by Mark O'Flynn
My father, as I think I told you, was one of the first men to be put on the Daylight Tunnel, through which a narrow rail line was struck to connect the eastern and western sides of the plateau. Another team of men worked to dig the Mount Rennie Tunnel, burrowing under the towering, precarious monolith of Orphan Rock. As Clancy and I were finishing school, it looked like there would be plenty of work for everyone.
Other tunnels, thirty-four adits by the end, were dug and the torbanite extracted at the rate of about thirty-one skips an hour over a twelve-hour day. Beneath the surface the escarpment must have looked like a Swiss cheese. This gridwork of tunnels did not bore through the plateau, but undermined the escarpment in order to access the coal. The men were spending a lot of time in darkness. It was dark when they rose. It was dark when they trudged along the track adjacent to the pony tramway. It was dark inside the rock where they spent all day chipping away at the stone beneath the orange skirts of the cliff. The only time they emerged, blinking at the sunlight, was when they brought out their corves of ore to tip into the skips. Their faces, when scrubbed at the day’s end in a bucket of water, took on a pallid hue.
The men, spurred on by my father’s mate William Garbutt, complained that it was dirty, dangerous work for a mere cracker a week. You only had to look at the ponies who could not see a carrot in front of their noses. They posed this concern to John Britty North via his overseer, Crusher Edwards. The only communication they got in reply was a reminder as to how great the company would be once the cuts on either side of the plateau were further linked.
Garbutt and Ossie Farnell quietly set about garnering the opinions of the miners. First they spoke to those living in the valley, then those at Nellie’s Glen, named after North’s daughter (who had a set of teeth on her, some said, more in keeping with the higgledy-piggledy escarpment of Dog Face Rock). Then they canvassed the views of those who worked topside along the three bridges of the perpetual cable, and those unloading the skips at North’s siding for the train to Sydney. There were a lot of people doing a lot of different jobs. They listened to what Farnell and Garbutt had to say with equal measures of approval and cynicism.
Meanwhile, the humpies had to be maintained, the earth swept, the clothes repaired, the babies birthed. All this talk of organisation was a load of hot air to those particular workers. Who would cook the meals while all this blathering was going on? What good could come of talk?
One day, when Douglas and Farnell were working cuts off the Alexander Heading deep beneath the cliff, they winkled out from the seam, in one piece, a great nugget of torbanite. The stinkpot lamps were giving off a greasy smoke. A breeze wafted through the heading, courtesy of the furnace sucking air through the tunnels like a great devilish in-breath, as though the rock had lungs. They managed to wedge their picks at just the right angle of purchase and: ‘Out she popped,’ Douglas told us later, ‘holus-bolus, like a kiddy’s tooth.’
‘Look what we’ve got here, Douglas,’ Ossie had said, when it was quite clear that what they had was a problem.
The nugget was too big to fit in the corf. Indeed, it was too heavy for Douglas and Ossie to lift. It was blocking the way. After they had alerted Crusher Edwards and a few of the others they found it was too heavy for five of them to lift.
‘What in Saint Jesus’ name is this?’ said Crusher, bent double by the low-goafed roof. Finally they managed to encircle it with some chains and ropes, twisting it out through the maze of tunnels. They dragged it squealing along the rails into the open air, led by Dusty and his skip-wheeler, Bert Dulhunty. By the time it emerged into daylight its dimensions had already assumed legendary proportions. Having heard of the discovery, John Britty North stood waiting with a proprietorial air.
There it sat. Cripes it was an ugly-looking thing. A canker, a great black burl blasted by lightning, a witch’s tit! Someone said it looked like a lumper potato from County Mayo. Someone else said it looked like a wombat’s turd. Another wag said, more discreetly, that it looked like the mighty morning turd of Crusher Edwards. Dropped from a great height. However, J.B. North didn’t see it that way. He took a shining pride to the ungainly lump and ordered Edwards to find a way to raise it to the top. The thing must have weighed close to seven hundred pounds. No coal skip would take it.
After a day’s consideration, a system of cables and pulleys was devised so that the thing might be manually laboured up the Incline. At the top end the cables were attached to four Clydesdale horses, whose strength, combined with that of a dozen men, heaved the lump skywards. Several times it slipped from the rails and a further ten men, following it up the cliff, levered it back onto the track with crowbars. All the village children, including my brother and me, followed the progress of the lump, so starved were we of more traditional entertainment.
In an unprecedented gesture of solidarity, J.B. North threw off his hat and joined with the men in heave-hoing the nugget up the last yards and over the lip of the cliff. There. It was done. North’s side-whiskers sagged with sweat. The horses sucked at their water trough. After he’d caught his breath, North clapped Edwards on the shoulder, grinning broadly. No one knew why he was so taken with the thing. What did he want it for? (To put in his pipe and smoke, someone mumbled.) Drinkers from the Centennial Hotel came to look. What in Jaysus’ name were they going to do with it? There was much discussion as to what sort of turd it resembled exactly.
Putting it in his pipe and smoking it was not what North had in mind. The Sydney International Geological Exhibition was scheduled to take place the following week. To this end North ordered his nugget be hauled to the railway station where the constabulary, Brownrig and Clout, mounted guard. No wild boy would dare to climb on it with them around, although we were all tempted. North must have given the officers more than adequate recompense for them to sit there all night, to the neglect of their other duties. (Though Sergeant Brownrig quickly realised it wasn’t a two-man job and so went home to his bed and his plump wife. Clout was said to have sat by it in the darkness, unmoving, as if waiting for a full moon.)
On the second day the nugget was persuaded gently onto a boxcar at the rear of the train ordinarily reserved for transporting sheep. North was executing what they call a strategic business plan. He wanted to show the world, or at least the government, an example of what the Western Coal Fields were capable of producing. However, the size of the thing confronted North with a logistical dilemma. He couldn’t simply arrive at the exhibition buildings in Sydney with the lump in his pocket. He would need some muscle, and didn’t trust those metropolitan lackeys who would, like as not, drop the thing on the platform and crack it in two. Besides, there was a danger they would stop work and demand more money and tobacco and cinnamon buns before they lifted another finger. North would be hanged before he capitulated to the demand for cinnamon buns, or whatever else they had in mind. He wanted his own workers (whom, as he paid them, he could make do whatever he wished) to transport it to Central Station and see to its settling. Who better than the men who had sweated alongside him to haul it up to the light of day? Surely they felt the same affection for it that he did?
Crusher Edwards chose ten men to accompany the nugget to Sydney. One of them was Douglas Wilson. Douglas quietly asked if he might bring his boys along. They had, neither of them, been to the city before.
‘It ain’t a holiday,’ said Crusher.
I nagged Douglas, and Douglas nagged Crusher, and finally he relented. ‘You may bring one. But you pay. The Australian Kerosene Oil and Mineral Company ain’t payin’ for a family outing, you know.’
‘Why can’t I go?’ squawked Clancy, mightily offended at having been overlooked.
‘I didn’t think you would be interested,’ said Douglas, ‘gallivanting around town as you do.’
‘I’m not interested in that great lump of shit,’ Clancy shouted, furious, ‘but I would like to see the city and the people and else besides.’
It was a stubborn clash of wills.
‘I can’t afford another ticket.’
‘I want to go.’
‘Do you think you deserve to go?’
‘I have a right.’
‘You have a right to my boot in your backside.’
‘You’d miss. You can’t even see that far.’
‘I’m sorry, but it’s done,’ said Douglas.
‘Oh, for heaven’s sake, Douglas,’ snapped Emma. ‘You can’t take one and not the other. I have some money.’
‘You have money? Where did you find some money?’ Douglas asked.
‘Don’t change the subject,’ said Emma. ‘Clancy, you’re going. But only if you remember to brush your hair.’
We had never been on a train before. I was terribly excited to hear the whistle shriek and the steam hiss, the guard’s knees disappearing in its clouds. North and Edwards sat in the forward carriage, while the rest of us, the ones on nugget duty, sat in the last compartment adjacent to the boxcar. The black lump sat there like a meteorite dropped out of the sky. Someone said it was bigger than the Beyers and Holtermann gold nugget, the biggest piece of gold ever to come out of the earth, only worth about a ten-thousandth of the price.
The train jolted off. It wound its way through the bush, through the various settlements that were springing up along the tracks. One of the men had a deck of cards and a group began to play pontoon, but because there was no table the dealer had to place each card in turn upon the knees of the players. It was an odd sight to see full-grown, bearded men lightly placing cards on each other’s knees with a little pat. If it had been a lady she would have slapped their hands away or stabbed them with her parasol. I couldn’t reconcile them playing cards when there was such a grand spectacle passing just beyond the windows. Clancy stared out at it mutely, glancing up from time to time. I could tell he was wondering what would happen if he pulled that emergency-stop cord just above our heads.
After a long hour or two we made our slow descent and crossed the great green Nepean River onto the Emu Plains, and all the flat farmland stretching eastward to Parramatta.
The platform at Central Station was bustling with people and geysers of steam and train guards calling to each other. With great ingenuity the men of the Western Coal Fields levered the nugget and slid it down a track improvised from crowbars onto a baggage trolley.
‘Don’t drop it, men,’ North cried anxiously in his round, fluffy vowels.
They hooked the trolley up to a pair of hired cart horses who then proceeded to lug the thing at a funereal pace through the city streets, flanked by its troop of scruffy escorts. North and Edwards were there the whole time, issuing instructions, making sure we didn’t abuse the nugget.
I can still picture the astonished and disbelieving looks on the faces of the people of Sydney as we paraded our cargo up George Street, left down Goulburn and along Pier Street to the Exhibition Centre. The city air had a breathless humidity we weren’t used to. Inside the building we unloaded the nugget onto a marble plinth in the main chamber. There were numerous other geological specimens already on display, not many of which were as impressive as ours. (And it was strange how we were now starting to think of it as our specimen, our nugget – a feeling that went beyond the general indifference we had to the hard, black rock it was.) North wasn’t worried by this competition because his rival colliers were competing in different categories. He was, in everything he undertook, including the filling-in of the paperwork, supremely confident. Clancy and I gawped up at the glass-domed ceilings, so high the sunlight had not yet reached us.
After we had swept up the coal dust left by our exertions, polished the plinth, and returned the baggage trolley and horses to the railway station, there was still an hour or so of daylight left. Crusher Edwards had organised the men’s lodgings two to a room (three in our case) at the Orient Hotel in The Rocks. Several of our group found their places at the bar and vowed not to move until the novelty of the day had quite worn off and they could stagger upstairs. However, at my urging my father, Clancy and I went for a stroll along the foreshore. There were skiffs bobbing and jingling on the water with the sound of harness buckles on a still morning. There was the slap of small waves against the pylons of wharves and jetties. Men fished from various vantage points, observed by patient gulls. We watched some men catch a few fish they called whiting, and plop them into buckets. Clancy poked his curious face into the buckets to look at the fish. We walked all the way round to Circular Quay and watched the boats rock at their moorings, amazed at the piercing hoot of their horns. I marvelled at this life by the sea. How would people get any work done, I wondered, if they had the harbour to look at out their windows every day? It was a very pleasant thing to do, to spend an hour walking the foreshore with Clancy and our father, looking at the busy life of the city as its day came to a close.
’Emma would love this,’ said Douglas at one point.
‘What about Ann?’ snapped Clancy.
‘Well, yes, Ann would too.’
‘And yet you said Emma.’
‘Must you always pick a fight with everything I say?’
The lamps were being lit. Across the harbour the winking lights looked like a new galaxy slowly waking up. The water in the harbour gradually turned to ink. Douglas said we had better head back to the hotel before it got too dark; a little dodger before bed, in anticipation of our big day tomorrow. I could see he was making excuses. He was afraid of wandering too far and getting lost. But I could have walked all night, to see what lay around the next corner, and the next. The prospect of getting lost was a great temptation to me. Clancy also, I could tell.
We left the waterside. There was not a gum tree to ground us. As we wound our way through the alleys and narrow lanes of The Rocks a young lady stepped from the shadows of one warehouse just off the Argyle Cut. There seemed a peculiar looseness to her clothing. She asked, ‘Are you looking for a girl?’
Douglas placed his arm about my shoulder and hurried me on. He didn’t even answer her. However, Clancy lagged behind, looking back at the girl.
‘Clancy,’ Douglas barked over his shoulder, ‘hurry up.’
Behind us the girl’s laughter bounced from the bluestone walls, a harsh sound but one that seemed to sum up the brazen exhilaration of the city. A sound whose meaning I didn’t fully understand. If a girl was lost then of course there would be people out looking for her. What was there to be wary of? That night, however, in the strange bed in the strange city, I dreamed of that alley, the stones of the walls vivid in a strange light, my father nowhere to be seen, and the lost girl asking me: ‘Are you looking for a girl?’
That dream-girl left me feeling strangely afraid, and what I was frightened of was myself.
The next morning, I woke early to find Clancy gone. His side of the bed was cold. Douglas cursed, but there was nothing to be done. We had to get on with the business of the day. We assembled on the footpath outside the Orient Hotel while Crusher Edwards inspected us. His headcount didn’t quite match the figure on his list, but there was no time to quibble. Harv Selby visibly swayed like a boat’s mast on the nearby water. Crusher made several of the men go and wash the coal dust from behind their ears. Then we marched, not quite in formation, up Harrington Street then left to the exhibition buildings. We were made to stand at attention, if you please, gathered about our cold, black meteorite, which someone had thought to label Western Coal Fields no. 2711. John Britty North was already there, resplendent in coat tails and a fine top hat. His whiskers had been vigorously brushed so that he looked like a badger, or at least what I imagined a badger to look like. He seemed pleased to see us. He even had the diplomatic impulse to ruffle my hair, before striding off to hobnob with the other society magnates. The hall was filling up. There was money in the air.
The premier and the governor arrived with much pomp and ceremony. Sir Henry Parkes and Lord Carrington, fat and skinny, tall and taller, all those whiskers. Together with the judges, they meandered through the hall inspecting the various geo
logical specimens. By that stage I no longer knew what our purpose was in being there, apart from perhaps lending some sense of scale and importance to the nugget. Were we to pounce on anyone who tried to interfere with it? Several of the other exhibits also had their guards, miners like us, spruced like us. We might have found things to converse with them about had Crusher Edwards not berated us for fraternising with the enemy.
‘Look sharp. No talking now.’ Crusher showed us how it was to stand to attention.
No talking? There was talk aplenty echoing through the hall. Most of it was geological gobbledegook that I couldn’t understand, like the chatter in a foreign country.
All the morning, too, I wondered, with a stab of envy, where Clancy had got to. I didn’t think: look what he has missed. Rather, I wondered why he didn’t wake me. We might have further explored the city together, faced Douglas’s inevitable wrath together. Perhaps he was saving me from those consequences, but this didn’t stop me from thinking that I was the one missing out.
When the judges arrived, accompanied by North, and stood before exhibit 2711 it only took a glance from Edwards to make us stand relatively straight (though the mast of Harv Selby’s spine was still swaying). The governor and the premier, a great big snowman of a fellow whom I recognised from the papers, put their heads together and muttered. There seemed to be a great deal of import attendant on this muttering. The judges examined our nugget. My sharp ears heard Sir Henry say, ‘… resemblance to the droppings of a wombat’. There was chortling. John Britty North blushed to his badger’s whiskers, then stiffly joined in the merriment as they sauntered on.