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 p
eriod 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.
Golden Soak Page 12