferdie got his first break.’ And he went on to tell me how they’d found a rich pocket of ore, half concealed by the wooden shoring of a slope. They hadn’t dared knock the timbers away, but Kadek had gone down on his own night after night and cleared the pocket out with his father’s mining tools, humping the pay dirt up through the mine in sacks and selling it to the government stamping mill at Ora Banda. ‘The dirty crooked little bastard!’ It was said without rancour, almost affectionately. ‘Never let on to us. Just took off for Sydney and I didn’t hear of him again till he came to Kal ‘bout a year ago looking for nickel prospects for some piddling little company he’d formed.’ He eased his crutch, then leaned forward and squashed a fly on the windscreen with his thumb. ‘So you got a degree.’ It seemed to rankle. ‘Well, you just remember this, Alec — but for me there wouldn’t be any Blackridge prospect.’ The small eyes stared at me from under the battered hat. ‘I found it, see.’

We were into the centre of Boulder now and he turned left, following the Kambalda signs. ‘What about that mine you were enquiring about — Golden Soak? A washout, eh?’ I didn’t say anything and he laughed. ‘Gold. I’m not interested in gold. Nor’s Ferdie. But copper now …’ He braked sharply, turning into a side road on the outskirts that was sparsely flanked with corrugated iron houses, some of them little bigger than shacks. ‘Did you get up to Nullagine?’

‘I was there for a few hours, yes.’

‘What did the abo say?’

‘Nothing.’

I don’t know whether he believed me or not. The tarmac had ceased and we were on a black grit track that ran across a flat wasteland to the long rampart walls of the gold tailings. ‘Okay, we’ll talk about it later — when we’ve settled this Blackridge deal.’

The tailing walls were golden in the slanting sun. They were enormous, like Egyptian tombs. A pony all alone eyed us doubtfully as we swung south, the wheels ploughing through grit so fine and black it looked like coal dust, and ahead was a solitary house standing in the shade of two gaunt gum trees. The ugly tin fencing was rusty, and where it wasn’t supported by old iron bed-ends, it had fallen in. We stopped in a whirl of dust beside a pair of rusting traction engine wheels that served to mark the entrance. ‘Well, this is it,’ he said, and climbed out.

I got my suitcase out of the back and followed him through a scattering of hens to the verandah entrance. Like the other houses I had seen, the verandah had a delicately curved tin roof, but it was dilapidated, the holes showing ragged. The smell of pigs hung heavy in the hot stillness. He nodded to a corrugated iron shack. ‘The bog’s over there when you want it.’ He climbed the verandah steps and pushed open the fly-screen. ‘Edith!’

‘That you, Chris?’ a woman’s voice answered, thin and high, with an edge of nerves in it.

‘I got Ferdie’s pal with me.’

‘Coming.’

I put my suitcase down and he took me into the parlour. It was cool and dark, the windows shuttered, and the furniture Victorian with lace curtains, even antimacassars, a period piece and spotlessly clean. A small dried-up little woman appeared in the doorway, standing hesitant, brushing a wisp of hair. ‘You didn’t say anything about company tonight, Chris.’

‘Didn’t know, so how could I?’ He told her my name and she came forward to greet me, wiping her hands on her apron. Her handshake was surprisingly firm, the skin dry and hard. ‘I expect you’re hungry.’ She smiled at me, her eyes almost green in a shaft of sunlight. ‘It’s all ready. I only got to lay another place.’

We ate in the kitchen at a plain scrubbed table, cold ham and pickles with fried potatoes and thick sweet Indian tea. Edith Culpin hardly spoke, picking daintily at her food, with the big china teapot in front of her. I was hungry and very tired after the long ride south, but I thought it time I found out exactly what Kadek wanted of me. Culpin didn’t seem to know. ‘He’ll tell you when he gets back from Perth. I’ve wired him the results of the analysis and he’ll have the boss of Lone Minerals with him.’ He took a gulp of tea, sucking it in noisily, his mouth full. ‘All I know is he’s expecting you to give Les Freeman the lowdown on the geology of the area. He’s got it all worked out. You’re the expert, see.’

‘When do you expect him?’ I asked.

‘Monday. He’s going to ring me.’

It didn’t give me much time and I soon discovered he knew next to nothing about the geological structure of the country. He could give me the results of geochemical and geomagnetic surveys carried out on various claims, but he couldn’t explain the gossans and anomalies usually associated with sulphide minerals or even talk sensibly about the theory of ultrabasics. ‘You’d better go and see Petersen first thing Monday morning. Either Pete or somebody at Western Mining. And there’s Smithie. He knows the nickel belt as well as anybody.’

‘What about the School of Mines?’ I asked. ‘D’you know anybody there?’

‘No.’

‘Kennie does,’ his wife said. ‘If Kennie were here — ‘

‘Well, he isn’t.’ He swallowed the last of his tea and got to his feet. ‘I better go now.’

‘I baked an apple pie for you.’ Her voice sounded aggrieved.

He shook his head. ‘Red’s just in from the mulga country up beyond Warburton and I wanta get hold of that abo he had with him.’

‘Dick Gnarlbine?’ Her voice was frozen. ‘It’s not right, you drinking with a black.’

‘Who said anything about drinking?’ He laughed. ‘All right. I’m going to pour some liquor into the bastard before any of my pals get at him.’ He turned to me. ‘Red’s been filming up north of the Gunbarrel, over towards the Clutterbucks, says they ran into a bunch of natives been walkabout east from Disappointment.’ He reached for his hat. ‘A few beers and Dick’ll tell me anything he knows.’

‘It’s not right,’ she repeated wearily.

‘To hell with whether it’s right or not. If he’s learned something that’ll make our fortunes, then I don’t reckon you’d come it so bloody high and mighty about my feeding a few beers to an abo.’ He clapped his hat on his head. ‘See you in the morning,’ he told me and went out. A moment later we heard the door of the ute slam, the whine of the starter.

‘You mustn’t mind Chris,’ she said as the sound of the engine faded up the track. ‘He’s had a hard life.’ She gave a little sigh. ‘We both have.’ And she went over to the oven and got out the pie, fussing over me as she served it. ‘You were asking a lot of geological questions. I hope you won’t do that again. It upsets him. He’s not a geologist.’

‘No, I realize that.’

‘He’s not even a prospector, not really.’

The pie was good and I told her so.

She smiled and I caught a glimpse of the girl she had once been, before the dry air and the hard life had shrivelled her. ‘Would you like some more tea?’

I let her refill my cup, sensing her loneliness, her need to talk. But the world she lived in was a limited one, her husband out most of the time and the nearest house a fifteen-minute walk across the empty wasteland. ‘It’s the summers I can’t stand. I’m from the South West, from Yeagarup, and I miss the trees. I grew up with great forests of karri all round me and the sea not more’n twenty miles away.’ She gave a little shrug. ‘There’s worse places than Kalgoorlie, I know that. But January, and next month too — the heat and the flies, and the dust from the tailings, it drives you crazy.’

Her family had been small farmers owning a few paddocks and about fifty acres of forest. That was how she’d met her husband. He was just back from the war, working in the timber mills at Pemberton, and at weekends he was felling for a neighbouring farmer. ‘Chris has tried almost everything in the twenty-four years we been married. He ran a sheep station for a time, a big place out on the edge of Nullarbor. He was a butcher, then a dogger. I think he liked dogging best. He was all through the Pilbara, living bush and on his own. And I had the child. I wasn’t too lonely. But Kennie’s grown up now and finally we came here. It was the nickel boom brought Chris back. He went to Kambalda as a driller. Then up Laverton way. Now he’s on his own and calls himself a prospector, and all he thinks about is striking it rich.’ Her thin lips stretched themselves into a sad little smile. ‘If he ever did, I don’t think we’d know what to do with it, not now.’

I asked her about the mine then, but she couldn’t tell me much, only that it was near Ora Banda and she didn’t think there’d be much in it for them. ‘Even a place like Blackridge costs money these days. Chris is only the agent. It was Mr Kadek bought it.’

I think she’d have gone on talking for the rest of the evening, but I wanted to stretch my legs before it got dark. She took me across the hall and showed me into a small room with a single bed and home-made shelves littered with rock samples, all carefully labelled. There was a desk with a battered typewriter on it, and above it, another shelf stacked with books on geology, physics, metallurgy — Mason’s Principles of Geochemistry, Elements of Mineralogy, Elements of Geology for Australian Students, Bragg’s Atomic Structure of Minerals; I hadn’t seen that since I was a student.

‘It’s Kennie’s room really.’

‘Yes, I guessed that.’

‘He’s twenty-three now, a real bright boy. Solid, too — not restless like his father.’ She was smiling. ‘I’ve got a photograph of him in the parlour if you’d care to see it.’ She went and got it and I found myself looking at the picture of a tall, slightly-built lad with his mother’s features showing through a wisp of beard, an unruly mop of fair hair falling over his face. ‘That was taken the day he passed out from the School of Mines. He did very well there.’ She said it with a mother’s fondness, adding, ‘He should be back any day now.’

I asked her where his survey party was operating, but she didn’t know. ‘Somewhere up north of Leonora.’ She was staring down at the photograph. ‘He and Chris — ‘ she hesitated, twining her fingers nervously around the frame. ‘I don’t know what it is, but the young don’t seem to look on money the way we older people do. But he’s happy, that’s the main thing. Seems interested in minerals for their own sake.’ Again that hesitation, as though she wanted to tell me something else. But then she said brightly, ‘Well, I’ll leave you now. I’ve got to clear up and there’s the pigs to feed. I’ll have sandwiches and coffee for you when you get back.’

I thanked her and she stood there hovering for a moment, her eyes darting about the room. Finally she left, closing the door quietly behind her. The room was stuffy and I pushed open the shutters, looking out on to a litter of rusting iron with the walls of the tailing dumps red in the sunset beyond the ragged tin of the fencing. Beside the desk there was a washstand with basin and ewer of blue china. The water was lukewarm but at least it got the dust of travel out of my skin. Then I left the house, heading across the wasteland towards the tailings.

The walls, when I reached them, were about thirty feet high, the sloping sides funnelled by occasional rain storms and reflecting the lurid red of the sunset sky. A wind had sprung up, and as the light died and darkness closed in, I came out through a defile between two of the dumps to a view of what looked like water with a sea mist hanging white and the line of a harbour wall yet another of those monstrous dumps.

I stood there for a while, feeling the strangeness of this land to which I had committed myself. And not just the land, the people, too. The way they behaved, the way they talked, their whole outlook. Above all, die remoteness of it. I felt a million miles away from anything I had known before and standing there, looking out across that misted sea that wasn’t a sea but a dust-filled plain, I was conscious of the need of something with which I could identify myself — a sheet anchor for my loneliness. And as night fell and I retraced my steps, walking slowly back through the tomb-like adobe walls, back across that black grit wasteland to the desolate isolation of the Culpin home, I was thinking of Janet and the rock samples I had taken from Golden Soak, wondering what the analysis would show.

It was dark when I got back to the house with the stars a pale glimmer that outlined the gums and the shack that was their latrine. The shack had a fly screen as well as a door. Inside it was pitch black, no light and the smell of disinfectant. And when I came out I had a sudden feeling that I was being watched. I stopped, conscious of the smell of pigs, the stillness all about me, no wind and the soft glow of an oil lamp in the house. And then I saw it, a figure standing motionless, so still, so black, it might have been the stump of a tree.

I stood there for a moment, rooted to the spot, sensing something primitive. And then the figure moved and the black lowbrowed face of an aborigine emerged from the shadows as he moved to my side without a sound.

‘What do you want?’

His hand reached out and gripped my arm, the thick lips moving below the broad nose; all I got was the name Chris.

‘He’s not here,’ I told him.

‘Where? Where I find’im?’

‘He’s gone into Kalgoorlie.’ I hesitated. ‘Are you Dick Gnarlbine?’

‘Am.’ A deep chesty sound, an affirmative.

‘He’s looking for you.’

‘No find’im.’ And he added, ‘Me film’im walkabout longa Red. Me come back, whitefella talk bad something. You tell’im Chris. Whitefella talk bad something. You got’im beer?’

I shook my head, uneasy at the hard-skinned touch of his hand.

‘You tell’im Chris. Kambalda man speak’im no good.’

‘What are they saying — ’ I asked.

But he wouldn’t tell me any more. He just said, ‘You tell’im Chris.’ Then he was gone.

I went into the house and Edith Culpin was waiting for me, coffee and sandwiches in the kitchen and her voice thin and complainful. I didn’t tell her about the aborigine, and as soon as I decently could I took myself off to bed.

I must have been very tired indeed for I didn’t wake until Edith Culpin brought my breakfast in on a tray. ‘Thought you’d like a nice lie-in seeing it’s Sunday.’ The time was almost ten-thirty and her husband had already left. I didn’t see him at all that day. Most of it I spent in Kennie’s room, examining his samples, and reading everything I could find that related to the geology of Australia. It was not quite so hot here as it had been in the Pilbara and in the evening I walked the whole length of the Golden Mile. I needed to be alone with time to think; also the exercise got some of the soreness of the long truck ride out of my muscles.

I went to bed early that night and woke with the sun. It was Monday now, the Culpins already up, and by the time I was dressed the house was full of the smell of bacon frying. The kitchen was hot, a blaze of light from the flyscreened window, and we ate our breakfast in silence. Culpin had the Kalgoorlie Miner propped up in front of him, his wife was reading a letter. ‘Kennie says they’re almost through with that survey.’ She looked at the date. ‘That’s Wednesday. He wishes us both a happy New Year.’

Her husband grunted, but made no comment, his eyes bleary. There was the sound of a car and she lifted her head, her thin dry hair a golden halo. The car stopped and she rose to her feet as the verandah door opened and a woman’s voice called to her. That’s Muriel,’ she said. ‘Mebbe he’s phoned her.’

While she was out of the room I told Culpin about his visitor of two nights before, and when I repeated what the aborigine had said, he stopped eating and leaned forward, his bloodshot eyes staring. ‘What do you mean — bad something?’

‘Just that. I don’t know what he meant. But he wanted to see you.’

‘Stupid bastard!’ he muttered. ‘I was all over town looking for him.’ He glanced over his shoulder. The door was open, the murmur of women’s voices. ‘What did he want to see me about?’ There was tension in his voice, his eyes searching my face.

I shrugged. ‘I told you what he said. Some white man had obviously been getting at him.’

‘Who? Did he say who?’

‘No. He just said to tell you. And he asked for a beer.’

‘Been drinking, had he?’

But I couldn’t answer that. I didn’t know whether he’d been drinking or not.

The verandah door slammed and Edith Culpin came back into the kitchen. ‘Muriel just had a call from Mr Kadek,’ she said. ‘He wants you to ring him back right away.’

Culpin had twisted round in his chair, the sunlight full on his face. A globule of dried blood showed by his left ear and his skin had a bad colour. For a moment he seemed to have difficulty in switching his mind. ‘What’s Ferdie want?’ He was frowning, his voice slow and heavy.

‘She didn’t say. Just to ring him, and it was urgent.’

He turned back to his breakfast, staring down at the remains of the bacon. Then he pushed his plate away, folded the newspaper and poured himself another cup of tea.

‘We ought to have the phone here,’ his wife said.

‘You say that every time I get a call,’ he snarled. Then added, ‘Mebbe we will, when this deal’s gone through.’ He drank his tea in quick gulps, then lumbered to his feet. ‘You coming?’

I nodded and went to get the rock samples, which were still in my suitcase. I stuffed four of them into my trouser pockets and went out to join him in the ute.

We stopped at the second house on the dirt street leading to the Kambalda road and he was gone about ten minutes. ‘Mickey Mouse have put on a special flight. That’s MMA, the local airline. Ferdie wants us to meet them at the airport.’ And he added, ‘Beer and sandwiches at Ora Banda and you’re to get yourself clued up so’s you can answer all the questions this feller Freeman’s likely to ask.’

I reminded him that I hadn’t even seen the mine yet, but he only glared at me. ‘What the hell’s that matter? The mine’s my pigeon. All Ferdie wants from you is geological know-how.’ And he added, ‘They’ll be here about noon. That gives you three hours.’

Clear of Boulder, we took the dirt road that parallels the Golden Mile, the sun blazing hot and the mineworkings looking as though an army had fought a desert campaign across the scarred wasteland. ‘I’ll drop you in Macdonald Street. There’s Western Mining on one side, the School of Mines on the other. And Smithie’s usually at the Palace bar around eleven. I’ll pick you up there at eleven forty-five. Right?’