The Golden Soak

by Innes, Hammond;

  ‘Would you like me to come with you?’ I asked. But he shook his head. ‘They’ll go as soon as they know we own the mineral rights. The entrance to the mine is boarded up anyway. It’s unsafe, y’see.’ He went out then, calling to Yla, and a moment later we heard the Land-Rover drive off.

  ‘I’m glad you didn’t press him,’ Janet said, adding with an impish gleam, ‘I know you’d rather be driving down to the mine than sitting here with me.’

  ‘I’m sorry if my disappointment showed.’

  ‘Oh, don’t worry.’ She was grinning, a flash of white teeth. ‘I’m used to men who think mines are more important than women.’ And then, suddenly serious again. ‘Daddy’s quite hopelessly possessive about that bloody mine. Won’t let anybody go near it.’ She got up. ‘I’ll get you the Journal. Then at least you can read about it – how it all started.’ She came back a few minutes later with an old box file full of typed pages. She opened it and placed it on the table in front of me. ‘You’ll learn more from this than you would from Daddy. Sometimes I think he’s scared of Golden Soak.’

  ‘Because it’s unsafe?’

  ‘No, it’s more complicated than that – a love-hate feeling he has.’ She was turning the pages of typescript. ‘I can’t explain. I don’t really understand it myself. But when he was a young man, think how exciting it must have been for him. Going down there, working with the miners – it made a change from riding fences and working sheep in the heat and the dust. And the miners themselves, he always says they were a different breed. He got a great kick out of the fact that we had a mine on the station.’ Her fingers smoothed a page. ‘There you are. December 22nd, 1905, and a drought every bit as bad as we’ve got now. Start reading from there.’

  ‘But why should he hate the mine?’

  ‘I think you’ll understand when you read some of the later passages.’ Her hand was on my shoulder, her breath on my cheek, and I heard her sigh. ‘He won’t talk about it. But I know he does hate it.’ She straightened up. ‘You’ve got to remember what a drain Golden Soak has been. It never made money, not after the first few years. And yet, owning a mine like we do, there’s always the hope at the back of our minds – that one day it’ll turn out beaut and make our fortunes and we’ll be rich and live happily ever after.’ She was laughing, a note of wistfulness. ‘You read that while I clear the things away. Then you’ll understand how my grandfather must have felt, why we all have this stupid, quite illogical feeling that we’re sitting on a fortune, a sort of Pandora’s box, if only we knew how to open the lid.’

  ‘The official price of gold hasn’t changed in thirty years,’ I said gently.

  ‘I know that. But it doesn’t make any difference. I still dream dreams that one day.…’ She shrugged, turning quickly away and beginning to clear the table. ‘Maybe after a few days, if you can spare the time, Daddy’ll get used to you being here and I’ll be able to persuade him to take you down. Actually, I’ve never been down myself. The ladders are gone and the winch gear broken. He always said it was too dangerous.’ She went out then and by the light from the single bulb and the flickering candles I began to read Big Bill Garrety’s account of driving cattle from the Turee Creek area to the goldfields at Nullagine:

  22nd Dec: Two more soaks gone and the last bore run dry. Buried a dozen carcases and started driving the live beasts at sundown. About 60 head. Maurie told me two days back they’re short of meat at the goldfields now and the miners paying high prices. But these poor beasts are skin and bone and I doubt I’ll get more than a score of them through. Camped at dawn where some eucs gave a little shade for us and the cattle. Made only 9 miles during the dark and still another 12 to Pukara. If that waterhole is dry, then there’s nothing between here and the Fortescue, unless I take them into the gullies below Coondewanna and up through the homestead. But Pukara should be all right – it’s one of the blackman’s sacred waterholes inhabited by the ghosts of two Watersnake men of the Dreamtime. They sprinkle penis blood there. I’ve seen them do it. But not my two jackaroos – they’re from down around Kunderong.

  23rd Dec: Left 7 dead, starting again at sundown. The sky a dying furnace, the sun a monstrous flaming ball. Could almost pray for a cyclone. But no cloud. Just burnished sky, and the cattle so weak they’re sinking in their tracks. Thank God we’re riding camels, not horses. Have called a brief halt having pushed the animals hard and made 8 miles. Good flat going, but too much spinifex, too little pasture. I’ll have to complete the change-over to sheep. I’m about the only station up here that still runs cattle. But I hate sheep – they eat out everything, ring bark the trees in a drought. Another twenty years and I reckon the Sandy will have moved into this country.…

  Hurrah! We made it and there’s water – not much and brackish, but it’s water. Trust the blackman – the sacred soaks never seem to run dry. Reckon that’s why they’re sacred. You don’t make a gash in your John Thomas and scatter blood around for nothing! But looks like we’ll have to go the long way round by Coondewanna.

  24th Dec: Below Coondewanna now and just before sundown took a stroll up a gorge between Coondewanna and Padtherung to see whether the blackmen have made any of their funny drawings here like on the rocks behind the homestead. Found several, very faint, in a little ravine. Red country this, red like it is all to the west of JJ, but only a thin layer of iron rock. Where storms have eroded it I can see quartz, or maybe it’s jasperite like at Marble Bar – it’s coloured a sort of dirty grey and right under the overhang, where they’ve painted a rather odd-shaped roo, there’s patches of it that glitter faintly. And at the bottom of the gully, there’s another soak, carefully shielded by a slab of thin quartz stuff. The ground very moist underneath it and the dirt around it marked by roos urgent for water. Odd country this—very wild. I broke off a bit of the quartz and stuffed it in my pocket, more for curiosity than anything else. I think it’s iron Pyrites, or maybe a form of mica, but even now in the firelight, waiting for the billy to boil, I can see the specks glittering.

  This was the beginning of Golden Soak and all my troubles.

  (Note: This last sentence was obviously added much later. Instead of an indelible pencil, it is written in ink with a fountain pen, probably in 1944. J.G.)

  ‘That was the year my Grandmother Eliza died.’ I hadn’t even noticed she’d come back into the room. ‘He was alone then. Daddy was the only son and still a prisoner of the Japs. I suppose the old boy had nothing better to do but to relive his life through his Journal.’ She was leaning over my shoulder again, her voice gentle. ‘The handwriting is very shaky, so I imagine he had already taken to the bottle. There are quite a few comments like that, all added about two years before he died, including four or five pages on the mining techniques and problems peculiar to Golden Soak. They might interest you.’ She refilled my coffee cup and began turning the pages. ‘You’ll probably have difficulty in following the sequence. I certainly did.’ She found what she was looking for. ‘There. I’ll leave you to browse through it. I’ve got to go and see to the chickens.’

  It was towards the end of the typescript, a semi-technical account that constantly referred to the high cost of treatment due to the presence of antimony and the inconsistencies of the reef. Faulting had apparently been a major problem. On page 324 he gave the date of closure – November 21, 1937. But on the following page he referred to the final blow – a cave-in and the mine flooded at the lower level. No indication of when this had happened. The writing here was very vague, mostly an angry diatribe against the absence of any increase in the price of gold and the collapse of the Australian gold share market. It concluded abruptly with these words: The end of all my hopes – the effort of half a lifetime wasted. I wish I had never discovered that Soak. And then, without a pause, he went on to deal with the problems of maintaining the wool clip in country that was deteriorating year by year. This, too, seemed to have been written at a later date, but it was much less vague, probably because he knew more about the land than he
did about mining, had in fact a strange affection for it; and unlike other graziers around him he realized what the effect of overstocking must be:

  I remember when I first came to JJ. It was so beautiful at times it took your breath away – saltbush, bluebush, a whole world of native shrubs and grasses, all tough enough to exist in the harsh arid heat of this outback country, and the mallee and the ghost gums shimmering their leaves in the wind, shading the ground from the sun. But now – my God! when I look at what I’ve done to keep that bloody mine going and those blasted miners in booze and women. The land is desert. It’s shagged out. Maurie and Pete, they both say I should burn off like they do to encourage new growth in the spring. They don’t see that that’s the last straw in this poor unhappy land. I’ve tried it, seen the young growth come, and then there are more lambs, more hungry sheep-jaws champing, and before you can say knife the green that should have grown lush and big in the wet, the seedlings that might have been trees – they’re all gone. It never has a chance to seed. And you burn again and it burns the seeds in the ground. Pete’s mentally retarded, a grown child, not caring. But Maurie ought to be able to see it. Betty does, I know, but he’s a pigheaded bastard. Eighteen years I’ve been running sheep here, more and more every year. Quantity to offset the steady decline in quality, and now I look at the place and I can’t recognize it. Even the mulgas are dying with no vegetation to shade their roots in the heat, and this year in the dry those damned sheep were stripping the bark they were so famished for food. And Ed – what will Ed make of it when he comes home? Thank God he’ll never know what this country was like when I first came to it. There’s nothing left to show him by comparison what I grabbed and what he’ll inherit. But my heart bleeds for him. One thing he must do is get rid of the blasted sheep, get back to cattle – a small herd, and give the land a rest, a chance to recover if it can.

  I turned back to the early part, reading entries here and there, oblivious for the moment of anything but the world Big Bill Garrety had lived in. There was a lot about Golden Soak in the entries for 1905 and 1906 – the first tentative shaft, the establishment of a mining camp, and then the adit driven into the side of Mt Coondewanna, the sinking of the main shaft to 200 feet, the difficulties of getting machinery to the site, the problem of supplies. The first cross-cut from the shaft into the quartz completed on April 4, 1907, and on April 6: This day we brought up the first bucketful of ore from the 200-foot level – the booze-up went on all night, the men singing by the camp fires, four sheep roasted whole and the camels scared to death. There was a lot about the camels after that – camel trains took the ore to Nullagine, coming back with the crushing machinery, all in pieces, and sleds for the heavier parts. Money pouring in, and all of it ploughed back into the development of the mine. And then, suddenly, the entries became shorter, more widely spaced – Perth, a troopship, Gallipoli, finally the trenches and the mud of Passchendaele, all told with stark simplicity, just the facts nothing more. Even the period in hospital, when he’d lost an eye after a sniper’s bullet had grazed his head, only rated three short entries – the last dated June 9, 1918: Invalided home. Arrived Fremantle feeling quite fit after voyage though ship very crowded. Can’t wait to get back to JJ.

  ‘You’ve let your coffee get cold.’

  I looked up, startled, to find Janet standing across the table from me and my coffee cup still full.

  “Sorry, I hadn’t noticed.’ I was still in the past thinking of his wound and how he’d died an alcoholic.

  ‘Shall I heat it for you?’

  ‘No, it’s all right.’

  ‘I had a little argument with a goanna – that’s why I’ve been so long. Didn’t you hear me shoot it?’

  I shook my head. I couldn’t remember hearing a shot.

  ‘One of those big lizards – they’re always trying to get into the chicken run.’ She came round the table. ‘You’re back on the early part now.’

  ‘You didn’t tell me he’d been wounded.’

  ‘He only mentions it that once. He doesn’t refer to it again – not once in the whole Journal.’

  ‘And you say he went mad in the end. Was that the cause of it?’

  ‘Maybe. I don’t know. I never knew him, y’see. And Daddy’d never discuss it with me.’

  ‘Then how d’you know he went mad?’

  ‘It’s what I’ve heard, that’s all. The older people, those who knew him, they don’t talk about it in front of me, but I’ve heard it all the same.’ And she added, ‘He must have been a most extraordinary man. It wasn’t only that he was tough physically. It was his personality. D’you know, even those who lost their money because of him – they still speak of him with a sort of hero-worship as though he were a man quite beyond the usual run of men. Did you read that bit where he described what he’d done to the land to keep those blasted miners in booze and women?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I read that.’

  ‘To think that he knew.… I was so appalled when I was typing it that I burst into tears. He knew what he’d done – the problems Daddy would have to face.’

  I turned to the last page, to that abrupt ending with its reference to Munich. ‘It’s strange,’ I said, ‘that he kept this Journal all those years and then ended it here.’ I looked up at her. ‘Are you sure there isn’t some more of it?’

  She shook her head. ‘I’ve searched the house – everywhere. The same thought occurred to me.’

  ‘Then why did he stop at this point? Was he afraid of another war – that your father would have to repeat his own experience?’

  ‘No, I don’t think it was that. Though it’s what happened, of course.’ She was silent a moment, her brows wrinkled, gazing into the candles. Then she said, ‘I think myself he came ashore from that pearling boat, went up to the bank and was suddenly faced with the news that the company was broke and owed money all over the North West. It must have been a terrible shock. I think if I were keeping a Journal I’d stop there myself. All the rest was disaster – the sheep and the leases being sold off, the fishing boats, the bank building, and the mine a sort of golden elephant that nobody wanted. It was the end of an era, everything he’d worked for …’ Again she shook her head. ‘No, I don’t think I’d want to continue my Journal after that.’

  It seemed reasonable enough. ‘Could I see the original?’ I was thinking that the handwriting might give some indication.

  ‘I’ll get it if you like. D’you want to see it now?’

  ‘No, it doesn’t matter.’ I was running backwards through the pages, searching for some reference to his partner. But I couldn’t see anything about McIlroy or his Monster, and when I commented on this she said, ‘They were business partners, nothing else. And he was nearing sixty, his mind harking back to the old days.’ She had moved to the patio entrance. ‘All that last part of his Journal is about the social life here and the old-timers round about. I don’t know much about McIlroy – only that he was a much younger man and that he was brought in, from Kalgoorlie I think, to run the bank.’ Her hand was holding the bead curtain back and she half turned to me so that the shape of her body was clear against the patio light, her face with the upturned nose in silhouette. ‘I thought we might walk down as far as the paddock grid and meet Daddy coming back. The heat’s gone off now.’ She came back, smiling, and blew the candles out. ‘Come on. Do you good. It’s lovely at this time of the evening and I could do with some air.’

  I got up and we went out into the starlight together, the air hot and dry, but the day’s heat done and a breeze stirring, the buildings a black complex of substance and shadow. She didn’t talk and there was nobody about as we started down the dusty track through the paddock. It was very quiet, the old moon riding low so that I could just see our shadows like twins stretched out ahead of us. She took my arm and at her touch a spark leapt between us.

  I didn’t dare look at her – not then, not until I had myself firmly under control. And when I did it was to see her eyes gazing up at me
, the whites bright in the tanned darkness of her face, an urgent excitement in the gleam of teeth between parted lips. The spark was stronger then, electric in the dryness of the atmosphere, and I looked away, quickly, to the black hump of the Windbreaks rising high to our right. ‘No dingoes tonight,’ I murmured, and I wondered whether she would detect the tremor in my voice.

  She didn’t answer, only the pressure of her hand on my arm conveying the message of her need and my blood throbbing in response. It was the heat. Man and woman alone in the quiet cruel beauty of the land’s emptiness. Christ! I thought. Don’t be a bloody fool. She’s just a kid and I was remembering Rosalind, how urgent she had been, her long slender body soft beneath me. I bent down, pretending to take a stone out of my shoe, and after that we walked on, the contact between us broken.

  ‘D’you miss her?’ she asked, a tenseness in her voice.

  ‘No,’ I said. But I think she knew it was a lie.

  ‘I never told you why I came to England.’ And she went on to explain that she’d come over in the hope of raising a loan – the ‘wind’ she called it – from the Mann-Garrety branch of the family. ‘It was a waste of time and Daddy would be furious if he knew.’

  ‘You saw Rosalind’s father then?’

  She nodded. ‘He didn’t want to know he had Australian cousins with a cattle station in the outback. Rosalind was the same. I can remember that night you came back from the mine – you must have known something was wrong between us. We were like two cats with our fur up. And you were so nice to me, I could have hugged you.’

  ‘You didn’t ask me for a loan.’

  ‘No. I sensed you had troubles of your own.’ And she added, ‘I’m glad you’ve separated. There was something about Rosalind …’

  ‘You didn’t like her.’

  ‘No.’ And she added almost in a whisper, ‘She was a bitch. Oh, she was beautiful – all the things I’m not and would like to be – but underneath that lovely velvet exterior …’ She looked up at me. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I shouldn’t talk like that. But you’re too nice, too real a person.’