The Golden Soak

by Innes, Hammond;

We didn’t say anything after that, but pressed on fast, taking a chance and moving the area of our search forward a few miles. We were then into a patch of old mulga scrub, all dead and their roots half buried in the sand, and we had two puncture in quick succession. Altogether it was a bad day with only two boxes completed from our new starting point. Clouds came up in the late afternoon and the night was very dark. Our position was now 26 miles east of the rira, and I remember thinking that the abo who had given McIlroy the directions must have been a hell of a tireless walker. Either that or the Monster didn’t exist.

  We filled up as usual and checked our petrol before turning in. The situation was becoming critical. Each box was 13 miles of ground covered and at our present rate of consumption we had just about enough fuel for five or more box runs, unless we decided to rely on rinding the rira again. We had already taken two cans from the abandoned Land-Rover, but there was still a sufficient reserve there to see us back to the Stock Route. We argued it out for some time, lying wrapped in our swags, but when we started out the next morning we had still reached no definite decision.

  We need not have bothered. Our search ended that morning just as we had completed the first run north. I was driving, keeping an eye on the clock and the compass as we began the eastward mile. We were then cutting diagonally across the sandhills and for just over a third of a mile we were on the flat floor of a trough, travelling quite fast for once. Then we came to the slope beyond. I didn’t change into four-wheel drive, just kept my foot hard down. It was a mistake. I hit a soft spot near the crest and we slowed, the rear wheels digging in, the chassis slewing and tilting.

  It took us half an hour to dig ourselves out and get the Land-Rover to the top. We stopped there for a breather, both of us hot and tired, our tempers frayed. And it was while we were standing there, grateful for the breeze and the clouds that had obscured the sun, that it gradually dawned on us that we were looking across, not at another sandhill, but at an area of gibber eroded from the younger Permian overlay to form a shallow rounded hill, and the green that showed in patches through the light brown of the gravel was not the green of vegetation.

  I don’t know which of us realized this first. I think it hit us in a flash almost simultaneously, for both of us suddenly dived for the Land-Rover and the next minute we were roaring down the slope. We hit the bottom hard on rock, our heads bumping the roof. We were lucky not to break a spring, and when we got out, staring upwards now at the rounded, gentle slope of that hill, it looked like the dead carcase of a giant whale, its petrified flesh blotched with gangrenous streaks of malachite.

  ‘Jesus Christ!’ Kennie breathed. ‘It really does look like a monster.’ And he started work there and then collecting and examining samples, moving with feverish haste, literally dancing on his toes with excitement. It was copper. No question of that. The whole red-brown hill was patched with a lighter brown, the surface smooth and rounded and littered with stones and small rocks, and the copper, exposed by the weathering of the calcareous sediments and sandstones that had overlaid it, showed in streaks and blotches that were a greenish brown in colour and merged with the sparse covering of spinifex.

  Kennie was immediately convinced that it was a discovery of major importance. I was more cautious, fearing he was letting his excitement run away with him. But, growing up with the geology of Australia constantly in mind, he had developed a sort of sixth sense that I respected, and after we had climbed to the top, so that we had a clear view of the whole hill, he argued very convincingly that this was an old leach area, the Permian sediments worn down by the winds and the extremes of temperature over millions of years to expose the trapped ore in the Archaean rock beneath.

  The first thing was to surface map the entire area, and it was while we were discussing this, back at the Land-Rover, planning how we would do it, that the stillness of that strange place was invaded by a low droning sound. It was high up to the south-west, but growing all the time, and then we saw it like an insect descending towards us. It was lost for a while behind the whaleback hill, the sound of it beating against the sandhills behind us, and then suddenly it was there to our right hovering over the tail end of the Monster.

  We watched as it settled and the blades stopped turning. A man climbed out, glanced quickly in our direction, and then began unloading an aluminium peg about 6 feet long. The battered hat, the bulky body – no question who it was. And Kennie staring, his body rigid, his face gone white as death. I could literally feel the anger in him as he watched his father start to set up the first corner post. The pilot got out, and another man, and they began attacking the rock with hammer and chisel.

  That was when Kennie moved. He gave a sort of grunt, not quite a cry, but a furious expellation of breath that expressed the pent-up fury within him. Then he moved, very fast, and the next thing I knew he was in the Land-Rover, the engine roaring as he slammed it into gear and went bucketing across the rock slope towards the helicopter.

  I followed on foot. But I didn’t hurry. I didn’t think there was any need. I knew he had to get this off his chest, have it out with his father, and there were two other men there if it came to blows. I saw the Land-Rover stop, saw him jump out and go towards his father, who was standing there, leaning on the post, waiting for him. They were arguing there for about a minute. I could hear Kennie’s voice, high and strident, but not his father’s. Culpin seemed to be reasoning with him quietly.

  Then suddenly the whole scene erupted in violence. Culpin dropped the post, caught hold of his son by the collar of his shirt and shook him. The others said later that he was merely trying to shake some sense into him, that there was no reason for him to call his father names like that. But there must have been more to it than that for I heard Kennie scream something at him, and then Culpin hit him.

  That was when I started to run. But too late.

  Kennie had come up off the ground with an inarticulate cry that seemed to express some inner horror. He was round the back of the Land-Rover in a flash and came out holding my rifle. He took about a dozen steps towards his father, then stopped and raised the gun. Culpin didn’t say anything, didn’t move; he just stood there, his mouth open and an expression of shock on his face. Kennie’s movements were quite deliberate. He took careful aim and fired.

  I had stopped by then, of course. But at the sound of that shot I started running again.

  Culpin’s body took a long time falling, a slow crumpling at the knees. The boy had, in fact, shot him through the heart. But I didn’t know that. I yelled to the other two. I wanted them to grab him before he could fire again. The sand drifts tugged at my feet, the rock stony and uneven, and as I raced the last few yards, Kennie standing there dazed, his father dead at his feet and the gun lying where he had dropped it, I saw his legs begin to go. He was in a state of shock, trembling violently and unable to speak, and then he fell forward, his arms flung out, reaching for the rock as though to embrace the entire monstrous body of the ore.

  The ten days it took me to get out of the Gibson were the loneliest I have ever spent in my life. The real reaction to what had happened didn’t come until after the helicopter had taken off with Kennie and the body of his father. For the rest of that day I just sat there by the Land-Rover, or mooched around, unable to think, or even to feel anything. And all the time the greenish brown of that copper showing through the gibber stones and the redder brown of the whale’s back.

  And that night, lying sleepless and cold, with nothing there with which to make a fire, I thought back to McIlroy. My God, he’d named it well! McIlroy, Ed Garrety and now Kennie facing a charge of murder – the murder of his own father. And the guilt was mine, or so I felt, alone there in the Gibson with the desert all round me and that hill of copper rising beside me. Edith Culpin’s warning words, Kennie and his talk of mamus. So like his mother and I lay there remembering his voice, the way he tossed his head when the long hair fell over his face, that irritating little laugh. I wished to God I could have had th
at day again, change what had happened.

  In the morning I drove the Land-Rover to where there was some wattle and snappy gums, built myself a fire and had coffee and a large breakfast. And after that, I went back and pegged the bloody Monster, using a pick to set the stakes and cut the trenches. It was hard, slow work in the sun, and it took me two days all on my own. And when I had finished setting up the intermediary pegs, I got my camera and photographed the datum post as proof that I had done it. Then I started back.

  I didn’t go near the rira. I couldn’t face that place again on my own. I just headed back west, on a compass course for the Soaks, hoping to God I’d make it on the fuel I had left. And then the rain started. That was the one thing I hadn’t expected. Rain. There was a day of broken cloud, the second I think after I had started back, and then about noon the next day it began. Showers at first, some of them quite heavy, but intermittent, so that I was able to keep going. It was like that all night. And then in the morning the clouds thickened, very low clouds and heavy rain, torrential at times, with lightning and thunder around midday.

  The desert was suddenly changed, the sandhills troughs awash with water, the air damp and humid, difficult to breathe, and a cold wind blowing. I lay up all that day, and the next, the Land-Rover parked just below the crest of a sandhill. And then the clouds dispersed, the sky was blue again and the sun blazed down, and the desert took on a sheen of fresh green before my eyes. It was a sudden, extraordinary miracle of re-birth.

  I was there altogether four days until the sand had sucked up all the flood water. And after that I was able to drive quite fast in places, the going surprisingly firm, almost like a black-top road in the flats between the ridges.

  My fuel carried me all the way to Lynn Peak, but when I got there I was suddenly too tired to go any further. They made up a bed for me and I stayed there two days, sleeping most of the time, too exhausted even to bother about shaving. They knew what had happened, but they had the sense not to talk about it. Kindness is a great healer and they couldn’t have been kinder, Maria fussing over me and Andie sitting beside my bed for long stretches during the day, not saying much, just sitting there so that I wouldn’t be on my own. And the kids came and went, little Anna Maria, aged five, and Bruce, who was two years younger. They did more than anything to restore my sanity.

  The third morning I got up. That was when Andie let me see the papers. Culpin’s body had been flown to Kalgoorlie and the inquest had been held there. Smithie and the helicopter pilot had given evidence. But it was Edith Culpin who had told the court what lay behind the tragedy. ‘Kennie took after me. He was farming stock. He was always working for the future. He believed in it. My husband lived for the present. The two of them just didn’t suit.’ And there was a picture of her, dressed in black, neat as always, but stony-faced. It was a sad picture that seemed to say everything.

  Sometime soon there would be a trial and I would have to give evidence. I thought a lot about that, and about Edith Culpin – it was what I could say to her that worried me most. And there was Janet, too. Andie told me that when he had driven over to Jarra Jarra with the supplies she had burst into tears. She wants to see you, he said. But that, too, would have to wait.

  I left that morning, driving north up the Highway, and with the creek bottoms bad after the floods, it was late afternoon before I reached Marble Bar. I drove straight to the Mines Department office and there I registered the claim to McIlroy’s Monster, the first I think that had ever been registered deep in the Gibson Desert. I could have stayed the night at the Ironclad. Instead, I drove up the valley of the Coongan River towards the Comet Mine and camped above Chinaman’s Pool, by the Jasper Bar that had given the gold-rush town its name. The river was running fast over the cream and ochre striped marble of the bar and the pool below it was peaceful in the still of the evening, the sand at the edge marked by the feet of countless birds.

  I didn’t sleep that night. It was just after the shortest day, the moon past the full, and I sat there beside the pool, the sound of the running water, the soothing stillness of the night giving me a sense of peace. It was still there when the moon set and dawn broke, a few kangaroos coming down to drink, a heron and other birds moving very close. And after breakfast I started out for Jarra Jarra, feeling more myself but still surprised to be driving the Land-Rover on my own down that familiar road.

  I reached the homestead just before sunset. The paddock was all green with new grass, a mass of cattle grazing, and the ghost gums on the Windbreaks had a fresh sheen that glimmered in the slanting sun. The camel Cleo was couched under the poinciana trees, just as she had been when I had first come to Jarra Jarra, and the bitch Yla came out barking, then seemed to recognize me, her tail revolving in sudden pleasure as I got stiffly down from behind the wheel. I walked slowly between the outbuildings and was halfway across the quartz-paved patio when Janet emerged from one of the french windows that opened on to the verandah. I stopped then, not knowing what to say or how to greet her, the Alsatian nuzzling at my hand.

  She stood there for a moment, absolutely still, her face frozen as though she were seeing a ghost. I remember she was wearing blue jeans tucked into mud-bespattered boots, a dark blue shirt, and her hair looked wild, a bright halo catching the light. And then she moved, her boots sounding hollow on the bare boards, and suddenly she was running towards me, her face, her eyes, her whole being alight with excitement. ‘Alec. The paddock. Have you seen it?’ She reached me, grasping me, her head buried against my chest. ‘It’s all green.’ She was laughing and crying all at the same time and holding me very tight. ‘It’s like a new world. Everything fresh. Oh my God, it’s wonderful to see you.’

  I felt peace then, real peace – as though I had come home at last. And that spark between us. I felt it again. But it wasn’t the same spark. It was there. But it was different now.

  It was only later, over the evening meal, just the two of us there and the candles lit, that I began to talk. And when I had told her everything, I gave her the registered claim to Coondewanna. ‘That’s for you to keep. I don’t know whether it’s worth anything or not. But if it is …’

  ‘You already gave me the one thing I needed,’ she said ‘Only I was –’ She hesitated. ‘I’m sorry. I should have written, come to see you. But I was too shocked by what had happened to Daddy, and there was so much to do here – I couldn’t seem to think straight.’

  ‘What did I give you?’ I asked.

  ‘Why, Golden Soak. The water from the lower levels. Just as you were driving off – remember? You told me to try Golden Soak for the water we needed, It saved over two thousand head. And now the rain.’ She was smiling, her freckled face looking almost beautiful, and her eyes, those blue eyes reminding me suddenly of her father, bright with hope.

  That was when I explained to her what we would have to do about the Gibson claim, how Kennie’s hopes paralleled the dream her father had once had. But I didn’t tell her the other parallel, that Ed Garrety had also killed a man out there in the Gibson. She knows now, of course. But it was too soon to tell her then.

  I fear we are still upsetting some of the more conventional folk around here, living together, waiting for my divorce to come through. And there is a child on the way, which makes it look worse, of course. During this period I have worked harder than I have ever worked before – new fences, a deep bore and reservoir down by Golden Soak, and the drilling on Coondewanna. We have proved the reef there, but in the meantime the price of antimony has slumped. So has the price of copper. The bottom has dropped out of the stock market and until there is some sign of recovery nothing can be done about the Monster.

  But it has done something for us already. Les Freeman took a lease on the claim, and before the winter of 1970 was out Lone Minerals had completed a geophysical and two exploratory drill holes, confirming it as a major copper strike. As the price of the lease we got $20,000 in cash, which is what we have been living on for the last eighteen months. Most of it has
gone now, in improvements and the purchase of stock. I doubt whether I shall ever be able to get the station back to what it was in the days of Janet’s grandfather. But at least we have made a start, and the future is bright. The price of antimony is still at rock bottom, but the American dollar crisis has raised the value of gold and I reckon Golden Soak is profitable at anything above $50 an ounce. And if copper recovers, too, then part of the deal with Lone Minerals is that we get a royalty of 5 per cent on the value of all ore extracted from the Monster. That’s a long way into the future, but whatever happens about the Monster, Jarra Jarra is now secure, the grass coming back and water in the dry. My son will inherit at least some of his grandfather’s dream … or if it is a girl, then pray God she grows up with the same qualities as her mother, the same love of this harsh demanding place where I have now put down my roots.

  Jarra Jarra,

  Nullagine,

  Pilbara, W.A.

  February, 1972.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  I have taken certain liberties with that area of the Pilbara dominated by the mountains of the Governor, Padtherung and Coondewanna. There is no Golden Soak, no tribal area known as the Pukara, nor any sheep or cattle station called Jarra Jarra. The characters are, of course, equally fictitious. I mention this because to those few who know this locality well, I feel some explanation is due for changes in the topography which I have made for the purposes of the story. And for those very few who have leaseholds in the area, my apologies for what may seem to them an invasion of their privacy. Though I have travelled the backtrack through the Ophthalmia Range from Mt Newman to Mt Robinson, I have not actually climbed the gap between Padtherung and Coondewanna, so that there may be some inaccuracy in the description, which is based on a gully slightly further to the east.

  My choice of the Pilbara as the setting for this story of the Australian outback and the mineral boom of 1969–70 was made after very extensive travelling. That my wife and I were able to see so much of this vast, underpopulated country before making my final choice was due to the encouragement and assistance I was given by Sir Reginald Ansett, through his Ansett Airline, and of course by Qantas, and in the mining world by Sir Val Duncan, Sir Maurice Mawby and Sir James Vernon. More personally, because they gave of their time, energy and knowledge, I would particularly like to thank John Davidson, Colin Smith, Jock Ritchie, Arthur Peck, Colin Sampey, Jim Edwards, John Tozer, Administrator at Pt Hedland, Mike Oliver, Mark de Graaf, Mike Napier; and there were a host of others – mine managers, geologists, bush pilots, station owners, prospectors and survey team workers. To all of these my sincere and grateful thanks, and my hope that this book conveys something of the unique quality of the country they took so much trouble to reveal to me.