Mosquito Creek

by Robert Engwerda

  There was already talk of the prison closing down not long after he first arrived, when the Reverend Schofield also appeared in the settlement. Horrified by what he found – the practice of treating boys the same as men – the minister had the younger convicts separated as he began his own attempts at reformation. A kindly man, he instituted reading and writing lessons and it was a revelation to Niall that he found he learnt easily. He was soon spelling out whole words in chalk and in his own time would with stick in dirt imitate sentences he liked the sound of, and challenge himself to make out words he hadn’t been taught yet.

  And why hadn’t his own family given him this chance, he wondered, let him make something of himself, instead of them always being half a jump ahead of the debtors and the law, hurriedly dragging their few belongings from one squalid dump to the next? His father could have taken employment. No one was so poor they couldn’t work at something, however menial, and whatever they thought of their dignity.

  He tried to put the relentless sound of rain out of his mind as he looked around his hut. As he preferred to keep his earnings in pounds, there was little about him he could claim as his: a stretcher to sleep on, two chairs, a trunk with clothes and uniforms, scattered personal possessions, including books he’d bought cheaply in Melbourne, a pile of newspapers on the wooden floor and a table where he could sit down and write.

  Learning to write was the first time he began to stand away from himself, to see what he was capable of. At first he had sent letters back to England to show them what he could do and so they would know he was all right. He wasn’t surprised to receive no reply. His father, had he held a letter in his hand and woken to who it was written by, would probably have been resentful anyway.

  Smales wandered through the door, looking all about him, as was his way, as though trying to find his sergeant was the last thing on his mind.

  ‘Everything’s all right over at the boat,’ the trooper said, flatly. ‘You having your lunch?’

  ‘Just finished it as a matter of fact,’ Niall said, rising from his chair. ‘Very nice it was too.’

  ‘Will I be able to eat as well?’

  Niall made towards the door. ‘Later on.’

  Niall pushed Smales away from the door and out into the compound yard.

  ‘Where are we going then?’

  ‘To the creek.’

  ‘We’re not going out there now, are we?’ Smales complained.

  ‘You said there’s a problem so we’re going to see what the story is.’

  ‘But it wasn’t me who saw it. It was someone else.’

  ‘So how does that make it any different?’

  ‘It makes it different because I don’t want to get it.’

  ‘We’ll see what’s there first.’

  The trooper reluctantly followed his sergeant to the yard behind the police huts where the horses were kept.

  ‘We riding out there?’ Smales asked.

  ‘Yes,’ Niall replied. ‘On horses.’

  ‘Ha ha.’

  ‘Got your rifle?’

  ‘It goes everywhere I go.’

  ‘Good fellow.’

  They saddled two mounts and slipped quietly out of the yards. With Niall riding out in front they headed north-west along what was known to diggers as Boxing Harry Track. On the way they passed a butcher tying the back legs of two recently slaughtered lambs to the sturdy branch of a black wattle. As they watched, the butcher drew a long knife along one lamb’s belly, dropping steaming grey innards onto the ground.

  Smales turned his face.

  ‘You’ve never seen that before?’ Niall asked.

  ‘Never had a reason to.’

  ‘It’s only gizzards.’

  ‘Still don’t have to look at it if I don’t want to.’

  The sergeant wasn’t comfortable watching the butcher either, but neither was that something you shared with a constable.

  Before long they were riding away from the more populated area of the diggings over gravelly ground where claims were spread thirty or forty yards apart.

  ‘At least the fog’s disappeared,’ Niall said, turning in the saddle to look at Smales. ‘What we wouldn’t give for a few days of sunshine, eh?’

  ‘And no bloody rain.’

  ‘And no rain. Definitely no rain.’

  Winter had made life miserable for everyone and it had continued through spring. They had to be getting some clear weather before long, Niall thought. He’d never seen this much water ever in his life.

  They rode on silently towards Mosquito Creek, Smales falling back twenty yards for the rest of the journey to the camp.

  ‘Better get your handkerchief out and tie it over your nose,’ Niall called back to him when they rounded a bend in the track opening up to a wider clearing.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘You’ll see.’

  Though the camp on Mosquito Creek was where the first diggers settled there was little to suggest that fact. If anything there were more signs of disarray about and less evidence of permanent settlement than elsewhere on the diggings. The track petered out into what was once going to be the settlement’s main street, if seven rude huts built closely alongside each other could be described as a street. After the initial rush of building enthusiasm the huts had fallen into disrepair, several blackened by chimney fires and others with shingle and timber roofs leaking water. Timbers had been prised from the walls of some to be used for other purposes. Riding by, it was possible to see what most of the occupants were up to inside.

  The ground either side of the rough path meandering by the huts and beyond towards Chinaman’s Bridge was littered with hundreds of burnt, crushed tins, bottles and shards of glass, and pieces of paper fluttering like butterfly wings where they’d become caught against bracken and melaleuca bushes. Scattered among the trampled scrub ahead of the two policemen were perhaps forty tents of the dirtiest, torn canvas, as though a remnant of some lost, defeated army had retired here in hiding and had never moved.

  ‘We’ll get off our horses now,’ Niall ordered, and they tied their mounts to a stump and continued on foot, carrying only their rifles.

  ‘These rags over our faces, they’ll think we’re bushrangers,’ Smales worried. ‘Don’t want anyone taking a pot shot at us.’

  ‘It’ll be our uniforms they see first.’

  ‘You sure about that?’

  ‘If we end up full of holes you can tell everyone I was wrong.’

  Smales glanced sideways at him, not quite sure of his sergeant.

  ‘You think if I was killed you’d be made a sergeant?’ Niall continued.

  ‘I could be.’

  Niall stared ahead. ‘I wouldn’t get your hopes up.’

  As they wandered among the tents they came upon a pair of men crouching by a meagre fire. They were draped with filthy blankets covering their heads like monks and shivered as they looked up at the policemen, as though they’d been pulled soaking from a creek. All blood had drained from their faces. The first man, the older of the two, chattered as he asked, ‘You come to help us?’

  ‘We’ll do what we can. How long have you been like this?’ Niall asked.

  The man peered at them hopefully, his cropped ginger hair accentuating the deathly pallor of his face. The sparse stubble on his chin and cheeks was even more ginger than his hair.

  ‘I don’t know. Maybe two days. My mate here,’ he said, without shifting his eyes from Niall, ‘he’s worse and someone needs to come now.’

  ‘We’ll get someone to come and look at you.’

  ‘Looking won’t save us if you don’t hurry up,’ he said. ‘It’ll be the undertaker you’ll be needing to bring.’

  And then the breeze shifted and a pungent, rotting odour came so hard at them Smales reeled and skipped in circles trying to escape it. Niall himself was gripped by a tightening in his stomach.

  ‘God almighty! What’s that?’ Smales shrieked.

  Niall turned on his heels to look around.


  ‘It’s what’s coming from over there against that tree.’

  Pressing his handkerchief closer against his nose, Niall walked carefully to where a third man was sitting with his back against a paperbark sapling.

  ‘I’m staying here if you don’t mind,’ Smales called after him.

  The sergeant waved a hand to show that was all right by him.

  The digger wore no socks or boots, his thin black trousers hoisted high above his hips and tied tight by a belt too long for the job. His soiled white shirt was unbuttoned to the waist as if he’d been trying to cool himself down. What he’d vomited was a foul mess down the front of him. Niall wondered how long he’d been dead. And then he realised how young the digger was, perhaps eighteen at most. Even death hadn’t taken the ruby from his lips though his jaw hung slackly so the roots of his crooked, tobacco-stained, bottom teeth showed. His head dipped slightly but his eyes were still partly open so when Niall pulled his head back he could see right into them.

  The sergeant gently let him go.

  ‘It’s too late for this one. Just a boy,’ he said quietly to himself, but he was trembling, the sight sending him to the forest beyond Macquarie Harbour, the time he had made his one attempt at escape. The past always came skittering back, he thought hopelessly, however much he tried to shut out what had happened.

  Standing upright again, he found himself shaking uncontrollably, his legs jelly.

  Forget it, forget it, he told himself.

  He looked away and drew deep breaths.

  Think of something else.

  He moved with trepidation further among the tents. In one he found another two dead men lying face to face, closer as their decaying, swelling bodies pressed them together in a weird embrace. Elsewhere through the scrub men lay scattered as though shot while fleeing. From everywhere rose the bloated stench of death.

  Niall lurched forward to spew into the grass.

  10

  Alec Napier stood watching the others argue.

  For a long while the seven men left on the island had spread out to search for any sign of Ship. When they had seen nothing they had returned to the corner where the digger had disappeared.

  ‘That’s it, isn’t it?’ Bill waved his hand towards the area where Ship had disappeared. ‘What do we do now?’

  ‘Well I ain’t goin’ in after him, tell you that much,’ Kentucky said, standing a further pace back from the water’s edge.

  ‘Yes and now it’s just you and me in this claim now, you know that don’t you?’ Bill said.

  ‘It makes no difference to me. We keep doin’ the same we always were.’

  ‘Two is not the same as three.’

  ‘We’re taking off,’ the Geelong shearer Silas told his nephew and Jim Spearitt. ‘Come on, let’s get back to our claim.’

  ‘Hey, wait on!’ Bill grabbed Silas’s arm. ‘You can’t leave here. What about Ship?’

  The shearer shrugged his arm free.

  ‘You do that again and you’ll be swimming down the river with your hands and legs tied. Got it?’

  Bill tensed his shoulders, squared up to the Geelong man.

  ‘And you’re gonner do what?’ the shearer taunted him, knowing the smaller man wouldn’t press his luck.

  ‘Ship, he could still be there somewhere. You can’t leave him.’

  ‘He’s your mate. You sort it out.’

  Silas walked away, his two partners in tow, but he kept watching Bill over his shoulder a long time before disappearing into the scrub.

  ‘What sort of bloke is that?’ Bill complained to the others. ‘Someone tries to help us all and they walk away like they’re off to a Sunday picnic.’

  ‘He’s right, anyway,’ Jack Merriman told him. ‘Where Ship’s gone he’s not coming back.’

  Bill spun in a circle, his arms waving high. ‘Let’s everybody give up. Jump ourselves inter the river and be done with it.’

  ‘I ain’t doin’ that,’ the hang-dog Kentucky protested.

  Alec stared across the water. ‘The diggings seem a long way away, don’t they?’ he thought aloud.

  ‘Too far away for anyone to get to us,’ Merriman said.

  Bill picked up a twig, snapping it across his knee. ‘How much food have you blokes got left?’

  ‘Not much. Bit of meat, a few vegetables,’ Alec answered.

  ‘Same with us. We haven’t much either.’ He angrily regarded the vegetation into which the Geelong men had disappeared. ‘Tell you one thing, though, I’m going to be keeping my eye on that other mob. And don’t think I’m going to be just taking it from him lying down. What about you blokes? You going to step in too if it comes to it?’

  ‘If there’s a good reason,’ Merriman replied.

  ‘Same here,’ Alec said.

  ‘Good, then. Watch that bastard squeal when he gets some of his own medicine back.’

  With that, Bill and Kentucky wandered away to their camp, their very different heights making a curious pair as they departed. ‘The long and the short of it,’ as Merriman later quipped.

  Alec and Merriman took themselves away, too, suddenly aware of the rain and wintry cold. It was about midday but no glimmer of sun broke a barrier of rucking clouds as they trudged back to their shelter.

  ‘Take a quick look at the shaft?’ Alec said, thinking it might take their minds off Ship’s disappearance.

  His partner wordlessly agreed.

  Their claim was close by Merriman’s tent. Like all claims north of Mosquito Creek theirs was a good-sized area and a great improvement on the old size. On the diggings proper, claims were side by side, resulting in endless disputes, especially as miners burrowed underground and territorial boundaries became blurred. Here on this side of the river, where there was more room to breathe, the more speculative miners staked claims based on their own knowledge of geology, and chance, rather than on where proven finds were. They’d been rewarded for their risk, too. All parties at this place found enough to keep them going and to prevent them spouting their results to others. Any loose talk to outsiders, they knew, would bring hundreds buzzing around like flies to a carcass.

  Alec and Merriman already knew their shaft would be awash. Work of any kind was out of the question in this weather but they were interested in seeing what further damage the rain had done to their labours. Water greeted them from six feet down when they stared.

  ‘Like the bottom of a bucket,’ Merriman complained. ‘It’ll take years to soak back out.’

  ‘When the river runs down and the land water falls.’

  ‘It keeps going up though.’

  Merriman looked at his hands and rubbed at deep creases in his palms as if trying to scour away the evidence of years of physical work. He might’ve been only in his early thirties, like his partner, but he seemed much older to Alec. His bedraggled moleskins and shirt trailed lines of thread. His boots were splitting at the sides. He walked slightly bent over as if he’d been burdened by a huge weight all his life, his long, scraggly black beard further intent on dragging down his face. Nothing about Merriman’s appearance had bothered Alec before when he was camped in his own tent and there was free passage to and from their claim, and he could take the punt at McLaren’s Crossing if he pleased. But the flood had claimed his tent and most of their supplies from lower ground the first night it stole through. Now he was forced to share Merriman’s tent and closely observe every single thing the Englishman did, as well as endure his overbearing nature, his insistence on always being right.

  ‘I didn’t think it would be that high,’ Alec said.

  ‘You couldn’t even bucket it out.’

  ‘No point.’

  There was no gain to be had from hanging around and the two miners returned pensively to their tent. They were wet through.

  ‘Ship didn’t have a chance of making it across,’ Merriman said, as they crossed under the canvas sheet protecting their tent.

  Alec pulled on a rope to tighten one corner and saw their woode
n stakes were holding firm despite the wind. Without the additional cover everything they owned would have been drenched by now. As it was most of the canvas was heavy with damp.

  ‘Someone had to try something.’

  Although this was Merriman’s tent, in the two days gone by Alec had come to think of it as his too. The spare bedding and few clothes salvaged from his own tent had saved him.

  ‘Dying isn’t worth that,’ Merriman said.

  ‘And if no one does anything we’re all gone.’

  ‘That’s not a reason to do yourself in one by one.’

  Merriman paced the shelter hugging himself, while Alec put on his other, drier shirt.

  ‘Ship had a chance,’ Alec replied. ‘He did it for all of us.’

  ‘You’re wrong there. He didn’t do it for any of us. He did it for himself. He thought he’d make a hero of himself. Because he’d been in Ballarat he thought that meant something. But it means nothing. He’ll be floating around in the water now, blow up like a cow tomorrow. And then when the waters fall back he’ll be sucked back into the river and rot, snagged up against some bank. No one will know where he is even if they do care. That’s what wanting to be a great man is: a stinking, rotting corpse no better than a dead dog.’

  ‘I don’t think he’s dead anyway,’ Alec said evenly. ‘We didn’t see anything. There’s no proof.’

  ‘Take a look down the river next week. If you can stand it.’

  And with that Merriman stooped even further, rummaging for something among his possessions before settling down on his stretcher. Lying there in his wet clothes making his bedding damp as well, Alec thought.

  Alec tried to calculate how long he had been working this claim. He reckoned not even two weeks. He had left his wife Emily and young son in Melbourne several months ago expecting a brief period away. His business transporting goods from place to place had been doing poorly and this was a way of rescuing it, he’d told her, or of getting started in something else. But on arriving at Mosquito Creek he’d found next to nothing. He’d taken up with a group of four men working two adjoining claims who were looking for a new chum to help them out. Day after day he dug, barrowed, barked his knuckles, and washed their clay and gravel searching for gold, rarely finding more than the tiniest of nuggets.