Land of Golden Wattle

by J. H. Fletcher

‘It’s almost like they’re looking for trouble,’ Richard said.

  Maybe they were; in mid-October the disabled servant of a Catholic priest, a non-miner, was beaten up for not having a mining licence. Later the policeman who attacked him charged the servant with assault.

  ‘You can feel it,’ Alice said.

  ‘Feel what?’

  ‘Trouble. It’s like milk rising in a pan. At this rate it’ll be boiling over pretty soon.’

  ‘Who says so?’ said Richard.

  ‘I say so. I can smell it.’

  ‘You and your nose,’ Richard said.

  ‘Me, I’m gunna steer well clear of it,’ Rascal Jones said. ‘I never bin much for boiled milk.’

  ‘It’ll quieten down soon enough,’ said Richard, determined to be optimistic.

  In the meantime digging went on as the shaft, with excruciating slowness, drove deeper and deeper into the earth.

  Water was a problem. It started to seep into the mine when they’d gone down twenty feet. After that it got steadily worse. They bought a share in a pump that helped keep the flood under control. They were running out of money but had no choice. No pump, no chance of reaching the gold they went on telling each other would be waiting for them when they reached the gutter.

  Shoring up the sides of the shaft took almost as long as the digging but again they had no choice. Being buried alive, as had happened to some miners, was not an option that appealed to them.

  Finally, finally, when the pain of endless digging had come close to overwhelming them, at eight o’clock in the morning in the last week of November, Richard hoisted the final load of mud on his shovel and found he had reached the rock gutter marking the bed of the ancient river where they had told each other for so long the gold would be waiting for them.

  He sat in the enclosed space with the dank smell of wet earth in his nostrils, the darkness barely pierced by the guttering candle flame, and caught his breath as he looked at…

  Nothing.

  The gutter that had claimed all their hopes and energy was empty.

  When Richard fought his way to the sunlight his face said it all.

  ‘You’re saying there’s nothing down there?’

  It was hard to believe, impossible to believe, but that was the way it was.

  ‘Nothing.’ Richard’s voice was as heavy as the gold they’d hoped to find.

  ‘I’m gunna have a look,’ Rascal said.

  ‘Be my guest.’

  But the gutter, as Richard had said, was empty.

  ‘We’re still in with a chance,’ Rascal said when he regained the surface. ‘We need to clear the gutter to the limits of our claims. Then we’ll know for sure. There has to be a ridge across the gutter to trap the gold when it was brought down by the river. Just one ridge and we’ll be in business.’ He gave Richard a keen look. ‘I’ll go down if you’ve no heart for it.’

  ‘Don’t even think about it,’ Richard said.

  The work went on.

  It was close to impossible to breathe at the bottom of the shaft so they rigged a canvas sail over the shaft mouth to deflect the breeze downwards. It helped a little.

  Slowly the chamber at the bottom of the shaft grew bigger while, on the surface, the storm clouds grew darker by the day. There was murder and arson at the Eureka Hotel. Protest meetings were attended by thousands. Forked lightning flamed along the horizon as the governor rejected pleas for reform. Day by day, hour by hour, the storm drew closer.

  Another meeting. Men were carrying arms openly now: pistols mostly, although old Karl Leipzig found a blunderbuss from somewhere that he stuffed with old nails and sawn-up horseshoes.

  ‘Got any powder for that thing?’ Richard asked.

  ‘Not hard to find powder in a mining camp,’ Karl told him.

  ‘As long as you don’t point it at me.’

  Karl did not say whether the gun was loaded or not.

  ‘Maybe the look of the thing will be enough,’ Richard said.

  But in the Ballarat goldfields the look of things was no longer enough.

  Two days after reaching the gutter Richard sent up a bucket full of gravel and small pebbles. He followed the swaying bucket to the light. They stood and looked at what he’d found.

  ‘What do you reckon?’

  ‘It’s heavy.’

  Heavy as gold?

  No one dared say it but hysteria was not far away.

  ‘One way to find out,’ Rascal said.

  They took their findings to the crushing stamps at the end of the valley. The next day they had their answer.

  ‘Fifteen hundred quid? From one bucket?’

  It was hard to get their heads around it.

  ‘We’re rich,’ Alice said.

  They stared at one another. Close to broke one day and now…

  ‘There’s heaps more where that came from,’ Richard said. ‘All piled up against a rock ridge, like Rascal said it would be.’

  His words formed a hollow echo in Alice’s head. Now nothing would serve but shinning down the shaft to see their discovery for herself.

  Richard said that even the idea made his blood curdle. ‘I won’t allow it.’

  She raised her chin. ‘We called it Wheal Alice, didn’t we? My mine. Of course I must have a look.’

  ‘That shaft is almost a hundred and fifty feet deep. If you slip…’

  ‘Why should I slip?’ She gave him a merry grin. ‘I’m as nifty as you are and you’ve been doing it for weeks.’

  Down into the darkness, then. Down into the heat and an almost paralysing humidity. Despite her brave words it was a scary business, the candle flame leaping and gulping and throwing its light on both sides of the shaft, the constant seeping of water shining and the square of daylight soon far above her head as she eased her way down the slippery steps they had made in the shuttering.

  It must be a hundred and twenty degrees, she thought. More. How had the two men managed it day after day, shifting all the muck to get so far down?

  I’ve married a champion, Alice thought.

  After all her effort there wasn’t much to see when she reached the bottom: the wet floor of the shaft, the piled-up mass of gold-bearing pebbles. Heat; silence; the oppressive weight of countless tons of earth leaning inwards to cut off the light, cut off her light…

  Terror seized her. It was all she could do not to scream. Slowly she began the upwards climb.

  Somewhere far overhead, the shuttering that held the shaft walls in place gave a protesting creak. A splatter of damp soil fell past her into darkness.

  1913

  Jonathan walked into the Derwent living room to find his grandmother enthroned in the massive easy chair she had called her own for as long as he could remember.

  She gave him the pleasant smile that kills. ‘May we hope you have recovered from your ill temper?’

  He decided he might as well stand up to her now as later. ‘I don’t accept that I was in an ill temper.’

  ‘I see. Is it too much to ask where you have been for the last –’ she checked the long case clock in the corner of the room ‘– two and a half hours?’

  ‘No, it is not too much to ask. I have been with Bec Hampton.’

  Grandma, eyes black as boot polish, was swelling in her chair. ‘With whom?’

  ‘Bec. The blacksmith’s daughter. You remember Conan?’

  ‘You spent two hours with the blacksmith’s daughter?’ She spoke each word carefully, as though fearing it might break. ‘May one ask why?’

  ‘I asked her to marry me. And she said yes.’

  It was extraordinary how the colours came and went in Grandma’s face: red to white and back to red again. With her hand pressed to her heart. ‘The blacksmith’s daughter. You cannot be serious.’

  There was no point answering her so Jonathan didn’t but sat, looking at her silently.

  ‘Rebecca Hampton as mistress of Derwent? You want us to be the laughing stock of the district? I will not permit it.’

>   ‘I love her,’ Jonathan said.

  ‘Love…’ Bessie Penrose spat the word like filth. ‘I think you mean lust, don’t you?’

  ‘Have it your way,’ Jonathan said. ‘But I intend to marry her.’

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘You will not. I shall make sure of that.’

  The number of times Bec had heard her dad say Grandma Jane Hampton was a loony she might have believed it, had she not known otherwise.

  Certainly Grandma had her ways and some of them were strange. Also she was given to telling tales about the old days, although whether the tales were true or made up few people knew or cared.

  Bec cared. Bec believed that knowing the past made it easier to work out who she was. That was an ongoing problem for Bec because there seemed to be two of her. On the one hand there was the woman who was in love with Jonathan, heir to the vast Derwent run, the biggest and richest property in the midlands, and a man who had actually proposed marriage to her; on the other she was Miss Nobody the blacksmith’s daughter.

  Bec went to see her grandmother.

  To work out which of the two women she really was? Or to ask for her help in what she suspected would be a fight to the death with Bessie Penrose? Because Jonathan she would have, one way or another: that was the one certainty in her life.

  Lots of times Bec had listened to Grandma Jane Hampton rattling on about the people she’d known in the old days, the things she’d heard and the people she’d heard them about; what she wanted to know now was whether the old lady knew anything that might help her knock Bessie Penrose on her bottom.

  Grandma Jane lived in a small dank cottage at the end of a small dank lane where a rivulet flowed beneath matted vegetation. When the clouds broke over the hills the rivulet grew ten times bigger overnight, flooding the path and more often than not spilling under the door and into the cottage. A less stubborn woman would have moved but Grandma Jane made a donkey seem sweet and swore she’d die where she’d lived ever since her husband had carked it back in ninety-two.

  She had a vegie patch behind the cottage and was sitting beside the creek shelling peas into a bowl when Bec turned up.

  ‘Just in time to help,’ she said. She grinned; she was fifty-seven years old, looked twenty years older and was as toothless as a turnip.

  No help for it; Bec sat on the grass at her side, smoothed her dress and got stuck into the peas.

  ‘Haven’t seen you around for a while,’ said Grandma.

  ‘Yeah, well…’

  ‘Been busy, I hear.’ Grandma’s eyes, bright as buttons, glinted out of the nest of wrinkles that was her tanned-leather face. ‘I hear things, even in this rat hole.’

  ‘What sort of things?’

  ‘Got yourself a sweetheart, they tell me.’

  ‘That right?’

  ‘All the district’s talking.’

  ‘Can’t believe all you hear,’ Bec said.

  She cracked a pod open, discovered a nest of maggots inside. She flicked them into the creek.

  ‘You still got trout here?’

  ‘Plenty. We’ll have a couple directly, if you’re planning to hang around a while.’ Fingers still busy with the peas, the eyes watched.

  Bec concentrated on what she was doing.

  ‘What’s the old lady gunna say?’ Grandma asked.

  No point trying to deny it. ‘Do her block, most likely.’

  ‘You’re not wrong.’ Grandma had finished the peas; she eased her back, grabbed a knife and started peeling the spuds. ‘I reckon a nice fresh trout will just about hit the spot,’ she said. She flashed Bec a warning glance. ‘You wanna watch out for that old bitch. Cross her, she’ll be lookin’ for blood.’

  ‘What can I do about it?’

  ‘Walk away, you got any sense.’

  ‘I love him.’

  Grandma nodded, morose over the half-peeled spud. ‘I guessed.’ She sighed. It might have been Bessie Penrose’s throat, the way she slammed the knife through the potato. ‘Love’s a bastard, innit?’

  ‘Is that why you married Grandpa?’

  ‘I always fancied him so when he asked me after Dad died I jumped at him. A farm needs a man, so there was that too. But I loved him, no error.’

  ‘You’ve known Bessie Penrose a long time?’ Bec said.

  ‘We were supposed to have been born the same year: 1856. I was, certainly, but I’m not so sure about her.’

  Bec heard something Grandma had not said. ‘What you mean?’

  ‘Some thought she might’ve been a year older.’

  ‘So what?’

  Grandma sighed again and stood up. ‘You’re right. So what? It’s a long time ago now. Let’s go and fry them trout.’

  Later, over the fish: ‘What did you mean, there was talk?’

  ‘We’re cousins, her and me. You knew that?’

  Of course Bec knew it. She’d heard Grandma bellyaching about it since she was little.

  ‘I heard,’ she said.

  ‘Bessie Tregellas and Jane Dark. Although mind you her dad was a Dark too, when he started off. Him and my dad was half-brothers.’ She cackled. ‘And look at us now. Lady Muck on top of the hill and me down here. Funny how things work out. But I’ll bet these trout are fresher than any she has,’ she said fiercely. And forked a slice of the white flesh into her mouth to prove it.

  Bec refused to be sidetracked. ‘This business about her age… What’s the story there?’

  ‘You don’ wanna go down that road,’ Grandma Jane said. ‘My advice to you is give it away. Find yourself another bloke.’

  ‘I don’t want another bloke. It’s Jonathan I want. I told you already: I love him. Can’t you understand that?’

  ‘Of course I understand it. But what about him? Does he feel the same?’

  ‘Yes,’ Bec said.

  ‘You know that or hope it?’

  ‘I know it.’

  ‘Pray God you’re right. Because that old witch will fillet you like this trout if you’re wrong.’

  For a minute or two they carried on eating in silence, then Bec put down her knife and fork. ‘You’re hiding something. Something about Bessie Penrose’s birth.’

  Grandma chewed for a while, eyes fixed on distance. Then she too put down her knife and fork. ‘It’s only rumour, mind. No proof.’

  ‘Jonathan has asked me to marry him,’ Bec said. ‘You said it right: she’ll stop us if she can. If you can help me…’

  A Berkshire sow would have been proud of Grandma’s snort. ‘Does Bessie know about you and her grandson?’ she asked.

  ‘I don’t know. What I do know is she’s threatened to disinherit him if he marries someone she doesn’t approve of.’

  ‘Meaning you.’

  ‘Meaning me. I dunno if she means it.’

  ‘She means it, all right. But what does Jonathan say?’

  ‘He says he’ll give up Derwent if he has to. But I’m afraid if he does that he’ll come to hate me for it.’

  ‘He could, at that. I was lucky but most men are fickle creatures.’ Jane Hampton studied her granddaughter. ‘So you’re looking for a way to stop her doing that?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘So you’ve come to the only woman in Tasmania who can maybe help you?’

  ‘Because I know you’ll help me if you can,’ Bec said.

  ‘I don’t know anything but I’ll tell you what I heard. What I believe is true. Like I said, there’s no proof; what you choose to do about it is up to you.’

  1854–71

  Alice was bathed in sweat, terror threatening to freeze her limbs.

  Below her was eighty feet of darkness. If she fell, death was certain. Above her the shaft seemed on the edge of collapse. That too would mean certain death.

  At that moment the thought of making a fortune from the gold they had found seemed unimportant. Life was the only thing that mattered.

  She forced her hands away from their death grip and reached for the next rung. And the rung after that. She was
weeping in terror, eyes blind, an insect burrowing in the dark. She could hear her own plaintive cries.

  Another rung. Another.

  Limbs shaking, sweat flooding.

  Another step. Her foot slipped off the greasy rung. She hung, weeping. Save me, God!

  She regained her footing and took a series of deep breaths. Her hand ventured, closing on the next rung. She dragged herself higher. And higher.

  She dared not look up but knew she must be nearing the top because now she could see the shuttering that was still holding the sides of the shaft in place. Where the fall of earth had come from she did not know but was reasonably sure she was above it now.

  Below her feet the darkness opened its jaws, determined to drag her back, but Alice was more determined still. She reached up and climbed. Reached up and climbed. The light and waiting faces welcomed her.

  She stepped away from the shaft, breath shuddering, body shaking. She collapsed on the ground and lay full length. The smell of the sun-warmed earth, the noise of voices, of machines, of dogs… She was safe now.

  How beautiful was life!

  That night was celebration time. The Eureka Hotel had been burnt down back in October so instead they went to the John o’ Groats, a wooden building across the road from the Gold Office among a scattering of the first permanent buildings in Ballarat.

  The old Eureka had had a bad name, being home – or so it was said – to Vandemonians.

  ‘What are Vandemonians?’ Rascal Jones had wondered.

  ‘People like us,’ Alice had said. ‘People from Van Diemen’s Land.’

  ‘What’s the problem with them?’

  ‘Most of the ones here are ex-cons,’ Alice said.

  ‘Like me, you mean?’

  ‘Who’d want to eat in the same hotel as people like us?’ said Richard. He was ebullient at the thought of the gold they’d found. ‘Fifteen hundred quid,’ he marvelled.

  ‘And plenty more where that came from,’ Alice said.

  Although it would be a cold day in hell before she ventured down that shaft again.

  Fifteen hundred quid. It was a figure to conjure dreams. Why stop there? Why not fifty thousand? A hundred? The world was wide and they, incredibly, were rich.

  Never mind the riots, the looming threat of trouble, the fact that soldiers of the 12th Regiment had been stoned passing the Eureka Lead, that diggers were rumoured to be burning their licences – now they would celebrate.