Mosquito Creek

by Robert Engwerda

  MOSQUITO CREEK

  Robert Engwerda was born in the Netherlands and his family later settled in northern Victoria. His first novel, Backwaters, was longlisted for the Miles Franklin Award in 2005. Robert currently lives in Melbourne.

  ROBERT ENGWERDA

  MOSQUITO CREEK

  VIKING

  an imprint of

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  For Jacob, Anneke

  and Joshua

  1

  Charles Stanfield, the Mosquito Creek goldfield commissioner, shivered in his coat as he surveyed the floodwaters spilling to the north. The nature of the country both sides of the river, he knew, made it impossible to tell how far the flood might have run, how much territory it might have breached. All about here was his responsibility and he felt its weight keenly. He could afford no further black mark against him.

  Behind him to the south, his eye caught eruptions of earth discarded by burrowing miners. Some hummocks already seemed old, smoothed by rains and trampled by countless restless feet, though the ground had been even and undisturbed less than a year ago. Further in his line of sight, scattered through the few remaining trees on the diggings were huts of crude wattle and daub alongside grey canvas tents, sore reminders of how far he was from home.

  As he stared even further south, a craggy escarpment peered over the heads of dripping eucalypts in tired contemplation of the diggings. Where the escarpment sagged in a low trough, travellers and coaches were funnelled through into easier country and the goldfield below.

  Stanfield shivered again, drawing his coat tighter about him.

  ‘Cold,’ his sergeant, Niall Kennedy, noted.

  ‘Yes.’

  Several other policemen stood about idly as their superiors endeavoured to sum up the situation. One rested the stock of his rifle on the ground, using the weapon as a crutch before discovering how soft the ground was.

  ‘Water’s travelled a long way,’ the sergeant said.

  ‘Do you believe it will rise more yet?’

  ‘It might go a bit higher. But the ground here’s fairly high. I think we’ll be all right, sir.’

  Stanfield held no great trust in any of his policemen but he considered Kennedy at least competent, one of the few with a dedication to his task.

  ‘Do we know how far the river is in flood?’

  The policeman glanced around pensively, which was partly what Stanfield liked about him. There was no shooting off with the first thought, no puffing himself up. The sergeant tried conveying something of the truth of a situation. Kennedy was about forty, he supposed, getting old to be a trooper, but clean-shaven and with hard green eyes. Almost six foot tall and broad across the shoulders, he could move beyond the authority of his uniform if he needed to, though he was more inclined to look away before speaking, as if considering how many of his thoughts he could let go.

  ‘The road across to Wangaratta seems to be all right, they say. The same with Beechworth. Anything north of the river we won’t be able to get to.’ Kennedy pointed to the east. ‘The thing is, there’s all these weeks of rain we’ve had, and they’ve probably had more falling higher up in the mountains too. Melting all the snow. I’d say for the Murray to break like this they must have had even more rain out that way than we’ve had here. The other rivers and creeks pouring into it further up too, you’d think.’ He read the commissioner’s next question. ‘It might not go much higher here, but if it keeps on raining it’s not going to fall much either, for a spell. And that water from the north will have to fall back somewhere, to the river.’

  ‘So we might have to contend with this for a time yet,’ the commissioner said despondently.

  ‘I’d say that’s about it.’

  ‘You’ll keep me abreast of any news?’

  ‘I’ll see if there’s anything else to find out.’

  ‘Make sure now, won’t you?’

  Kennedy nodded.

  Commissioner Stanfield dismissed the others before turning in the direction of his hut. The muddy diggings were quiet enough and he could negotiate a path without any concern. When the first hopefuls ventured here from the central Victorian goldfields early in 1855, too late to take advantage of the great finds there but with still enough glint in their eyes to make the trek north-east, Mosquito Creek had quickly grown from a hundred strong to five hundred, to a thousand before two weeks were out. Swarming crowds picked over every likely pocket of earth, and as larger finds became rarer, impatience and tempers rose. New arrivals were blamed, ostracised, beaten. The little gold remaining was now swiftly running out, that much was clear.

  The commissioner let himself into his hut, which he locked these days since Bendigo taught him the need. He shrugged rain from his coat before hanging it on an improvised hatstand. What remained of his fire had almost extinguished itself in the hearth so he stoked it back to life with kindling and twigs, listening to the spit and crackle of wood igniting. A millipede crept from a narrow tube of bark he’d tossed into the flames and he flicked it back into the fire, watching it sizzle and shrink into itself.

  Stanfield was young; no older than twenty-five, one of the governor’s ‘boy commissioners’. He stood straight and rigid, which made him appear even slighter, taller than his height of six feet. He wore the faintly sick, pallid look of all recently arrived from England, even though he had been in this country seven or eight months now, arriving at Mosquito Creek after a stint at Bendigo. His short brown hair was recently cut. A neatly trimmed moustache barely hid a white scar. His walnut-brown eyes surveyed the room without interest.

  As frequently happened when he was alone, what memories he tried hardest to close out of his mind most commonly stepped forward to confront him.

  He remembered being sixteen, lost in a book with thin, pencil-line illustrations of mechanical equipment and engines, his father stamping into the library and catching him unawares.

  ‘What are you doing?’

  His father might have run from somewhere. His hair was dishevelled, the loose folds of his jowly cheeks were red. There was a sharp smell about him.

  And before Charles had time to answer, to respond in any way, his father strode forward and spat a sticky, burning gob into his face.

  Pulling a chair to his desk, and staring at the unopened correspondence on it, a sick, bilious feeling began rising in Charles Stanfield, not for the first time since his arrival in the new country.

  2

  Niall Kennedy decided he’d do the rounds of the diggings, and check with his own eyes what disappointments the night had brought.

  He headed first to where those in residence the longest had settled in shacks and more established huts, to the south-west of the goldfield. These were the storekeepers, a couple of itinerant sch
oolteachers, other workers paid from the public purse, undertakers and ministers and tradesmen who had done well selling to prospectors. Women living on the diggings mostly lived here, where there was company and what comfort could be found. Though intended as a proper street in a proper town the houses resembled a slightly nervous collection of buildings leaning against each other in quiet distress, with peeping, small-paned windows warily watching a slightly straggly street; houses that without much care would soon fall down again. A run of six or seven stores with tin advertising boards screeching their wares jostled for territory further along the street. According to the signs everything could be purchased there, from the newest leather shoes straight off the coach from Melbourne to pickled white onions in jars and ‘medical appliances’, to fortunes accurately read – 99 per cent success rate – by one ‘Lady Calcutta’.

  Alongside more recent additions to the streets were the first police huts and lockup built on the diggings. As Niall drew closer he remembered how it had looked here soon after news of the original finds broke eight months ago. Then, a party of troopers had been hastily summoned to Mosquito Creek hard on the heels of streams of miners emptying other goldfields. It was always a vexed question, deciding whether or not to send police to the site of a new strike. Some places lasted no longer than a week, while others exploded. With people came carts, wheelbarrows, wagons, cattle and horses, sometimes goats and always dogs. Saplings were chopped down and canvas roped to them for shelters. More and more timber was felled, for firewood, shoring up shafts, dwellings, laying pathways. Rifles took care of native animals and the occasional stray sheep from a settler’s property, and harried blacks away from where they weren’t wanted. Kangaroo and possum hunts became popular ways of whiling away what leisure hours there were. The tramping of hundreds, then thousands of feet wore down the earth. Shovels and picks turned over the rest as fire torched grassland and stubborn patches of scrub. In no time the new arrivals rendered the landscape desolate.

  Walking at least brought some blood to Niall’s toes. Even though he could never maintain a brisk pace for long he felt the travel doing him some good and all seemed quiet here. A girl, perhaps five or six, lugging a white linen doll missing an eye, walked right across his path so he almost stumbled over her.

  ‘Sorry,’ he laughed, but the girl ignored him, preoccupied with her doll’s brown woollen hair.

  As he continued on his way one of his troopers, Smales, a shortish bloke a good ten years younger than himself, with a deep purple birthmark creeping from neck to right ear, came by to wander along at his heel.

  ‘Wet,’ the trooper complained. ‘Bloody wet, ain’t it?’

  Niall merely raised his eyebrows and hoped the commissioner didn’t view him the way he saw Smales.

  ‘Bloody wet, all right,’ the trooper repeated.

  ‘You said.’

  Despite drizzle riding the back of a cold southerly, the goldfield’s population was out in force, bucketing water from deeper shafts, slops of shovelled earth running like lava down mounds of discarded mud.

  No digger paid the two policemen any mind as the sergeant decided to cut across the field to the east.

  ‘We going along to the river?’ Smales wanted to know.

  ‘Looks like it.’

  The trooper followed wordlessly for a while and then cast a glance at his sergeant, mulling over something he might say.

  Finally he asked, ‘You ever been in Van Diemen’s Land?’

  ‘Who wants to know?’

  Smales waited a while again.

  ‘Just asking.’

  ‘What’s it of interest to you?’

  The trooper looked downcast. ‘No reason. It’s just someone said you were in Van Diemen’s Land, that’s all.’

  ‘I’ve lived there, worked there. Last I heard, people are still allowed to move about if they want. And it’s my business, not anyone else’s.’

  ‘Anyway, it wasn’t me who wanted to know. Just someone else.’

  ‘Who then?’

  Niall could feel his heart beating a little quicker.

  But Smales didn’t answer, just shrugged his shoulders to avoid any further conversation.

  Niall stared hard at him but when Smales wouldn’t meet his eyes he turned his attention away and continued towards the river, studying the men labouring nearby at their claims. There was little chance of anyone finding anything today, he knew. And privately every digger knew it too.

  Now that he was closer he could see the river fanned out further than he had imagined. The natural geography of the region, where the river slid through a bumpy plain hemmed in by corrugated ranges to the north and the rugged escarpment to the south, meant floodwater would sit a long time before meandering on its way again. Most claims were already swamped and nearby a morose gathering of miners pointed out places where they thought their claims used to be. One tossed Kennedy a dirty look, as if it might be his fault the river had broken its banks.

  ‘Anyone lose anything in all this?’ the sergeant ventured.

  ‘Just the shafts. All the digging,’ one answered.

  He might have added, all their fortunes buried at the bottoms of their holes, everything gone, the whole bloody lot.

  ‘If you’ve got your bit of paper, I suppose you could just choose another spot. You never know. Could be more lucky there.’

  ‘Or unlucky.’

  Niall didn’t answer this time, knowing there was no point trying to revive the dispirited. Once someone was on a bad-luck streak and knew it there was no wrestling it away from them. The unlucky saw signs of their misfortune everywhere: omens, fate, one disaster drawing another down upon it. He knew those signs himself.

  ‘Where were you saying that tent was?’ he asked Smales. ‘The one you were telling me about yesterday.’

  Smales and another trooper had mentioned to him in passing that they’d come across a deserted tent but the flood had pushed it from Niall’s mind until now. Abandoned belongings often spelt trouble of one kind or another.

  ‘That one,’ the trooper nodded. ‘Saying it didn’t look right. At the start, I thought there might be a bolter. Someone hadn’t paid their Right or was crooked. But we went back later and there was still no one.’

  ‘They could’ve just been off at the stores.’

  ‘Someone told us they hadn’t seen him.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘The feller who lived there.’

  ‘Yes, but who?’

  The trooper didn’t know what he meant, was tangled up in the questions.

  ‘Anyway, let’s have a look,’ Niall said.

  As it turned out the deserted tent wasn’t more than five minutes walk away, a trip that would have been quicker but for shifting ground. A sticky paste of clay and thin topsoil slid under their boots as they carefully picked their way along.

  And the tent itself was pretty much as Smales had described it. All police on the diggings had an eye for something that wasn’t as it should be. It was an instinct in them; a carcass tossed far away in the scrub throwing off a faint scent. And they could all pick it, even if a newcomer casting eyes on this scene wouldn’t have given it a second glance. But both sergeant and trooper, in different ways, could tell that something was wrong. Smales couldn’t have explained his intuition. Niall saw it in smaller signs as they took in the tent and the few items strewn around. A fire was burnt out but had never been used; there were no raked embers or billy sitting in the ashes. Inside the tent there was more than the usual disarray, as though someone had been through it and turned things over. Yet a clean shirt tossed on the stretcher bed yielded a further clue: a Miner’s Right within an inside pocket.

  Even after all this time Niall’s skin crawled in anticipation of being held accountable further down the track for what had gone on here, however little it had to do with him.

  ‘Someone’s beaten us to it, by the looks, but they didn’t notice this,’ Niall said. He held the paper out to Smales, whom he knew had no schooli
ng. ‘Read who it is.’

  ‘Very funny.’

  ‘It’s …’ Niall held it on another angle, trying to read through the water stains by the weak light from the tent’s opening. ‘It looks like somebody Oriele or Oriente … Phillip Oriente.’

  ‘You know who that is?’

  ‘Just like I know everyone on these diggings. That is, the ones who sign my visitor’s book.’

  ‘Ha ha.’

  ‘What else have we got?’

  Niall began rummaging through the rest of the miner’s belongings. The air inside the tent clung damply to him and he wouldn’t stay a minute longer here than was necessary. There was another pile of clothes; nothing of an expensive cut, but a red vest of silk-like material lay buried underneath. There was little in the pockets save a slip of paper on which the ink had also run, leaving only parts of sentences intelligible.

  ‘Can you make it out?’

  ‘Even harder.’ Niall squinted at the note. ‘… by the … can’t see the rest … meet … No, it’s impossible. There’s about six lines.’ He put the note in his pocket to study later. ‘Now, what else?’

  The remaining space in the tent didn’t warrant much investigation. There was a scattering of cooking implements and two locked packing cases doubling as a table laid out neatly with plate, mug and eating irons – a setting waiting for a meal. Two thin blankets and a third one of better quality with naval insignia and a ‘W’ sewn into a corner lay rumpled on a stretcher. In a corner loose sheets of newspaper were disintegrating in the damp.

  ‘Oriente,’ Niall muttered.

  ‘Sounds foreign.’

  ‘Something’s gone on here.’ And now it was in his head, gnawing at him, he knew he’d be worrying at it until he found this Oriente or discovered what had happened to him. At the same time he feared what that might be. ‘See what you can find out. Talk to the people around here. See if they’ve got something to say. If you need to pay a shilling come along and see me. All right?’

  ‘All right.’

  Niall watched Smales trudge off, waving a hand airily above his head as if to ward off rain now blowing in gusts. Across the diggings the few remaining tree stumps poked like rotten wharf pilings through a slippery mess of brown soil and runny blue clay. Much further away, where the river spilt its banks, river red gums emerged from the flood as sentinels; markers for whatever might lie at their feet. Wattles, peppermint and ironbark saplings, swayed alongside them with the push of water.