The Profilist

by Adrian Mitchell

  Anywhere out of Bathurst is up a long pull.

  The track, not much more than a worn path in places, snakes along the steep hillside, well below the crown of the ridge but also well above the river, so much so that at one time I saw three or four eaglehawks circling below me. It did not feel at all comfortable to look down so far on to the river flats. This was a dizzying height; and besides, every so often loose stones had slipped across the track and down over the edge, almost a vertical wall, and you had to watch your footing closely. Sometimes, too, miners had opened a little tunnel just off the track, to see if they could find a reef, and shale and rock chips were strewn about and made the way more difficult at that place. The absence of ongoing activity told that they had met no luck there.

  We camped, as many others had, at a crossing where the water gurgled strongly over a bed of stones, most of which had been turned over many times on speculation. The serious activity was a few miles further yet, however, up over another steep pinch and around another great bend of the range and over another crossing, deeper this time, and then we were at Sofala, in the midst of much the same throng of activity as I had witnessed in Victoria.

  All over the floor of the valley men were digging, either along the present river banks or into the ancient clay slopes that marked its course long ago, or sinking shafts and driving tunnels, and so industrious had they been that the original shape of the land was barely recognisable. Nowhere had been left untouched. That is to say, the scene you looked at was wholly unnatural. The earth had been heaved all over the place. Nothing had been left as it was first created. Geographical blasphemy, my father might have thought it. Forgive us our trespassers.

  Further back the shopkeepers had set up their stores and the men had pitched their tents or made their shelters, and they had chopped down most of the trees, so that the edge of all this turbulence was sadly thinned out, the merest skeleton of a forest. But nobody stopped for the reflection. They were all tearing into the earth’s surface, gouging it out and washing it away, worrying at the lottery which might be theirs.

  As in Victoria, so in New South Wales it is bitingly cold on the goldfields, especially in the winter months. The chief difference is that instead of soggy mud, on the Turon fields the ground is all but frozen. In the early morning, when the mist begins to rise, you see kangaroos grazing on the edges of clearings, their fur and their lashes spangled with large dew drops. At night the stars pierce the skies like points of ice, hard and glittering in a frosty sky. The temperature plummets, the clouds roll in and the skies get heavy, and then huge snowflakes drift down. At times, cutting southern winds rush along the ranges and sweep down into the wide valleys, a blight to all mankind here that the Bible never thought of.

  Some hold that this country lies outside the jurisdiction of the original Creation. And beyond redemption. Not my father’s concern. It is a hard country. The lure of gold, the chance at a lucky strike, keeps drawing men from all corners of the world, with the secret hope that they might be the one. And just as in Victoria, so here you meet a steady file of poor wretches, defeated by hardship and disappointment, trudging back towards Bathurst, and indeed all the way to Sydney.

  I was delighted to be back in the midst of a kind of activity I understood—activity, not just standing about—with my sketching pad at hand, ready to jot down any interesting detail I came across. This was familiar to me; I knew how it was on the fields, and the kinds of checks that timid new chums invariably bumped into, and the kinds of cheats that surrounded them, and their curious innocence. Though the old hands here were not, on the whole, rapacious. Indeed, they were for the most part good neighbours, friendly, provided nobody attempted to trespass on their leasehold. And helpful should the need arise.

  The authorities had at last resolved one of the most troublesome issues on the fields, and now a digger is required to pay an annual fee for a miner’s right. But of course the chief discontent is that gold has been becoming more and more difficult to find. It is no longer sufficient to wash for gold in a pan. Now they have to dig deeper, and crush quartz to find specks of colour, and small groups of men are at a disadvantage in terms of the labour involved and the heavy machinery, the thumping and crashing stampers and crushers that this deep mining requires. From time to time their discontent boils up into suspicion, particularly against the Chinese, who seem to thrive where nobody else can and without anything cleverer than their own hands and bent backs. That has resulted in shameful attacks by the Europeans, though it is difficult to see just what end they hope for. To drive them off the field, I suppose, though they also acknowledge that the Chinese confine themselves to working over the mullock heaps considered waste by everybody else. The old story of the dog in the manger, I think.

  Along with that same ill-concealed hostility, the same notions and superstitions I met in Victoria have applied here. Diggers try to align themselves along narrow corridors where gold had been found, but everyone has a different vision of how the veins lie, and where. They pay attention to the names of reefs and gullies. And to the names of diggers. One unfortunate fellow was named Timothy Coffin. You will not be surprised that nobody wanted to go down into a shaft with him; and they objected even more strongly to his working the windlass. He is consigned to the banks of the stream to puddle about and to wash for gold tailings. With such a name he will never amount to anything, poor fellow, unless he takes up employment as an undertaker’s supplier, or gets himself written into one of Mr Dickens’s facetious stories. Another miner, a Norwegian sailor who had absconded as so many did, has the absurd name Bjorn Gnarld. His parents must have had a quirky intimation of his prospects. As had my own.

  What I saw on the Turon was not very much like what Flute had drawn just a matter of miles from here. In fact, his sketches are fussy beyond belief, and placed at a distance, as though he were halfway up the hillside opposite his subject. As was doubtless the case. He would not have wanted to get too close to the bustle and dirt and general pandemonium. I choose to bring my subject well forward, or if you prefer, to bring myself up to the very edge of the activity, though of course without pretending that I am part of it. I leave the field to those who own it.

  In Flute’s pictures, you cannot actually see what the men are doing. There are lots of them along the banks of a creek, but they are all stooped over or sitting or standing about, much like cricket players perhaps. And forgive the uncharitable thought, but his vegetation looks just a little Californian to me. Now why would that be so? Whereas what I observe is that when the trees thin out as they do on this side of the range, the foliage appears to be formed in clumps, and that presents a problem in how to paint it without making your background forest look clotted. The diggers were doing their level best to assist me, of course, by cutting down every tree in the district. It was only marginally less bald here than at Bathurst.

  At a place called Wattle Flat, now all but destitute of the nominal wattles, their attention was directed to the flat itself by elimination of everything else from the immediate vicinity. Right from the earliest days of the rush they had established a presentable race course, marked all round by saplings tied to stakes driven in to the ground, and race days are held here from time to time, when all and sundry turn up to enjoy the outing. The booths and the bookmakers do an excellent business. There are some first-rate horses in the district, and competitors with great heart. When I was there, at least two of the squatters had thoroughbreds in their stables, and from time to time young men drifted in with a small mob of horses of superior quality, with receipts convincing enough to those who wanted to believe them, and whose common practice was to race one of their horses, pocket the winnings and sell him to whomever was interested; and move on. That much was marginally acceptable, but you may be shocked to learn that while everyone is attending at the picnic meeting, thieves are also apt to enjoy themselves—helping themselves to the best of the horses that have been left grazing on the properties round about. That is as vexatious to the
farmers and squatters as gold thefts are to the diggers and the buyers.

  And to the police, for it is thought that these young fellows are forming into gangs of bushrangers, and have mounts that can easily outdistance any pursuers. They don’t look like the grim-faced scowling rascals lurking in the back forests north of Melbourne. On the contrary, they seem harmless young fellows with a coloured neckerchief and a ribbon around their cabbage tree hat. No longer red; black usually, or blue.

  They seem more intent on fun than harm. Indeed, there is a persistent story, which the patrons of the public house I frequented insisted was completely true, that one time the winner of a race at Wattle Flat was in fact a person the police wished to interview about a recent spate of robberies. Having received the winner’s purse and the congratulations of the course stewards, he waved his hat to the admiring throng and galloped off before the authorities realised who he was. Or before any of the locals thought to inform the authorities. Whether that is true or not I do not know, but it is an example of the cheeky conduct you could expect to encounter hereabouts. And of course there is no doubting that some of the horses being raced are of a rather superior quality. Their proper owners make sure to stay very close to them when they are not actually on the track itself.

  You can see from the surrounding countryside how inviting it is to go cantering off across the broad vales and rolling ridges, and once past them on to what might be called half-timbered plains; so very easy to ride through and speaking most temptingly of a carefree and perhaps careless way of life. Of course, it is also country you can see across very easily. A team of pursuers would hardly require a blacktracker to follow a band of young lads through that. Which is I suppose why at first thought they head for the hills. Much too difficult to find them there, if they do not wish to be found. And much easier to scrounge a feed from the wildlife if they had to. Indeed, that would have been their introduction to the back country, going out hunting as youngsters, and meeting up with likeminded mates on the track of the same game.

  But to those who are newcomers here, this is daunting country to look at. The road sometimes leads past steep cliffs and overhangs of rusty-looking rock, blotched with lichen. Down along the riverside the tree trunks are mostly dark, a dark chocolate colour; indeed, the trunks of the she-oaks that grow along there are almost black.

  The towns springing up throughout the area are very populous. The main street might be several miles long, and by far the commonest buildings are the hotels. Allowing that slab huts and sheds do not quite achieve the status of a building. You can see where all the trees have gone to, sawn into planks and pickets or split for post-and-rail fences. There must be at least thirty licensed hotels, as well as countless coffee shops, meaning grog shops, and of course a number of the storekeepers have refreshments available at the rear of their tent for trusted customers, just as at Mount Alexander. And all this quite necessary I would say to keep the cold at bay. I begin to understand why they speak of a nip of whisky; it serves as a measure of degrees of cold.

  When you can draw up a stool or a block of wood to sit on near the fire, that is where you learn more about what is happening on the goldfields than by wandering about them, your breath steaming out of your mouth, your fingers too cold to hold your pencil, and a grey mist settling in the gullies and along the course of the river. You hear tales of more than the Turon, too. I told of Lola Montez and the ball of lightning at Bendigo, and as is the way of gossip in bar rooms, that led on to others by way of reply, everyone contributing their two penn’orth. Apparently when she first arrived in Sydney she was about to leave without having settled all her accounts, and a sheriff was sent to seize her. He had to jump on to the pilot boat to catch her, as her ship was already under way; she retreated to her cabin, and when he demanded entry or he would force the door, she told him that she was in bed and stark naked, and no gentleman would commit such an affront.

  That utterly nonplussed him, and as she declined to dress herself so that he might arrest her, there was nothing else for it but to leave, because the pilot boat was about to return. That is a likely enough story, outrageous as she so often was, vivid, and such a picture; but it is not the kind of incident you could allow yourself to illustrate. Unfortunately. It has all the trappings of wonderful farce. Cruikshank or Rowlandson would have done it though.

  With the approach of spring, the wattle that provides this place with its name comes into splendid bloom. The green bush is awash with a different kind of gold, and all sorts of birds dart in and out of the undergrowth. The warbling of the magpies carries right across the valleys in the clear thin air and the glorious blue skies begin to give a bit of warmth. If I were a cattle farmer I would be uneasy on moonlit nights. The spirit of careless independence is abroad.

  Which is not always a thing to be proud of. The diggers have taken matters into their own hands at various of the diggings, both here and in Victoria, and not just in demanding relief from the licence system. As I said, they have become unhappy at the apparent success of the industrious Chinese; indeed, their very presence on the fields, let alone the substantial numbers of them, is resented. And even though the Chinese keep to their own camps, that too is seen as a provocation. Who knows what they get up to in their joss houses and the like? They have none of their own women; if they so much as look sideways at a white woman that is a flashpoint.

  Matters have come to a sorry pass at Lambing Flat, where there has already been a series of attacks by my countrymen, I am unhappy to say; the men of both my old country and this new one. Now there has been a riot. Chinese diggers have been hoicked out of their shafts and trenches by their pigtails, beaten, and if any dares to retaliate that is a sufficient warrant for more extreme violence. The scrambling retreat of the inscrutables seems to have invited further brutal assaults. It is even reported that a number of them have been killed. I do not understand this ugly savagery. I cannot see a reason for it, even while I am afraid I recognise it. It is mindlessly shameful, and shamefully mindless. I wonder how many of those diggers grow big and indignant about the Eureka attack.

  Yet the labour of the Chinese has been beneficial to the district. Quite a few of them have been employed in improving and consolidating the trail back to Bathurst, though there is of course a road by a longer way round, along which the mail and the gold escort can travel at a good clip.

  When I heard the alarming news of the riots I thought to hire me a horse and ride across country to see for myself whatever I might see—taking on trust that he and the ostler were both law-abiding and reliable. It somehow seems appropriate that on my way I came to another World’s End, not far from where the first gold in Australia was discovered. It is even more desolate, more remote, than its namesake in South Australia. Not somewhere you would want to find yourself; a nothing. In that connection, my mind was as full of moral law as of geography, of course.

  The shameful actions at Lambing Flat speak of the end of the world in another sense. That is a lawlessness that is not to be tolerated. So much for independent action. It is a kind of madness, too horrible to contemplate. I don’t suppose my father’s vision of the apocalypse was so very different, or not in its outcome.

  Contrariwise, or not as the case might be, my route also took me through somewhere called Pretty Plains. I wish I had thought of that. A surveyor with a turn of wit such as to delight me.

  The countryside is not populated entirely by whiskery diggers and young horse thieves and cowed Chinese and ruddy-faced publicans. There are propertied men too, among them the owners of horses attractive to the casual eye of the wild colonial boys, and the envy of those who dream of owning land when they strike it rich on the diggings. These are the men who have all but locked up the land, making it very difficult indeed for new immigrants to find a suitable holding for themselves. The old system of land grants has now been abandoned—and a good thing too; but even those who can afford to buy acreage are unable to find a selection because the best of it has all been tak
en up. Those who got in first pride themselves on their cleverness. They can afford to. Push come to shove.

  I came across one specimen of a squatter beaming with assurance of his own sublime self-importance, and tailor-made for my portfolio of sketches. He wore a patterned waistcoat straining over his belly, a chequered broadcloth coat, an enormous jewel pin in his cravat, and tight striped unutterables. His ever-so-shiny boots had never come within an inch of getting dirt on them, or horse dung, not a mote nor a dustbeam. He was neither a Nob nor a Snob, to use my old terms, for he didn’t meet their requirements. He was not up to their mark. His kind is simply too self-satisfied to belong to any party; yet he was a type. He was a kind of John Bull in the antipodes, out of place.

  His type is indifferent to that reflection, and to any other. He owns acreage, quite a lot of it. Lord of all he surveys, though he looks like he may have risen to that eminence from some lowlier position, a bailiff perhaps. The flat hat and clay pipe show his class, or lack of it. He is the sort who looks about him but sees nothing except reflections of his own good fortune. At his feet, on the ground, sat Jacky, the real worker on the property, and wearing not much more than a blue striped shirt with the sleeves rolled up, and a pair of spurs. That is, no boots.

  I was sorely tempted to call this squatter The Baron of Beef.

  He was standing before his stockyards where, I would lay long odds, he had never set foot. Not with immaculate boots like those. So I have sketched him with his back to the yard. I like the weight of the timbers they use for those posts and rails, Australian hardwood. You would need to resharpen your axe several times in cutting and shaping them. They are heavy and solid; strong enough to take the shock of wild cattle charging into them. That kind of beast ranges about for several years before being yarded for branding, and they don’t take to it kindly. On the whole, cattle do not interest me very much. They have no personality, except for the rogues that make their escape, and go sailing off into the scrub with their head and tail up, and the native stockmen after them—and the squatter is left behind to stare at, well, nothing. World without end.