Eureka to the Diggers

by Thomas Keneally

  Gold had earlier been found in the Kimberley and in the Pilbara but a location inland from Geraldton, like Mount Murchison, was a much better proposition than the tropics. Alluvial gold was mined, miners could also pick up or extract visible, small pebbles of gold. But obviously this would ultimately be a field for commercial mining. The limitation of the Murchison field was that the water was unsafe and enteric fever killed diggers, who were buried in coffins made out of grocery cases advertising Coleman’s Mustard and Condensed Milk.

  Further south, gold was found in 1887 at Yilgarn, east of Perth. These finds were welcome at least in some ways, as distracting as they were for the sons of farmers and for agricultural workers, in that they promised an inflow of capital and population. The Western Australian Stock Exchange was now created in Perth to speculate in shares. These were the sorts of events which caused Western Australians to cry of their colony, ‘At last she moves.’

  The Sydney merchant Anthony Hordern, whose famed Palace Warehouse and Palace Emporium sat in George Street, Sydney, had a passionate interest in Western Australia and devised immigration and railway schemes, even one, which did not eventuate, running as far as the Kimberley where overlanding clans like the Duracks were settling down to make cattle stations. His plans for the west, which seemed even closer to reality now that goldfields were operating, would soon be snuffed out when, in 1886, he died of ‘brain fever’ aboard a ship.

  There was considerable excitement about reefs south of Yilgarn named Southern Cross. Southern Cross seemed the limit though. East of it lay the great desert plain. Even so, some men, using Aboriginal guides to take them to waterholes and camels driven by Afghans to carry their gear, went gold seeking beyond, towards the arid and dangerous east. There was indeed so much demand for camels that the elegantly and princely Afghan Faiz Mahomet, who had managed a desert camel operation for Elder Smith in South Australia, would arrive with his brother Tagh and three steamers full of camels, and with another two shiploads on order from India, to supply freight to Southern Cross and beyond.

  Arthur Bayley was a fellow who seemed genetically designed for mineral frontiers. He was a twenty-seven-year-old prospector and athlete who competed for prize money in foot races, and was a champion hammer thrower. He had already mined gold in dismal Croydon in the Gulf of Carpentaria, in the Palmer River in North Queensland near Cooktown, and at Mount Murchison. His friend, William Ford, had known him in Croydon and had seen him triumph in bare fist fights. Ford felt certain that Bayley was equipped by his previous experience to survive the wilderness to the east of Southern Cross. They put together a team of ten horses, and supplies adequate for a long winter of prospecting, rode out 120 miles (200 kilometres) into the desert, and were doubling back because of lack of water when near the site of what would be the town of Coolgardie they found a waterhole. The following morning, Bayley went rounding up horses and saw at his feet a nugget. He fetched Ford, and by noon they had picked up 20 ounces (over 500 grams) of gold. In a month they had collected £800 worth, rode secretly to Southern Cross to get rations, and then turned back towards their discovery. But there was a miners’ strike in progress in the Southern Cross commercial mines, and a number of young strikers had the time to try to follow them. One of them, Tommy Talbot, described his arrival at the basin of earth where Bayley and Ford were working. ‘We could see it [gold] glittering in the sunlight for at least twenty yards in front of us.’

  There was immediate and hard-handed conflict between Bayley and the newcomers. Bayley knew he would have to register his claim with the warden at Southern Cross, and galloped back to that settlement on 17 December 1892. The news was out now, and it seemed unprecedented news, as if this were the Western Australian find of finds. When interviewed, Bayley’s friend Ford said, ‘We gathered nuggets like spuds in a paddock.’ This image had the power to stampede the imagination. Men from Murchison, and young men from Perth and other coastal towns, moved towards Southern Cross now, but only because it was the jumping-off point for Coolgardie. In the depressed eastern colonies, men and some women took ship for Western Australia. The population of Western Australia would increase fourfold between 1891 and 1901.

  The report of gold still had the capacity to turn young men into adventurers who would leave comfortable but suddenly boring jobs to suffer intense discomfort and danger on a long shot. Albert Gaston was a youth who worked in a sawmill in the town of York, east of Perth. Serving the boiler of the big saw, when the news came through of a find at Coolgardie he nearly failed to let off steam and ran the risk of blowing up the boiler. In the tradition of gold seekers forty years past, he left work instantly and at dawn trekked east with a billy and water bag and a few clothes. He had 300 miles (500 kilometres) to cover, and farms and fencing and other signs of adequate water gave out a little over 12 miles from town. When he arrived at the first waterhole out of Southern Cross he had to take his turn at filling his water bag to boil up some tea. He claims that one day he was forced to walk 38 miles to reach the next waterhole. Reaching the field, he found a lack of food except expensive tinned meat and, of course, a lack of water. An infestation of flies energetically spread gastro-enteric fever.

  Most prospectors built a hessian hut or pitched a tent in Coolgardie and went ranging up to 60 miles (100 kilometres) or more from town looking for their own lode. Eventually, after finding only two pennyweights of gold at a site 50 miles north of Coolgardie, Albert Gaston, hard up for water and passing groups of men similarly traipsing who had stopped to bury a friend who had died on the track, at last managed to return to the new settlement.

  Paddy Hannan, a secretive and gnarled little Irish troll now in his early fifties, had worked on the Victorian fields and fossicked in South Australia, and was camped at Southern Cross when Bayley’s news got out. Adept at desert travelling, he immediately marched to Coolgardie. By June 1893 Hannan and two other Irishmen, Flanagan and O’Shea, found gold near the surface of a red soil plain 25 miles (40 kilometres) further east of Coolgardie, and set about working it in the normal early secrecy. But ultimately miners had to come to town for supplies and to register claims, and in June 1893, when Paddy turned up in the tented town of Coolgardie carrying with him 100 ounces (nearly 3 kilograms) of gold for sale, a great proportion of the desert horde heard and began yet another move east.

  Hannan, like Bayley, was not the sort of man who had the capital to develop such goldfields. In the future he would sometimes prospect under contract for syndicates, but in the early twentieth century fell back on a compassionate pension of £150 a year from the Western Australian government. It was justly earned. That so-called Golden Mile between Coolgardie and Kalgoorlie would be an engine for Western Australian wealth and growth. The Garnbirringu natives of the area, whose word for the desert food silky pear would give the Kalgoorlie goldfield its name (just as Coolgardie derived its name from the words for mulga wood and waterholes), might have been justified in thinking that their home region, in which only they had the key to the water, would remain forever unvisited. Now they found their home full of grasping, ambitious, thirsty and squalling white fellows who struck out in all directions, spreading their chaos.

  The possibility of waterholes being emptied by thirsty miners would lead the government in the end to build small reservoirs along the way. Cobb and Co began to operate a service and small corrugated-iron and hessian stores and shanties appeared along the track. Faiz Mahomet’s camel teams, working from depots in Geraldton, Coolgardie and other centres, carried freight and water. Faiz Mahomet also founded stores at these places and had a reputation for staking miners, which spread his reputation as a ‘good darkie’. Even so he petitioned the government for protection against goldfield hostilities which were directed not only against him but also at the southern European so-called ‘tributers’, who worked not by union rules but by receiving a share (tribute) from what they mined. His 1896 request for naturalisation was turned down. That year too, in a disput
e whose origins will probably now be never known, his brother Tagh was killed by another Muslim while praying in the rudimentary Coolgardie mosque.

  The Adelaide stock exchange, which had been founded by South Australia’s appetite for Broken Hill shares in the 1880s, took to the Western Australian gold-mining stocks with great enthusiasm. George Brookman was a forty-three-year-old Adelaide financier who appointed his brother William and Sam Pearce as a syndicate’s prospectors. The Irishman Paddy Hannan thought little of the claims taken up and made by Brookman and Pearce, but in Adelaide their Coolgardie Gold Mining and Prospecting syndicate raised capital, and their chief source of wealth, Great Boulder, would produce in present values something like $3 billion of gold. Because of the decline in South African gold mining and the economic collapse in eastern Australia, British investors had money to send Coolgardie’s way. In 1894 a group of speculators led by Colonel J.T. North, who had made his fortune promoting Chilean nitrate on the London stock market, now earned further riches by floating the Londonderry and Wealth of Nations mines. The Londonderry was floated for £700 000, of which only £50 000 was devoted to working the mine, the rest going to the promoters and vendors of the shares and, of course, the directors of the company. The mine produced barely anything.

  But Brookman and Pearce’s Great Boulder, efficiently run by a young engineer named Richard Hamilton, flourished. A British company named Bewick Moreing introduced a similar professionalism when it took over a number of leases. Its goldfields staff included a young mining engineer from Iowa, a graduate of Stanford named Herbert Clark Hoover, a future and undistinguished American president. Part of his job was to assess possibilities beyond Coolgardie and Kalgoorlie, and he was the engineer who pressed upon his seniors the possibilities of the Sons of Gwalia mine near Leonora. He would be superintendent of that mine for some months in 1898 and would be called back to America later in the year. He took with him a reputation for being an excellent engineer and, in a foreshadowing of his crushing of American veterans’ protests at the beginning of the Great Depression, for sacking miners according to the fluctuations of the market.

  The problems of the old world reached Coolgardie when there was a fight between Catholics and Protestants during an Orange parade in Coolgardie in July 1897, and a few years later police had to draw their revolvers to quell an even worse Irish disturbance at Southern Cross. But both sides of the sectarian divide suffered equally for lack of the refining influence of women. Nor did enteric fevers discriminate between them. And the countryside became even more desolate and dry as wood for pit props was cut down.

  C.Y. O’Connor, an Irish engineer, had been daring enough to offer Premier Forrest, the new and first Western Australian premier, a man of progressive vision, a 350-mile (560-kilometre) pipeline from Mundaring in the Darling Range behind Perth all the way to the goldfields. It was a phenomenal proposition and its critics not only declared that no pipeline of such length existed anywhere on earth but resorted to what would prove to be lethal ridicule. O’Connor’s creation of a harbour at Fremantle had similarly been attacked, yet its success would become obvious. The network of railways surveyed and devised by him, including a line to Southern Cross and then ultimately to the towns of the Golden Mile, were built throughout the 1890s, and as with Fremantle, were achieved with the support and admiration of John Forrest. Forrest was an enthusiastic enabler of O’Connor’s plans for the pipeline, and both men saw it not simply as servicing the goldfields but as creating farming in the intervening zones. The Irish engineer made an interesting boss by the standards of his day. He told Forrest’s bureaucrats that the workers of the Fremantle railway workshops were overworked, underpaid and laboured in squalor. His improvements in conditions produced energy in the workshop and great profits for the railway.

  Some claim that O’Connor overstated the water shortage at the goldfields to justify his world-beating project, and that Kalgoorlie and other towns were already building watertanks, and even considering desalinating the water found at depth in the mines. And it might have been above all in the name of serving the steam engines with water that O’Connor promoted a pipeline. But even then a number of rock catchments were discovered and ground-water tanks had already been built along the railway line to deal with the problem of human and mechanical thirst. In any case, responsibility for water supplies on the goldfields was placed permanently in O’Connor’s hands in November 1893 and his water engineers reported to him that, despite all the canards about adequate water already being in place, every device that could be used to conserve water on the Golden Mile would still yield no more than a gallon (4.5 litres) per person per day.

  To make the pipeline work, water from a catchment on the Perth side of the Darling Range would need to be raised 1000 feet and then pumped over 300 miles (500 kilometres) to its reservoir at Coolgardie. Only Forrest could have convinced the Western Australian Parliament to seek the capital in London to build the thing, and the contracts for the steel pipes were signed in October 1898.

  While the early work was still in progress, in February 1901 Forrest entered federal Parliament and became Minister for Defence, under which portfolio he invited O’Connor to present plans for a transcontinental line linking Kalgoorlie to Port Augusta. Forrest’s absence in Melbourne, however, left O’Connor without his chief ally. Overworked and close to nervous collapse, O’Connor had to face his attackers alone. On 8 March 1902 a preliminary pumping test raised water over the Darling range for about 6 miles (10 kilometres) into the hinterland. This showed there was no reason why, having ascended 1000 feet, the water could not now be pumped on to Kalgoorlie. But the ruin of O’Connor’s soul had already occurred. On the morning of 10 March 1902, when he should have felt validated by what had occurred two days before, he took his pistol when he went for his early morning ride. He was usually accompanied by his daughter, but that day she was ill. He rode along the beach at Fremantle, took with him his horse into the surf and killed himself with his revolver. In his suicide note he had written, ‘The Coolgardie Scheme is alright and I could finish it if I got a chance and protection from misrepresentation but there is no hope of that now.’ At the end of the same year the work was finished within budget, and on 24 January 1903 Forrest turned on the water at Coolgardie and Kalgoorlie before enthusiastic crowds. He was full of praise for O’Connor.

  BUILDING AUSTRALIA—ANYWHERE BUT AUSTRALIA

  The enormously popular 1886 American book Looking Backward, by the American journalist and author Edward Bellamy, had a massive impact on Australian socialists. It was, with Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Ben-Hur, one of the great bestsellers of the Victorian age. A utopian fantasy, the novel was also a political argument. The protagonist, a man named Julian White, falls into a trance in 1887 and wakes in a utopian 2000. Unlike Marx, the genial Bellamy saw no contradiction between religion and socialism, and envisaged socialism arriving by peaceful means, through consent between all reasonable humans and by the force of its own argument—Bellamy’s character Dr Leete believed ‘the whole mass of people would embrace it’. Capitalists themselves would give up control of the means of production.

  Amongst other things, in the ideal Boston of Bellamy’s tale, women possessed political equality with men—an equality not all socialists in Australia or elsewhere were willing to accord them. In Looking Backward, women had the support of the state in raising children and were not reliant on the goodwill of husbands or lovers. Communal dining rooms and disposable plates replaced women’s normal domestic drudgery, and clothing and carpets were also disposable. Clothing was unisex, and conventional beauty was not an objective, since it had always been used by men as a tool for oppressing women.

  The Brisbane journalist and young firebrand William Lane, influenced like others by Bellamy, had already himself written one of the futuristic novels so favoured by the times. It was entitled White or Yellow? A Story of the Race-War of AD 1908. It was published in 1887 in serial form in his newsp
aper Boomerang, and showed that his concept of utopia depended on the republic of Asians.Lane had come to Brisbane in 1885, arriving at a time of high unemployment in the city, which enhanced his sense that there were good jobs up country which had been taken by Kanakas. The gulf between labour and capital had not yet developed into the class war of the early 1890s, and Lane found that premiers Griffith and McIlwraith also spoke of farmers’ cooperatives, land reform and the compatibility of religion and socialism, the very subjects he canvassed in his newspaper Boomerang.

  Lane believed in isolated utopianism. ‘We want to be left alone. We don’t care whether Canada loses a fishing monopoly or not; or whether Russian civil servants replace the British pauper aristocracy in Hindustan offices; or whether China takes missionaries and opium-dealers together and sends them packing; or whether the sun sets on the British drum-beat or not—so long as the said drum-beat keeps away from our shores.’ The Old World was Australia’s enemy, and so were the Chinese. In 1890, with backing from a number of unions, he became first editor of the Worker, whose oratory was designed for the whole mass of workers. The paper quickly acquired a circulation of 20 000. It was read in every shearing shed, mining camp and railway-construction settlement in Australia. Like William Guthrie Spence he came from outside the labour movement, but while some, such as Spence, thought him a prophet, others, such as Victorian cabinet ministers, called him the most dangerous man in Australia. Lane, who had been lame since childhood and had a North American accent from some years spent in Canada and Detroit, had become a seer to the shearers, his articles beloved by the strikers, some of whom learned them by heart. According to Vance Palmer, being quoted like scripture gave Lane a Messiah complex.