Mosquito Creek

by Robert Engwerda

  Then Smales was a spectral figure in the rain before completely disappearing from view.

  Niall tramped towards the floodwater’s edge.

  The same, morose band of diggers was still considering the swamp before them. Cast your nets out to the other side, Niall felt like goading them. Fish, gold, whatever you wanted, there for you in abundance. But the bedraggled group stared at him as though they wouldn’t have appreciated his turn of phrase. One snagged him with a question as he passed by.

  ‘What you gunner do about them what’s stuck?’

  The speaker was a short, wizened man, shrunken by rain, who would have looked more at home bouncing along on the back of a gelding somewhere, steaming around the turn at the two-furlong mark with a crowd, hats aloft, cheering him on. Here his audience was just his digger mates, a collection of men as unhappy and dispirited as him.

  ‘Who?’

  ‘The people what’s stuck.’

  ‘What people? Where?’

  The digger pointed a bony finger in the direction of the river to the north.

  ‘There’s a whole lot stuck out there somewhere on the other side near McLaren’s Crossing. They got claims in there on higher ground. Somebody said they saw them there. Don’t know names but you can bet they’s stuck. River’s come up so quick a man wouldn’t have time to think.’

  His mates nodded their agreement. One had heard shouting from that direction when the river had first started to spill, or thought he had, before the river properly burst its banks and spread the better part of a mile on the diggings side.

  With their quick, furtive glances, Niall figured they might start laying odds the minute he was gone.

  ‘So did anyone actually see someone stranded in there? Who knows anyone who’s in there?’

  ‘We didn’t see anyone oursells,’ the spokesman was forced to admit, ‘but we just knows they’s in there.’

  The others gestured their agreement again.

  ‘So where will I find someone who really knows who’s in there, and where, I wonder?’

  ‘That’s what you bein’ paid for to find out. You’s the police.’

  Niall looked them up and down; a muddy, sad-looking lot. There were limits to how much you could believe on a goldfield where truth was as changeable as the wind. They could have him running around on the back of some story concocted on the strength of poisonous home-made grog. But the way miners hid themselves all through the diggings and the bush beyond often had him wondering how a great many more hadn’t come to grief. The bush itself had already picked off a good number. There were accidents; too many different ways of dying to even contemplate. And now this flood they hadn’t seen coming.

  ‘I’ll see what I can find out,’ he told them. ‘Let me know if you discover anything else.’

  ‘We told you. We done our bit,’ the digger said.

  Put a police uniform on any one of these carping diggers and he would have scrubbed up as another Smales, Niall thought. Joining the goldfields police would be just another job for them, something he’d thought himself at the start: a green winter uniform, a wage and a new carbine in your hands. A chance to swagger a bit and pay some bastard back for all you’d suffered yourself. There were a lot like that – most were, in fact. But he saw it differently now. It was a wage for him, but it was something else too: a chance to slip into some new kind of skin, a chance to make up for a past that had grown over like brambles and suffocated his life.

  ‘I am the police,’ he agreed, closing down the conversation by walking off. ‘I’ll be the one who has to sort this out.’

  3

  Rumours of trapped miners stormed through the diggings. Inside the police compound a deputation of diggers milled by the commissioner’s hut, the troopers on duty shoving the men into some semblance of order. It was all part of the old game: the troopers feeling they had to throw their weight around, the gathering crowd feeling they had to trade insults and demands. But the goings-on at Ballarat the previous year – where thirty diggers were killed by troopers when rebelling over the cost of mining licences – were still fresh in everyone’s mind and the exchanges were nothing more than half-hearted.

  Niall stood by the hut door, listening to the small talk.

  ‘The old commissioner wouldn’t have bothered with this lot,’ one of the police remarked to his fellow trooper. ‘Would’ve had ’em off in a tick. Put the horses right through ’em.’

  ‘For sure,’ his mate said.

  ‘These people come here and think they got a right to walk all over everybody. People ought to know their place.’

  ‘True.’

  ‘If they were still over in the old country they’d know they had

  something to complain about. How would they be if they was still stuck over there?’

  ‘Much worse.’

  ‘Much worse, all right.’

  ‘Not all old country people causing the trouble, though,’ the other trooper said. ‘It’s the other ones too. Irish dogs like this lot,’ he said, tipping his head at the men leading the huddle waiting for the commissioner to emerge.

  ‘Irish pigs. Born of the muck houses and gaols,’ the first spat.

  Niall instinctively bristled but said nothing. His family had fled from Ireland shortly before his birth to settle in Bedfordshire. And in this country he found he had more in common with the Irish and the native-born than he did with the English.

  As he moved away he heard, ‘The whole place is going to the dogs and some people ought to learn their lesson.’

  In due course the commissioner appeared.

  Charles Stanfield had been on the Mosquito Creek diggings four months, meaning he had already been here longer than many of the miners and about half the police, whose numbers ebbed and flowed with the goldfield population. From time to time troopers deserted and it was never worth anyone’s while trying to reclaim them. People came and people went.

  Only the number of Chinese on the goldfield was more stable. From the first weeks at Mosquito Creek they’d dug themselves into a far western corner, establishing a shaky permanence of slab huts and outdoor ovens. Their dress and appearance, at first nothing more than a curiosity, began to remind diggers of their difference as gold became scarcer. Recently, sporadic attacks on their camps looted them of tools and other equipment. Now and then a hut was torched.

  Some miners blamed the first diggers for taking too much, for beating them to the gold. Some blamed the authorities and some the Chinese, but everyone blamed someone.

  Stanfield waited before the deputation until they had stilled, his red uniform carefully brushed. He was taller than his predecessor, some noted again, though young.

  Slowly the assembly hushed. Even if most had come to the colonies as free men or were native-born they carried an instinctive reluctance to be involved in anything that smelt of difficulty. There was still a dread in people that they might somehow be put on the spot. So when the commissioner came out to speak they held back as a group and prodded each other with ‘You!’ and ‘No, you!’ before one man with flame-red hair and glassy eyes was emboldened to step forward.

  Stanfield stared him up and down. ‘I believe there’s something you wish to discuss with me.’

  The digger advanced another pace. ‘We want you to know,’ he said, pushing his chin out, ‘that there is people stuck in the bush. Miners. Over the other side of the river. They’ve been cut off and we want to know what’s going to happen about it.’

  ‘One of my troopers informed me of much the same thing just before,’ Stanfield answered. ‘I have asked him to find out as much as he can.’

  ‘Is that all?’

  ‘For the moment. I do not believe there is a great deal to be gained in trying to enact a rescue when we do not even know how many miners are concerned or where they are. What we will do is ascertain the facts and then develop a plan to deal with them. It might take a day, it might take two days.’

  ‘But the people …’

 
‘If there are miners trapped they are not likely to disappear in the course of several days. Planning is the important thing. If there is a clear plan nothing can go wrong.’

  He sounded so confident the miners were taken aback. The last commissioner wouldn’t have even stood before them, let alone listen to them.

  One of the other spectators cut in. ‘What do you think you might do to get ‘em out?’

  The commissioner pondered.

  ‘It depends, as I suggested previously, on where they are and how many they are. But there are numerous alternatives we could employ. A swimmer taking a line is one possibility. The waters receding and them wading out is another …’

  ‘No chance of that. Water’s too quick and high and deep. Could take weeks,’ someone else sang out.

  ‘You can’t just stay here doing nothing!’ another yelled, prompting a rising of voices.

  ‘Sitting on your arses all day!’

  ‘What do we pay the gov’ment for?’

  ‘There’s men’s lives!’

  Niall raised both hands for quiet as the throng peppered the commissioner with their grievances.

  ‘Or,’ Stanfield continued, lifting both hand and voice at the same time, ‘we could send a boat to rescue them.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘We could send a boat,’ the commissioner repeated over the subsiding noise.

  ‘The only problem is, we don’t have a boat,’ the trooper standing beside him said quietly.

  The commissioner waved him aside and addressed the crowd with new spirit.

  ‘A river runs through this part of the countryside. There is bound to be a boat of some description somewhere.’ And then another thought struck him. ‘Failing that, we could, of course, build a boat ourselves.’

  ‘How?’ the trooper wondered aloud, if more quietly.

  ‘We have the tools and there is timber in abundance. I trained with the admiralty before coming to the colonies. Navigation, ship construction and other matters were all part of the training. Building a vessel small enough to sail these waters would present no real difficulty.’

  The crowd stood in dead calm now.

  ‘There!’ the commissioner pointed to the east. ‘We will build our boat and save those who need to be saved. I will lead the relief party myself!’

  The gathering before him looked over their shoulders in the direction of the river. The idea of a boat slapping oars to find those stranded met with their approval, and the crowd soon wandered back to their camps, nodding and nattering about the prospects of a rescue. The troopers followed to attend to their own business and only the commissioner and Niall remained.

  ‘A boat,’ Niall mused. ‘I wouldn’t have thought of that.’

  ‘There’s a river.’ The commissioner stared in the direction of the flood.

  ‘Have you made one before?’

  ‘One builds a boat, Mr Kennedy.’

  ‘Yes, sir. And how would you do it?’

  Stanfield kept his gaze fixed to the distance.

  ‘Plans. I had more than enough spare time on my hands in Bendigo, which gave me a chance to do some reading, and I have always been interested in boatbuilding. My family live in the country not far away from the dockyards in Chatham. We are very familiar with that kind of construction. As it turns out, I’ll now have an opportunity to put my learning into practice.’

  ‘What did your family do?’ Niall asked, regretting the question the second the words came out, should Stanfield ask in return about his family. But then, he knew authority never concerned themselves with the personal lives of their underlings.

  ‘My father works for the admiralty. Not on the high seas any more, you understand, more a sea dog at a desk. Somewhat like me,’ he turned and smiled. ‘My grandfather was the same – as a young man he sailed with Nelson. All that sea blood. Little wonder it’s in my brother and me.’

  ‘Your brother, is he out here too?’

  The commissioner touched his moustache.

  ‘No, no. He is still in England.’

  ‘When will we get started … on the boat?’

  ‘First thing in the morning. And Sergeant Kennedy?’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘I am trusting you to stand beside me throughout all this. I will need you to take charge of some of the men, keep direction over the carpenters and anyone else we need for this enterprise. There will be much to do and I am not sure how patient the rabble here will be.’

  ‘You can count on me. Just one thing.’

  The commissioner leant his head at an angle. ‘Yes?’

  ‘These diggers trapped over the other side of the river. Do you think they’re there?’

  ‘Is that not what these people are saying?’

  ‘Yes, but how could anyone tell? The waters came up quickly once the river broke its banks. Who could have seen what was going on over there?’

  The commissioner thought.

  ‘Regardless of whether there are people trapped or not, we cannot wait until someone writes a letter informing us of their plight. We have to assume the worst, if only to keep everyone here from causing further trouble for me.’

  4

  By next morning the sharp knock of axes striking eucalypts and wattle was already fracturing brittle air.

  Here and there miners bailed water from shafts filling as rapidly as they were slopped out, scooping relentlessly so as not to give the impression they had been defeated by the weather. Seepage caused timber shoring to collapse, the shafts caved in like weeping sores.

  A new hardship – ankle-deep mud – beset the goldfields and would bring new problems with it, the commissioner knew. Of these frustration was but one. Time out of the shafts meant no earnings when miners’ resources were already being stretched.

  And yesterday there had been an attack on three miners riding down from the escarpment. After being robbed of everything they carried one was punched bloody, the other two of their group chased deep into forest.

  No one had yet come forward with any information as to who was responsible and no one expected that anyone would.

  Commissioner Stanfield considered these things as he watched the first of his boatbuilding team fell and haul logs to where he’d decided the boat should be built.

  He kept a weather eye on the skies but there was no prospect of any immediate relief, nothing to cause any change to his plans. Overcast to black was how he would describe the skies in his dispatches to Melbourne. In letters to his family in England, where he could be freer with his language, he would paint them as being the colour of dark plums, sometimes as fierce and bruised as the cracking storms that had catapulted the Whitby around the Cape. There, at its worst, seas had flung him across his cabin, breaking a rib, while his cabin mate groaned with sickness in his bunk, a nauseous stench enveloping everything. Adding to his nightmare came the furious howling of dogs in the captain’s cabin while horses were dying somewhere deep in the bowels of the ship.

  Think of this for what it is, he told himself as he surveyed the diggings – a wearisome interlude that would pass with time. At least there was still some firm ground to cling to here, not the mountainous seas the Whitby was tossed around in, where several sailors had been lost overboard into the bargain. He’d seen one go himself, a fourteen-year-old lad snared as a rush of water flooded the fore end, yanked over before he could even give a yelp of surprise.

  In the time he had here, he would set about making things right. He had time to correct the terrible mistake that had been made on the voyage and which was the beginning of his troubles since landing in this country. Time to rid him of the dull sickness that gnawed at the pit of his stomach since losing in wretched Bendigo his family’s most valuable possession, as treasured a connection with England as could be imagined. Yet there was still hope for its return.

  Stanfield flinched as the striking of axes returned him to his surrounds.

  ‘Whereabouts?’ one of the navvies asked Niall Kennedy as he and two others battled a
log over slippery ground.

  ‘Where do you think, sir?’ Niall inquired of the commissioner. ‘Over there?’

  Without speaking, Stanfield indicated where the log and others to follow it were to be dumped.

  He had chosen a point close to the main body of water, slightly elevated so that even if the flood did rise further the boatbuilding could proceed without risk of having to be moved on. He’d also ordered the excavation of a hollow in which the boat itself would be built – his improvised notion of a dry dock. Two diggers were already hard at work with their shovels, gouging into the sodden earth.

  When the commissioner explained it to the others they could see the logic. They felt the reassurance of having a plan.

  ‘How big will she be?’ Niall asked.

  Stanfield was buoyed by the approving nods of the small crowd gathering to witness proceedings.

  ‘There!’ he ordered, as another log was delivered. ‘Keep them neatly side by side on the ground. We want to be able to choose our timbers without having to pull them out from under others.’

  He liked Kennedy’s reference to the boat as ‘she’, too. He turned and answered. ‘How big? She will have to be big enough to ride out the currents. There is a good body of water moving through that she will have to contend with, which will require maybe six or eight men at oars. A boat of fifteen to twenty feet and a couple of yards wide might not be out of the question.’

  Niall pictured it and rubbed his hands before shoving them back in his pockets. It was another bitterly cold morning.

  ‘For out here, that’s a big boat.’

  ‘It will have to be, for the passengers on the return journey.’

  The commissioner allowed himself a smile and touched Niall on the shoulder.