Goldfields Girl

by Elaine Forrestal

  ‘It embittered me to be called a lag,’ he said. ‘And that policeman, he had it in for me. But he couldn’t catch me. Oh no. No-one could catch me. I hid out in Moondyne Gully. I lived off the land, mostly, but sometimes I got thirsty and stole a few bottles of grog from the trader in Toodyay.’ Joe’s head was nodding and his eyes were closed. I wondered if he was dropping off to sleep, but he straightened his shoulders. ‘That’s where the nickname, Moondyne Joe, comes from.’

  ‘And when you pinched the horse you took it back to Moondyne Gully and ate it!’ The older boy laughed so much he fell on his back in the dirt.

  ‘Ah, yes. They got me for that one. But they couldn’t keep me in gaol. They got tired of having to find me and lock me up again, so the Governor of Western Australia says to me, “Joe, if you escape again I swear I’m just going to leave you roaming.”’ Joe gave a gravelly laugh and his eyes crinkled at the corners. ‘He didn’t believe anyone could get out of that tiny cell he’d had built specially for me. I’m smarter than that, you know. They couldn’t send me outside the prison walls to work off me sentence. They knew I’d get away, quick smart. So they brought in a pile of rocks for me to split inside the prison walls. Only I split their wall for ’em, instead.’ He laughed heartily at this, slapping his knees and rocking his body. ‘I went about it careful, mind, so they wouldn’t notice. Bit by bit, I made a hole behind the pile of rocks. Then one day I just slipped through. I made up a scarecrow and dressed it in me prison garb so they thought I was still working!’ He was laughing so hard that his eyes watered.

  ‘After that, I took to the bush. And the new governor, he let me be.’ Joe patted the dog. It raised its eyes.

  ‘Michael! Paddy!’ A woman’s voice was calling. ‘Come on home, now. Yehs best get yer chores done or yer da’ll be after ye.’ The two boys sprang up and the girl ran after them, even though she hadn’t been called.

  ‘Bye.’

  ‘See you later, Joe,’ they shouted, and ran off with the red dust kicking up behind their bare feet.

  When they had gone, I turned back to Moondyne Joe. ‘You have certainly had an interesting life,’ I said. ‘I hope you will tell me more about it, next time you come to town.’

  He didn’t reply and seemed to have retreated into his own thoughts again. I stroked his dog’s ears and left them both sitting there in the fading light.

  I returned to the hotel to find Emily looking for me.

  ‘At last!’ she said. ‘I was about to take the Finnertys’ dinner tray to them myself.’

  ‘Sorry,’ I said. ‘I was listening to Moondyne Joe.’

  ‘That explains it,’ Emily said. ‘He’ll tell tales till all the cockies have come in to roost, but who knows if they’re true. Sometimes I think he makes them all up – except the one about being sent out here as a convict. That one seems to stay the same. Here.’ She handed me a tray, already loaded with two plates of food covered by a tea towel, knives and forks wrapped in linen serviettes, a bottle of wine and two glasses. ‘Mind how you go.’

  September 1892

  It was 16 September 1892 when Arthur Bayley finally rode back into Southern Cross.

  I noted the date because Susan and I had been writing letters to send to Pa and the boys. Susan had asked Mother which date to put at the top of her letter, but Mother wasn’t sure and had to check. No-one in Southern Cross worried too much about the exact date, or even what time it was. Life progressed at its own pace. The pub was open, or it was not open. The dancing had begun, or it was about to begin. The sun was rising into a clear, blue sky, or setting like an orange cut in half by the horizon. I was never bored. There were singalongs and picnics, parties and racing carnivals. Everyone came. If you hadn’t already been told all the details, or read the posters around town, you just asked someone at the hotel.

  I had finished my work in the Finnertys’ suite and was dusting around the reception area while it was quiet after the lunch rush. It was a thankless task. A coating of fine red dust rose from every surface, and promptly settled again as soon as I turned my back. If the dusting wasn’t done every day, though, things quickly changed colour and felt gritty to touch.

  I became aware of someone else in the room and looked up to see a man standing at the counter. Two battered leather saddlebags lay at his feet.

  ‘Do you have any rooms?’ he asked, taking off his hat and looking towards the bar where bottles glinted invitingly on the shelves and glasses hung upside down in the wooden racks above.

  ‘I’ll go and get Mr Farren,’ I said. The man wiped dust and sweat from his forehead. His brown eyes were dull with fatigue.

  I hurried to find Tom.

  ‘A single room, is it Arthur?’ Tom asked, reaching for the hotel register and placing it open on the bar. The man wrote his name, Arthur Bayley, and booked the room for two nights. When the paperwork was completed, Tom asked me to show Mr Bayley to his room while he went outside to take the horse around to the stables. By the state of his clothes and boots, it looked like Arthur Bayley had ridden a long way. When he picked up his bags from the floor, he staggered a little under their weight.

  ‘Mr Farren will bring your bags to the room for you,’ I explained. ‘He will be back in a few minutes.’

  ‘I’ll carry them,’ Mr Bayley said. ‘They’re not heavy.’ He saw the questioning look on my face, but made no further comment.

  His room was one of the newer ones at the back of the hotel. I walked ahead of him, but had to slow down as he stopped every few seconds to rest the bags on the ground. When we reached the room I opened the door and he looked all around it, into the corners and under the bed.

  ‘Is everything to your liking?’ I asked, indicating the china bowl and jug on the bedside table and the hanging rail that stretched across one corner.

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘But please tell Tom that I don’t want to be disturbed.’

  ‘Certainly,’ I said. ‘Dinner is served from eight o’clock onwards.’

  ‘I won’t be eating dinner, thank you. I’ll be sleeping.’

  I looked at his face, still covered in grime, except for the paler strip where he had wiped his forehead. I was about to explain that water cost two shillings a gallon, but he waved me away and closed the door.

  By ten o’clock the next morning, the town was buzzing with the news. Arthur Bayley had put 554 ounces of pure gold on display at the Commercial Bank and registered a claim in his own name and that of his mate, William Ford, who had stayed behind to stand guard over their find. The whole town was alive with rumours. The reef was three feet wide and fifty yards long. No, three feet above ground and sixty yards long. It was a hundred yards long with veins of gold as thick as your finger, all shining in the sun! There were so many different stories, but one thing was clear. This was a reef of gold to rival any in the world. A sight for sore eyes. The stuff of dreams. Bayley and Ford had struck it rich. They could claim the reward, offered to anyone who found a new field, and live like kings for the rest of their lives.

  When lunch was over, I crossed the road to see for myself. A crowd of people still clustered around the display. The magnificent collection of pure gold nuggets winked and glinted on a black cloth spread on the counter. Mr Bayley, with his pistol in full view, stood guard over his stash. His freshly washed face was beaming as he answered questions and described the enormous ridge of gold he and Ford had found.

  ‘What you see in front of you, gentlemen, is a tiny fraction of the whole,’ he said. ‘A few nuggets broken off from the main reef, which is almost a mile long.’

  ‘How wide?’ someone shouted from the back of the growing crowd.

  ‘In my estimation, about twenty feet wide and in some parts rising above the flat plain to a height of …’ Arthur Bayley paused to calculate, ‘… say three feet, maybe a little more.’

  The buzz of voices increased. ‘You’re havin’ a lend of us, ain’t ya?’ one shouted.

  ‘Yeah, wantin’ some sucker to buy youse out,’ another gru
mbled.

  Arthur Bayley stood calmly, his eyes scanning the crowd. ‘Believe that if you wish,’ he said. ‘The evidence is here before you.’

  Men began to leave the room. Others arrived. The disbelief on their faces quickly turned to amazement.

  I stared at the knobbly rocks, all shining with rich, golden colour. To me they were unbelievably beautiful. Here was my father’s lifelong dream. The elusive treasure. The gold that he loved and cursed, but could never quite give up searching for. The thought of it lying out there in the desert, undiscovered for thousands, maybe millions of years made the hairs stand up on my neck. If only Pa had come with us. He and the boys would not be breaking their backs in the dark pits and narrow shafts of Cooper’s Mine. They would be packing up their picks and shovels, like everyone else, and heading out to the new diggings. A reef like Arthur Bayley was describing would not be lying out there on its own. There was obviously a lot more gold in the area, still to be found.

  I don’t know how long I had been standing there, mesmerised, before I noticed the crowd was gone. I was the only one left. Arthur Bayley sat alone on the high stool next to the counter.

  ‘Excuse me, Mr Bayley.’ He turned in my direction. ‘People are saying you camped for the night by a rocky pool. But everyone says there’s no water out there in the desert.’

  ‘True,’ he said. ‘But on the way out we had seen a group of blacks sitting around in the shade of some rocks. We kept moving, but our water was on the low side by sundown so we decided to go back there and camp nearby. It turned out to be a rock pool that still held seven or eight hundred gallons of water from the rains we had about a month ago.

  ‘In the morning I got up early to catch the horses and picked up a half-ounce slug. It was lying in a boot print.’

  ‘What? Someone had trodden on a half-ounce gold nugget and didn’t even notice it?’ I couldn’t believe that anyone could be so blind, even if the nugget was covered in dirt.

  ‘Yep,’ Arthur Bayley said. ‘We reckon it must have been that surveyor chap who was working out there for Hampton Plains Company a while back.’

  ‘And the reef?’ I asked.

  He smiled and his eyes lit up. ‘First bit of gold we saw on the reef was a great yellow blotch on the face of the stone. It was nice to look at and we didn’t touch it. But we couldn’t sleep for fear of someone turning up and noticing the nuggets lying around. Will has his revolver and my horse is faster than his, so he stayed on guard while I came in to register the claim. I have to be getting back, though. Good day to you, miss.’

  I stepped outside. The usually quiet street was packed with people. It was hard to believe that this was the same town I had lived in for the last three months. The men were calling to their friends, hugging their wives and children, gathering up anything they might need, everything they could carry. They were all heading out of town in the same direction. Heading for gold. Every horse, wagon, cart and wheelbarrow was being loaded to the top with shovels, picks, waterbags and tents. Men were leaving in pairs, in groups, on their own, while their womenfolk clustered together. The women’s faces were set. They were preparing, in their own way, for the hard times to come. They knew it was no use trying to hold their menfolk back. They recognised gold fever when they saw it.

  September 1892

  Jack did not go with the men. His father needed him to run the team of horses that delivered water to the Cross. I had already made other friends in the town, but Jack was my best friend. He was cheeky and full of surprises. The same things made us laugh and we both loved dancing. Although we danced with other people during the evening, we made a habit of saving the first and last dances for each other. Afterwards we would often go for a stroll out to the ridge above the town. Emily and Tom sometimes came with us, at least part of the way.

  ‘Are you thinking about trying your luck on the new field?’ I asked Jack one night, as we sat staring up at the vast black sky full of stars.

  ‘What, and risk you finding a better dancing partner while I’m away?’ he said.

  ‘That’s not likely,’ I told him. ‘All the boys in town have either gone, or they’re packing up to go. They say there are already more than two thousand men camped out there at Bayley’s Reward. And Mr Wisdom has gone out there to build a new hotel. I heard he’s ordered six water tanks and they’re already on their way from Perth.’

  ‘Are they now?’ Jack said. ‘And where does he plan to get water to fill his tanks?’

  I already knew that the soaks and waterholes in the area were nearly dry. And the camel teams going through to the new diggings had fouled what little water was left. A few of the Aboriginal gnamma holes still had water in them, but that wouldn’t last long amongst two thousand thirsty prospectors.

  Water was never a problem on the diggings in the east. There were always streams or rivers nearby so we carried our own water up to the hut in buckets. Out here in the desert, water could be harder to find than gold. Jack’s father had signed a contract to deliver water to the new diggings regularly, by horse and dray, from the soaks and wells he owned. A purifying plant had been set up in Southern Cross to supply the town when the surface water ran out, but the new diggings were more than a hundred miles from anywhere. It would take at least three days to reach them.

  ‘Will you and your father cart water out to them?’ I asked, already planning to go there, if I ever got the chance. How exciting it must be to pick up nuggets off the ground, without having to dig, or even pan for them.

  ‘There’s no road at all out there yet,’ Jack said, shaking his head. ‘Although with so many people trekking across the country, there’ll soon be wheel tracks to follow.’

  ‘Jack!’ I suddenly had an idea. ‘What if you, or your father, picked up a nugget on one of your delivery runs? I know Pa would be off to try his luck the minute he heard about something like this.’

  Jack looked at me thoughtfully. ‘Sometimes I do think about being rich,’ he said. ‘But I don’t want to die of thirst.’

  ‘There must be a way to have water and gold,’ I insisted.

  ‘Come on,’ Jack said. ‘Wave your magic wand, then.’

  ‘Abracadabra!’ I leapt up and waved an imaginary wand over his head. ‘Oh look. You’ve turned into a frog,’ I teased.

  ‘Cr-o-a-k,’ he gasped, clutching his throat. He did a funny frog jump towards me and I started to run. ‘Come back here and undo this spell,’ he called, and chased me until we were both out of breath.

  ‘No-o,’ Jack moaned as we stood together, breathing hard and looking across to the darkened town. ‘It’s too late! The witching hour has passed. Now I’ll be a frog forever.’

  The hotel lamps were put out at midnight. The town was in darkness.

  ‘Never too late to undo a wrong, my mother says. Anyway, I don’t want a frog walking me home.’

  ‘So you agree to release me from your spell, then?’ Jack asked.

  ‘Just for now,’ I conceded, and linked my arm through his.

  As we walked back to the hotel I thought about the differences between Jack and me. His family valued water above most things, but gold had an unbreakable hold on mine. Even when Pa did strike it rich, it didn’t satisfy him for long.

  ‘This is just the beginning!’ he would say, showing us the nuggets in his hand. ‘There’s more colour out there. I can feel it in me bones.’ Chasing the gold wasn’t such a problem for him. Water and gold go together in the east. Here we seem to have one or the other, but not both.

  We usually lived in a tent on the diggings, outside the towns, until we could build a hut. Pa and the boys hunted rabbits and wallabies for food. Mother cooked over the open fire. It was a new adventure for all of us children. We had our chores to do, but once they were done we were free to explore, play games, make up stories. Mother taught us reading and writing – and good manners, of course. She was very strict about that. When there was gold to take to the bank, we went into the nearest town with Pa. There were shops with real
windows and they sold iced buns for a penny each. The icing on top came in lovely colours. I could never decide which to have.

  ‘I wish we could live in the town,’ Susan said once.

  ‘No, you don’t!’ Billy told her.

  ‘I do!’ Susan protested. ‘We could have iced buns every day.’

  ‘Shush!’ Joe said, giving her a poke. Mother and Pa were just up ahead. ‘We’d have to go to school every day, stupid.’

  ‘Come along now,’ Mother called, looking around to see what the fuss was about.

  I grabbed Susan by the hand and tugged her along. By then I’d had enough of the noisy town and its smelly drains.

  Southern Cross only smells of salt and dust, but I’m getting a bit tired of it. The big adventures of our sea voyage and even my first ride in a buckboard buggy seem so long ago now. The excitement of seeing Mary and Emily again has worn off, too. Meeting Mary’s four little girls has been fun – although Mother is much more interested in them than I am. I wonder if my wild ride out into the desert on Buster has woken something inside me. A hankering for the freedom that is missing in the towns, a need for new adventures, different challenges perhaps?

  Over the next few days the last of the prospectors filtered out of the town and Jack got ready to make his first run to the new diggings. When I had finished my work on the day Jack was due to leave, I went down to the Raeside stables. He was still loading up his wagon.

  ‘I’ve decided to stick to carting water,’ Jack said.

  ‘Why?’ I asked.

  ‘Because … Well, because water is life, isn’t it?’

  ‘But someone else could cart it, couldn’t they?’ I was not looking forward to Jack being so far away for at least six days at a time.

  ‘My father can’t do everything.’