Such was the gleaming lure that drew Calvert into the country, the same lure that he himself dangled to raise funds repeatedly from his syndicate of willing backers, incorporated in London as the General Exploration Company, and based conveniently close to Fleet Street’s newspapers and printing presses. Four times between 1890 and 1896 Calvert made the long sea trip out from London to Australia, travelled north and engaged in his “tours,” or mine-site inspection visits, each of which he recorded in his brisk prose style, accompanied by vivid line drawings in his own hand: sketches of a remarkable fluency, which convey the look and feel of a grand expedition, and show lithe, keen groups of men on horseback, escorting their supply wagon across f lowing river channels or along dry, sandy creek beds. The tone of the Pilbara is precisely captured: the low, overlapping hills of the horizon, the white, wide-trunked gums with drooping branches – and this accuracy makes the fictive nature of these scenes more poignant, for even on his most ambitious journey, the second tour, Calvert had only two companions, one of whom, after a fierce dispute, abandoned him in the bush and absconded with his best riding horse. From the scant surviving evidence, it is plain what Calvert was about: he was quietly quartering the latest prospects around Roebourne, omitting nothing. On one trip he even took care to travel to the new-found Nichol goldfield, which lay so low and so close to the shore that its quartz veins were submerged, at certain seasons, by the incoming tide.
But there was also a deeper motive alive within him: Calvert was seeking to test and take possession of a particular, somewhat confidential story, which had long been playing on his mind – and it was this that drove him to make his fitful stabs into the back country of the first explorers, and to sift and study all he saw.
As he writes in his account of his deepest inland voyage, the Narrative of an Expedition into the Interior of North-West Australia, he set out in discreet fashion from Roebourne on Thursday, 18 September 1891, in the footsteps of earlier travellers, and made his way past Whim Well and the gold workings at Mallina and Egina, through the broad, sparse catchments of the Shaw, the De Grey and the Oakover for several hundred miles, watching, making his neat line drawings, writing down his immediate impressions – until, abruptly, he reached dry terrain: he had struck the margin of the Great Sandy Desert. The high dunes barred his further passage.
Little of geological interest came from this substantial foray, which left the prospectors of the region quite baffled, but Calvert was marked by the experience. In those days, he was much possessed by questions of evidence and authenticity, of claim and fabrication, of rarity and loss. During his initial visit to the southern cities of Australia, in 1890, he had travelled with his grandfather, John, who was making his first return in forty years to the continent of his earliest prospecting triumphs. Their trip was wholly financed by the London syndicate. Their aim was to begin mining operations in the remote central deserts and in the new goldfields of the western colony. John Calvert soon sailed on, across the Pacific, to his long-established mines in Latin America, but before the two parted, he told his grandson the full, confidential tale of his youthful adventures in the far north-west. They involved, predictably, gold, danger, privation, Aborigines and death – and they were, like almost all the Calvert family’s stories, so extreme and preposterous as to seem guaranteed by their sheer implausibility.
John Calvert, as his grandson well understood, was a man with a vexed relationship to conventional truth. His origins were unclear, and several different backgrounds have been proposed for him. One of the most attractive of these traces his descent from a father with pronounced artistic leanings, who knew both Samuel Palmer and William Blake. There is no strong reason to doubt Calvert’s claim that he was born in Cornwall, and was himself a mining engineer and geologist; nor that his expertise in gold-finding stemmed from his early wanderings in the Ural mountains and through Siberia and Transylvania with the mineral hunter Henry Heuland. An authorised biographical sketch, printed in his last years, records John Calvert’s youthful efforts at scientific theorising, which have a hectic, imperious quality about them. He had already begun assembling his magnificent collection of rare crystals and mineral curios; he was on the way to perfecting a mysterious process, involving the element manganese, for extracting gold from its ores. He had devised an automatic radiometer and made studies of the tails of comets, which led him to ideas about condensed gases, and circular and elliptical systems, and thence to the nature of time itself: it was no more than “an accommodation for the registration of a few events,” as he explained in The Solvent of Matter and Motion in Life, a work which so offended the clergy that they clamoured for its immediate suppression. But Calvert swiftly went beyond this pamphlet and its bold claim that water had been the key force in bringing all gold deposits to the surface of the earth. His next effort not only described the distribution of the metal in the earth’s crust, but set out the laws governing its presence there – and soon after its appearance, Calvert made for the Atacama mountains and the mineral fields of Bolivia and Peru, where he found gold in great profusion, and made his first fortune, and dashed off another work of theory, predicting, on purely geological grounds, the location of the undiscovered gold provinces of the world. Chief among them was Western Australia: he decided to head south and prove his ideas.
All this, the young Albert Calvert – he was only twenty-one at the time of that first journey – knew well. What he did not fully know was the secret sequel, which he now learned, and which dazzled him. His grandfather had visited New South Wales, and made his gold finds there, and next moved on to New Zealand, and repeated the performance. Then, in 1847, he had quietly purchased the brig Scout, fitted her for gold exploration and sailed the Tasmanian coast, before making directly for the far north of Western Australia – at that time unsettled and unmapped terrain. In the first account of this episode, John Calvert claimed only to have made a landing near Shark Bay, and to have come upon the crater of an extinct volcano, containing diamonds, while in another formation close by he found “the richest outcrop of gold he ever met with.” The story, whatever its initial degree of truth, was rather different and much more highly coloured when it made its appearance between hard covers, in Coningsby’s Discovery of Gold in Western Australia. The tale now has a fierce, biblical aspect. John Calvert makes land close to Exmouth Gulf, near the northwest tip of the continent, and heads into the interior with seven men and horses, instructing his crew to head for Turtle Bay, far off at the mouth of the De Grey River, and wait for him there for a year. The party follows the winding creek line of the Ashbur-ton; predictable disasters strike; water is scarce, the explorers, with the exception of Calvert, die; he is rescued by Aborigines, and escorted towards the coastline and the sheltered inlet where his vessel waits – the same inlet that was chosen as the site of Con-don, now a ghost town, once the first port of the Pilbara coast.
The final version of the adventure adds grotesque details: “The story of that terrible journey will never be written: two of the men went raving mad after killing one of the baggage horses and drinking the feverish blood. They bolted into the bush during the night and were never seen again.” The rest of the party succumb to thirst and hunger; emaciated, they die. Calvert struggles on, is revived by a tropical downpour and pursues his journey, until he is guided to the coast and reunited with his crew. The Scout sails to New Guinea and New Zealand, and is eventually wrecked, and sinks, with all her cargo of gold samples, off the New Caledonian coast. But Calvert’s looping journeys continue, taking him repeatedly through the South Seas, plotting, prospecting and inventing ever more outlandish metallurgical processes, until he returns to England some years later, bearing with him, as the newspapers of the day dutifully reported, a ton of pure bright gold.
On the basis of this wealth and his freight of well-disseminated stories, Calvert was able to launch a range of syndicates and mining companies. He opened a museum of curios and established himself as the patron to many artists and writer
s; he secured an invitation to Buckingham Palace; he became friendly with the mineral-fancying Prince Consort.
Captured by the sweep and splendour of this narrative, and above all by his grandfather’s tale of gold in the Australian desert – a tale which only became public knowledge in the year of Albert Calvert’s own first journey, and which he may very well himself have had a hand in publicising – the young man promptly set about retracing the ancestral epic. Albert had also acquired, or been infected by, the family mania for publication. A year later, he dedicated his own first book to his grandfather; in the decade that followed he poured out a slew of further mineralogical titles, each of them revising and elaborating on his dream of the golden west.
At which point, the question arises: in fact it can no longer be hidden or decently suppressed. Did the younger Calvert, born as he was into this mythomaniac dynasty, and bearing its royal sponsor’s Christian name like some heraldic letter patent, actually believe any of these stories? Was he himself a mountebank and fabricator? Did he devise them, and perfect them, and use them as the basis for the constant fundraising ventures which fed the family empire? Or was he, in his constant journeyings and his literary reworkings of the north-western landscape, simply making an attempt to come to terms with this legacy: assaying the evidence before him and seeking the veins of truth in his ambiguous inheritance? It is hard to resist the impression that Albert was drawn into the bush out of a desire to approach and know his grandfather; that he was always journeying towards him in his thoughts, that he admired him, and wished to believe in him, and was engaged, all through his life, in a bid to live up to the Calvert name.
But Albert was also a manipulator, an impresario. He adored the limelight, he staged constant dramas of his own; and they were always Calvertian in their grand ambition and the absurdity of their scale. At the outset of his third expedition, he took care to fill the Melbourne newspapers with reports of his plan to build a transcontinental railway, from Roebuck Bay near Broome across the desert; at the same time he was talking up his scheme of founding a national art gallery in Perth, with portraits, specially commissioned, of heroic explorers from Western Australia’s early days. Soon, propelled by a gale of publicity, he was on the road to Marble Bar, and Bamboo Creek and Nullagine, buying up mine leases and claims – and all this activity was always being described, and magnified, in his racing, scurrying prose. There were talks, lectures, articles; on his journey back to Plymouth he launched a shipboard newspaper. In London he founded the weekly West Australian Mining Register, which he filled with breathless reports on the latest gold strikes and alluvial diggings throughout the colony. At his newly opened offices on Old Broad Street he displayed maps and charts and ore specimens for curious passers-by to examine. These props were sufficient to entice investors: the Mallina mining company, which Calvert helped launch, was the first Western Australian gold stock to be floated with British capital. In late 1894 he named himself managing director of two more grandly titled enterprises, Big Blow Gold Mines of Coolgardie and Consolidated Gold Mines of Coongan and Marble Bar. This paper empire continued its expansion, and eventually included stakes in thirteen equally impressively constituted companies.
Word of his triumphs spread before him. His next trip to the west was a hero’s progress. He sailed for the Pilbara, the focus of his speculative energies, and when at last he reached Roebourne in the blazing heat of late December, he was feted at a banquet “attended by nearly fifty gentlemen” at the Jubilee Hall. The building had been tastefully decorated with “flowers and bunting” for the occasion – and one can almost see the pale mauve mulla mullas and heliotrope blossoms drooping from the pediment. The time soon came for Calvert to launch himself from the little town into a fresh tour of the goldfields, most of which, at that point, belonged to him. As he relates in a brief, poignant passage, oddly fictive in its accents, his young brother Lennard, who had accompanied him on the voyage, fell ill with typhoid on the morning of their departure, just as the four-horse dray was being loaded up before the front bar of the Victoria Hotel. Lennard came out, leaned weakly against the veranda’s wooden post and waved goodbye. Calvert travelled out as far as Woodstock station, a stretch of flat spinifex country studded with sandstone platforms that bear rock art upon almost every surface. At the homestead there, he too fell gravely ill. He was brought back to Roebourne by stretcher: his party reached the Harding River just in time to hear the church bell tolling Lennard’s requiem. Calvert’s own recovery was slow. He went south, then back to London. It was his last visit to the Pilbara; it had been full of drama, like a novel: there was fortune, there was the shadow of fatality; he caught it in dark, emotive style in print.
Just after the appearance of My Fourth Tour in Western Australia, which proved to be by far his most successful publication, Calvert’s life was again turned on its head. Early on 5 November 1897, at the family residence in Caversham Road, his grandfather, “that citizen of the world,” died, most likely in his eighty-sixth year. Behind him the old man left a jigsaw of financial interests, and the remains of his fabled collection of curiosities, which he had begun to dismantle, displaying a grim determination in the task, much like a revolutionary who seeks to annul all trace of his conspiratorial designs. Already he had sold off to the government of New South Wales the set of zoological, botanical and mineral specimens amassed on Captain Cook’s Endeavour by Sir Joseph Banks; only days before his death he received from J.C. Stevens Auction Rooms the proof catalogue for the sale of his “Savage Curiosities.” Minerals, shells, coins, books, the giant eggs of cassowaries, auks and emus: he planned to sell them all. The detailed, admiring obituary printed in the Mining Journal, and written “by one who knew him,” dwelled on old Calvert’s 10,000 fossils, his portfolio of prints by Dürer, his diamonds, his “regiments of emerald, topaz, sapphire and other precious stones.” Quite forgetting the sad context of the time, the author – almost certainly Albert Calvert at his most enthused and prolix – descends into long accounts of the collection’s special “freaks of nature,” the veined jaspers, or the mocha stones, elaborately patterned, in which imaginative eyes could trace the likenesses of the kings and queens of history: Marie Antoinette, for one, or Ramses II, the Pharaoh of the biblical Exodus. Another mocha stone seemed to show two lighthouses with the reflected gleam of light upon water between them; in another still, “nature’s accidental markings depict a fleet of ships at anchor in the bay.” The writer then, in a manoeuvre typical of the younger Calvert, turns to the old man’s time in the bush, his survival in the desert, and that profound discretion, too, which left his books devoid of a single detail of personal adventure – so that “save in social moments or in congenial company his curious experiences were never referred to.” How could one ever know, or be on level terms with such a man: with such a screen of silences? His agates and his rubies, his Siberian minerals and his cherry coppers – what was their secret: what did they mean?
And what, now, was Calvert, death-surrounded, deprived of his grandfather, and of all the stories? There is an acute portrait sketch of him from those days, drawn for the social pages of Vanity Fair by the well-known caricaturist “Spy.” It shows a frail, uncertain individual, with a fragile, reclusive look lurking in the eyes. Calvert is in his full racing finery; indeed, the costume is somewhat overdone: morning coat, cane of bamboo, top hat, kid-leather gloves, coral pink and iridescent greenish-black bow tie. Yet a mournful air hangs over him, and this tone is only heightened in the posed photograph he included in several of his early books. It portrays the author gazing out into infinite distance; a large, wilting rose-bloom flops from the lapel of his dress coat; a pearl-tipped tie pin stabs down towards his heart; his expression is soft and otherworldly. The old man had always radiated a very different manner. One sees no commonality between the two. John Calvert’s face was little more than a disguise, a front, half masked by a tumble of thick white beard; a pair of defiant eyes, like burning coals, would stare out; while upon the ro
ugh, sackcloth material of his waistcoat, a Ruritanian medal, suspended from a golden chain, declared his wealth and grandeur to the world. Believe me, it said: believe in me – here is my gilded proof.
A year was sufficient for the Calvert financial empire to crack under the young man’s sole guidance, and go under. But the ensuing bankruptcy was artful and allowed the investors who had trusted in the Calvert name a smooth retreat. The mines, so grandly advertised and laboriously acquired, proved largely empty. The grades were low in Coolgardie; there were scant returns from the Yellow Aster and from the Golden Hope leases close by Marble Bar. The Calverts had poured plant and capital into only one of their ventures, the workings at Lower Nichol on the Indian Ocean shore, which had seemed to them so like the site of Provin-cia Aurifera – but when it was visited by a government geologist some years later, the winding engine, pumps and boilers had stopped working, following a prolonged submersion in seawater floods. And Mallina, the Calvert Exploration Company’s pride – Mallina, where the region’s gold rush began, in 1888, when young Jimmy Withnell picked up a lump of quartz to hurl at a noisy crow and saw the rock was flecked with gold – even Mallina had failed. John Brockman, the acting warden of the regional goldfield, filed a succinct, bleak report from the site only a year after Calvert’s last, triumphal “tour”: “This place for the want of capital is almost deserted, and the deputy registrar’s house, offices and effects unfortunately have been burnt down recently.” A few months more, and all the mine workings in the neighbourhood were abandoned; the bush camps of the Pilbara had fallen quiet.
The Red Highway Page 22