by Trent Dalton
Now the miner turned over and stared into a different golden glow, and that was the full sun, and he willed it to set him alight, to burn his gold-lusting soul to ash.
‘But then I heard Samson holler out with a neigh like he was startled by somethin’,’ Tom Berry told the wide-mouthed whisky drinkers at the bar. ‘And I felt footsteps coming towards me in the dirt and I could not even move my head, gentlemen, because I was so weak. But I could move my eyes and I turned my eyes to the footsteps in the dirt and then a figure stood over me.’ Tom Berry paused for effect in the telling of his great tale and he lowered his voice. ‘The figure of a man, and this man blocked out the sun and all I could see was his coat. His long … black … feckin’ coat! A French admiral’s frock coat.’
Calls of ‘balderdash’ and ‘bunkum’ and ‘bullshit’ echoed across the beer-stained pub floor, but Tom Berry stood adamantly by his story. Longcoat Bob was old and tall. He was shirtless under the coat, but his long thin legs wore brown riding pants. There was scarring across his chest like the staff lines on the piano music sheets Bonnie Berry played from after dinner. He had a mess of curled silver hair and he had creases so deep in his long, thin face that the creases looked like battle scars. He wore the French admiral’s frock coat as naturally as a white man wears a vest. It was made of military-grade navy blue wool, with gold buttons and elaborate gold embroidery on the lapels and cuffs. The collar was so high and stiff it brushed against Bob’s earlobes. But the coat was no museum piece; it looked like the old man had worn it for decades, as it was torn at the elbows and covered in dust.
‘It was the real thing, too,’ Tom said, and men laughed and spat beer from their lips as they slapped their thighs.
‘I speak the truth,’ Tom gasped. ‘That coat had made its way from them Napoleonic Wars all the way to that bloke Bob up in those mountains.’
Tom’s audience was sceptical. ‘You went mad up there in those mountains, Berry,’ called Albert Strudwick, a seasoned digger from South Australia. ‘Tell me how a blackfeller all the way out there comes by a coat sewn by the French Empire?’
Tom knocked back a small glass of whisky and followed it with a swig of beer.
‘Well, there’s something you need to know about this feller Longcoat Bob,’ Tom said. ‘He’s not like other blackfellers.’
Tom then recounted how he dropped out of consciousness at Longcoat Bob’s feet because the vision of the strange Aboriginal had felt like a dream and there was little else he could do with his life at that point except slip away into that dream. He woke two days later inside a small hut with supports made of tree branches and walls made of rusting corrugated iron. The hut smelled of eucalyptus oil. His neck was throbbing, but he was no longer suffering the flu symptoms that had left him near dead by the rapids crossing. He ran his fingers across the back of his neck and felt a hole in the soft flesh behind his right ear. The hole was filled with a paste that smelled like piss and old grass.
Then an Aboriginal woman entered the hut. She said her name was Little Des, daughter of an older woman named Big Desree, and she wore an old grey linen shirt and she spoke in her people’s native tongue as well as English and told the lost goldminer just how fortunate he was to have been found by the extraordinary man they called Longcoat Bob, who had brought Tom Berry back to his camp and identified the paralysis tick the size of a pepper corn that had burrowed into the back of his skull and was digging a tunnel out of feasted human flesh that was about to break through the soft and juicy wall of his brain. At the same time as it was gorging itself on his insides, the tick was filling Tom Berry’s head with poison. Longcoat Bob had drowned the tick in wet tobacco ashes then dug it out with a burnt knife tip. He’d filled the hole it had left with a healing paste he made out of emu bush, tea tree oil, mashed moth larvae and one more secret ingredient that Little Des said he refused to disclose to tribe members, in order to maintain his superior air of medicinal mystery.
‘What are you doin’ wanderin’ about out here?’ Little Des asked. And Tom told Little Des about his shameful lust for gold and how he had found a promising quartzite seam maybe twenty miles from Longcoat Bob’s camp and he had hoped he would return to Darwin a wealthy man who could provide for his beloved family.
Stepping out of the hut later, Tom smiled wide at what was a small tribal camp of huts and firepits spread across a clearing fringed by stringybark trees and lush cycad bushes with ten-foot-tall stems. A trio of shy young women approached him with paperbark plates filled with boiled goose eggs and freshly cooked fish and freshwater eel. He found Samson in a shaded corner of the camp, joyfully slurping from a bucket of water next to a mountain of collected grass and bush apples.
Longcoat Bob subsequently ordered Tom to eat fourteen billygoat plums each day for a week to fight off infection. And soon Tom’s strength was restored, but he did not rush to climb onto Samson and clip-clop his long way back to Darwin. He had developed a fondness for Longcoat Bob’s people and they had developed a fondness for him.
Longcoat Bob enjoyed sitting by the fire at night telling the wayward traveller stories of how the land around him came to be, and in thanks for those stories Tom Berry recited descriptions of landscapes penned by famous English poets. Then Tom Berry told Longcoat Bob the story of his life. He told him of his love of the written word, from which he had been distracted by the glowing of gold. He spoke of how hard he had toiled for nothing, and the terrible cost of that fruitless toil to his wife and children, and how every gold-empty rock and cave and dugout he ever climbed down into was another reason to feel bitter and angry at the spinning earth. But, alas, he had felt like a changed man sitting by the fire with Longcoat Bob. He’d come to the deep country to dig up a gold lease, he said, but he’d dug up a new lease on his own life. Were he to strike a gold run of any significance now, he told Longcoat Bob, he would return the grace shown to him by God and Longcoat Bob in those recent days by creating a school where Darwin’s children of all colours and creeds and religions could study both the wonders of the written word and the wonders of Longcoat Bob’s creation stories. And Longcoat Bob stared at the goldminer across the fire and he stood and he moved closer to Tom Berry and he reached a long arm out and pointed at Tom’s chest. ‘Good heart, Tom Berry,’ he said, tapping Tom’s chest twice. ‘Good heart.’ Then Longcoat Bob turned towards the forest. ‘I must talk to the stars for a moment,’ he said. And he disappeared into the night.
The next evening, before sunset, Longcoat Bob met Tom at his hut. ‘Sunrise tomorrow, Tom Berry and Bob go for a long walk,’ Longcoat Bob said.
‘And that surely was a long walk, my friends,’ Tom Berry said to his audience. ‘We walked for six days. The land was Longcoat Bob’s kitchen. He turned grubs into fire-cooked delicacies. He reached his hands into rivers and long-necked turtles seemed to come to him willingly. And that land he showed me, my friends, was like no land I had ever seen. He led me through the most treacherous and deep country. He took me through ancient galleries and across crocodile-infested waterholes and through cave systems that felt like portals into different dimensions in time and space. I saw things in that country, gentlemen, that I’d never dreamed existed. There were tests, I tell you. I had to show my courage. I had to show my faith in Longcoat Bob, and faith in things beyond my understanding, and I believe he was testing me. The more worth I showed, the closer he took me to his secret place.’
‘And where exactly was this secret place?’ shouted Albert Strudwick.
‘Well, I’m sure you’d like to know, Albert,’ Tom said. ‘But Longcoat Bob’s secrets will remain safe with me. Though, make no mistake, dear friends, I am, at heart, a scholar, and a good scholar always takes notes.’
Tom Berry laughed and tapped his temple and he did not speak then of how the closest thing he’d had to a pencil on the long walk was a pocket knife and the closest thing he’d had to notepaper was the back of a goldminer’s pan. But then he did speak of how Longcoat Bob’s long walk ended at a miracle. A p
lace of pure impossibility.
‘It was a vault,’ Tom Berry said. ‘A vault of gold in the heart of the deep country. A vault built by the earth. A safe room beyond my wildest imagination, housing more raw gold than I could have carried home on the backs of ten horses.’
‘Step inside,’ Longcoat Bob said at the entrance. And Tom Berry stepped cautiously into the vault and his dark brown eyes were lit up by a blaze of raw gold. Too many fat and raw gold nuggets to count. Gold nuggets the size of apples. Finds the size of oranges. Nuggets shaped like tree stumps as long as Tom’s hand. Triangular nuggets. One nugget as big as an eggplant and so heavy that Tom needed two hands to hold it.
‘These are all yours?’ Tom asked Longcoat Bob.
Longcoat Bob shook his head. ‘Not mine,’ he said. He told Tom the gold belonged to the land. He said his people had been finding gold nuggets like the ones in that vault for centuries. But in all his years, he said, he was yet to come across a single gold nugget that brought any real happiness to the person who held it. Longcoat Bob said his family had found one large nugget long ago – centuries back – that resembled a human hand and it became so coveted by members of his family that it caused fights between brother and sister, sister and mother, father and son. During one dispute, an old woman struck her nephew over the head with the gold hand. The nephew was struck dumb and his mental capacity was like a waterhole that could never be more than half full after that, and the old woman was so ashamed by her actions that she begged Longcoat Bob’s grandfather, the oldest living member of the family, to hide the gold away in a place where no one else could find it. And any other gold nuggets that were found from that moment on, Longcoat Bob’s grandfather reasoned, were best hidden away with it too.
‘And you wouldn’t believe what he said then,’ Tom Berry whispered to his enraptured audience. ‘He said he and his family saw no value whatsoever in all that gold. He said real treasure was a freshwater spring. He said the real jewels of the earth were gooseberries that grow on trees. He said a good dig in his world is when you stick your fist down a bubble in the mud and find a long-necked turtle to grab hold of. He said true wealth isn’t havin’ your pockets filled with coin but your belly filled with white turtle flesh cooked in its juices, shell down, on a bed of coals. He said the only use for gold was to glitter, and he said the glitter of gold was like the glittering smiles of us white men he’d seen in town dressed in expensive clothes. He said that gold can’t be trusted. He said we all got the gold disease and it rots our hearts. It poisons us. He said it changes who we are, how we behave.’
‘Too right it does!’ said a liquored prospector also from Halls Creek, raising his beer glass. And the other gold diggers raised their glasses in agreement.
‘He said the long-necked turtle didn’t do that,’ Tom Berry said. ‘He said the turtle was a gift from the earth that kept on giving. He said he rubbed turtle fat on the chests of sick infants to make them strong again. He said the oil and meat from a single turtle could keep a dying elder alive to see an extra month of sunrises. And then he asked me if I thought a month of sunrises was worth more or less than the box of gold that rested in the hole below us. I said it depended on how you spent the gold and how you spent the month of sunrises.
‘And Longcoat Bob smiled at that and he pointed again at Tom Berry’s chest and said, ‘Good heart, Tom Berry. You speak of good things that can come from gold.’
Then he gestured towards the gold vault. ‘You may take what you can carry in your hands, Tom Berry,’ he said.
And in the public bar of the Hotel Darwin, young Aubrey Hook felt as envious as he did sceptical as he watched Tom Berry finish his tall tale of gold lust and gold rewards.
‘But then Longcoat Bob placed a hand on my arm,’ Tom Berry said. ‘And he told me something I will never forget for all my years because it sent a shiver down my weary spine. He said, “Carry all you own, Tom Berry. But own all you carry.”’
And the men across the public bar sipped their drinks in silence and confusion.
*
On the red dirt track far south of Darwin, Aubrey Hook brings the Model A to a stop once more. By the side of the road he can see two sets of shoe prints. One set bigger than the other. Further on he can see the snaking track left by something that was dragged carelessly behind the smaller set of footprints. A large stick, perhaps. Or a tool of some kind, he considers. A shovel.
He kneels down by the shoeprints. He traces his forefinger along the shovel’s line. The gravedigger girl, he tells himself. The miserable legacy of Tom Berry’s long walk into the wilderness.
He remembers the looks on the faces of every man in that bar that day when Tom Berry told his fabulous story of Longcoat Bob and the mystical vault of gold. Disbelief. Disregard. And just the slightest glow of gold envy.
‘So how much did you take?’ asked Albert Strudwick, eyes alight.
‘I’m not gonna tell you lot,’ he said. ‘But rest assured it’s enough to buy you all another round.’ And he raised his whisky and triumphantly downed another shot.
‘Go on Berry,’ Strudwick urged with a treacherous gleam in his eye. ‘Tell us how much you took!’ The greatest supply in the prospector’s kit is reliable information and Albert Strudwick wanted more of it. ‘We know you want to tell us, Berry!’ Strudwick urged. ‘Go on. Tell us how rich the most hapless prospector in Australia has become!’
Tom had promised himself he would not reveal the weight of what he’d carried from that natural vault that day, but he felt the pride of his glittering achievement welling up inside him, and he was going to burst if he held it inside any longer, the molten-lava eruption of his good fortune. There was something that always trumped wisdom in any conversation among gold prospectors and that was luck. The brightest, shrewdest prospectors – and Albert Strudwick was one of them – knew well that all the planning and information and hard graft in the world were nothing against the all-conquering force of a stroke of good luck.
‘We’re about the same build, Albert,’ Tom Berry said. Both men were short and thin. ‘How much can you lift in pounds?’
‘I once carried two seventy-pound bags of flour in my arms,’ he said. ‘Reckon I could carry more on me shoulders.’
Tom nodded, sipped a newly arrived whisky shot. ‘Reckon you could carry a couple pounds more, too, if you knew you was carrying pay dirt.’
The men in the bar were silent then. Some scratched their heads. Some slapped their knees in awe, some shook their heads in disbelief. Aubrey Hook was only young, but his father, the late Arthur Hook, had taught him how to find a hole in any surface. And he knew the surface of that grand and miraculous story of Tom Berry’s was like the surface of any gold country – full of holes.
*
On the dirt track, Aubrey Hook follows the two sets of footprints and he eventually comes to a short bridge crossing Candlelight Creek. He and Horace walked up Candlelight Creek when they were boys. Horace was so scared by the darkness that they were forced to turn back after half an hour of walking inside its twisting tunnel foliage. Darkness and light, Aubrey tells himself. There are some who can walk further into the darkness and there are some who always run back to the light. A world of absolutes. Rich and poor. Cursed and blessed. Good and bad. Truth and lies.
‘But I am a man of my word,’ Tom Berry announced in the public bar on that revelatory afternoon. ‘I told Longcoat Bob I would do good with that gold and I fully intend to do just that.’
At the same time as the newly wealthy Tom Berry was building his wife, Bonnie, and his children, Violet and Peter, a new and grand house on the Darwin waterfront that overlooked the Timor Sea, he set about drafting plans for a new school, one street back from the waterfront at Mindil Beach. Aubrey and Horace Hook attended the very town hall meeting at which Tom Berry stood on stage in a new black suit and vest and tie and proclaimed proudly to the gathered residents of Darwin that Mindil Beach Primary School would be a place of learning for children of all colours and cr
eeds, all races and religions. ‘From the grandsons of our Afghani cameleers to the descendants of our Aboriginal elders who are the children of what they call “the Dreaming”,’ he read from a page of inspired pencil notes. ‘The Mindil Beach Primary School will open its doors to all who are willing to learn. And what learning they will enjoy, from the poems of Edgar Allan Poe to the theories of Pythagoras and, yes, to the traditional campfire histories of this very rich and promising shared territory passed down by its original inhabitants over the course of millennia.’
But then the doors of the town hall swung open loudly and some four hundred seated attendees turned their heads to the voice of an Aboriginal woman standing at the entrance of the town hall, calling, ‘Thief!’
It was Little Des and she had come from the deep country to tell the residents of Darwin that Tom Berry’s tale of good fortune and long walk redemption was a charade, an elaborate work of fiction masking the fact he had stolen from Little Des’s family.