During those first few days, our trip fell into a simple rhythm: we would drive, and talk, and camp at nightfall, beside rocks or river pools, close to the maintenance roads that run far into the inland beside the iron-ore rail lines – and Kelvin’s stories turned more and more to Goldsworthy, and to the lay-out and the rhythms of the vanished town. Its people came to life, its street-scape and topography seemed to hang before my eyes, and this effect owed a great deal to Kelvin’s descriptive technique. He would run on, his voice level, almost devoid of obvious emotion, adding fresh clauses to his picture like little, emphatic dabs of paint, refining the verbal landscape before us, rendering it almost unbearably precise. Then the different pieces of his tales would come together, would support each other, no matter how far-flung and arbitrary they had seemed at the moment of their introduction into the story – until one had the sense of a set of events not just recalled but relived, analysed down to the finest grain of their constituent parts.
He would pause, every now and then, as if surprised by what was coming back to him, as he did one morning when we steered our four-wheel-drive up a rocky slope to the crest of a ridge. Before us was the opening of a small cave, which Kelvin used to come to on his free days when he first worked as a driver at the mine. From that point, you looked out across the whole country; you could survey the river channel and its twisting line of paper-barks. The hills opposite us had an odd, disquieting regularity: and gradually I realised that they were old spoil dumps, elaborately recontoured to mimic the natural lie of the land, for almost everything about the environs of Goldsworthy had been the subject of costly camouflage, much like the town itself.
“How much effort went into it!” Kelvin shook his head. “All the houses that were easily transportable went to Shay. The others were auctioned off to other mining companies or to pastoralists.
They disassembled everything, ripped up the roads, hired an environmental company to cut out all the non-indigenous trees. The stockpiles were even heaped up so they would look like hills, and planted with those white-trunked gums, and these days the side-pits we excavated are only visible from the air. I must say it’s hard not to regret the old place, now we’re so close by. It was over that way, just there, near the radio mast – in that notch in the range.”
He pointed, and moved his hand before us, as if stroking the line made by the rock and the sky. “All the streets were named after the rivers of the area – there was Coongan Street, and Pardoo, and Shaw: and they were beautiful, and green. There were near to 1,000 houses, and they were good: three-bedroom fibro and gyprock plaster. We had three kinds, the old ones from the early days, the ’70s models, and then the Jackson-Watson houses – replacements for the buildings destroyed by Cyclone Amy, which largely obliterated the town. All of them had gardens with paper-barks, or coral trees, or red gums, and lots of bougainvilleas. Water was no problem at all, because of the deep mining, so we had a lush green oval, too, and tall shade-trees round the office and the shopping centre, where the Aborigines from the communities nearby would pull up in their convoys of old, clapped-out cars. It was a real oasis. Unfortunately, though, the town had been built too close to the mine, so red dust would tend to drift over, and stain everything. Later, of course, it changed, when the pit was deep, and that didn’t happen any more. Sports was a big deal too: we had tennis courts, floodlit, and we had a very well-maintained bowling green.”
“It sounds like paradise,” I said.
Kelvin gave me a little sardonic look. Goldsworthy, which he had not revisited since his departure twenty years ago, had been in his thoughts increasingly in the wake of a reunion which took place at the Ascot Hotel in Perth a few months before. He had gone along with some misgivings, only to find the old town’s spirit still magically intact. “There were 400 people there: it was like time had stood still. Everyone’s memories were fresh. You talk to anyone from the old days, even people who have moved on in the Pilbara, who have lived for years in other mining towns, and they’ll tell you that in their hearts they’re still loyal Golds-worthy people. The old GML T-shirts are still handed around like war-time medals. I remember when I first pulled into Hedland, on my way up here, and climbed off my motorbike. A woman asked me where I was headed: I told her I was driving on to Goldsworthy. ‘Oh – the family company,’ she said. I never forgot that.”
In fact Goldsworthy was run by Utah International, a large American mining corporation with extensive further leases in the Pilbara, and a peculiar mid-term strategy. Utah hoped to develop the vast orebodies known collectively as “Area C”, and was waiting for a market upturn: during the wait, it kept Goldsworthy running, driving the open pit ever deeper, even while struggling to contain costs and pleading with its workforce for help in this quixotic scheme. Kelvin was just beginning his long career as an AWU organiser: he found himself thrown into the heart of this co-operative arrangement, which was hardly typical of the Pilbara iron ore mines in those days of union strength. During the hardest times at Goldsworthy, mass meetings would be held and workers would put forward their best ideas for saving money. One heavy machinery driver came up with the idea of using the blade tips on graders and bulldozers for longer periods before replacing them: the savings to the company ran into the millions of dollars from this suggestion alone.
“That way of doing things all depended on the managers,” said Kelvin, “and they were remarkable men. I look back now, and I see Goldsworthy as a kind of university, which prepared me for many things in later life. On paper, the place was under the control of the best engineer in the Pilbara, Derek Miller. He was the Quasimodo who made the mine run: but the show was really in the hands of an old German: Alfred Kober. I studied him for a long while, fairly closely, and I came to the conclusion that he was quietly implementing Albert Speer’s late Third Reich philosophy of devolving industrial power back to the shop floor. He was like a grumpy father; he instilled great loyalty in people. Besides, he was a well-known fanatic for high-speed driving, and could set records on the Hedland–Goldsworthy run: you can imagine how that impressed us young bucks! And then there was the town manager, a wonderful old man named Jack O’Farrell: he was hugely experienced in life, very generous, and fascinated by people’s personalities. He’d been an alcoholic, and then joined A.A., and he treated all the problem drinkers with great tenderness. He was on the railways in Queensland before, and he fought the war in Egypt. You were never short of stories with him. And you had all the other oddballs around in authority positions: there was the shaggy-haired dentist who had a penchant for marijuana, and who would slip outside in mid-filling for a steadying joint; and Dr Ted, who looked very much like Jack Hawkins in the role of the fraught priest in Zulu, and prescribed salt tablets as the remedy for everything …”
“It’s amazing, really,” I ventured, “with such a rich social fabric, that you had any time left for mining at all.”
“It’s true, there was a lot of life, and adventure, in those days,” said Kelvin, and he began piloting us across the flat, over half-eroded station tracks, past the remains of old fence-lines, towards the De Grey. “But that’s my point. Things were different then, in mining towns, and very different in Goldsworthy. Even when we were living through it, we knew that kind of life would never come again. It wasn’t just being young: it was more that Golds-worthy was an ideal: it was the remotest mine, the richest ore. We almost felt that we were heroes, living a magic life – especially when we came out here …”
He slipped the vehicle back into four-wheel drive: down we plunged, tilted forward, into a sandy hairpin, and out onto a wide stone ledge above the riverbank.
“Here?”
“Mulyie Pool,” he said, with a little note of reverence. “This was a very important place, in the mining times. This is the side of the inland outsiders never know. Look: a green cave beneath the sun: broad, deep waterholes: they reach on, up the De Grey, for kilometres at a stretch. In fact, this is unique in all the Pilbara, this wide, sandy, riverbed wo
rld. There’s everything here: emus, pigs, goats, pythons – hundreds of them. It’s their world: you expect to see them here.”
I gazed out, obediently, scanning the far bank, then watching the water-flies on the river’s surface, and the patterns the breeze was making, until I felt myself slip into one of those bush reveries, when words, thoughts, sights, as if unhindered by our frail defensive ramparts, pour freely in: I listened to the sounds from the river, and to Kelvin’s voice, until his stories fused with the light and the play of the leaves and shadows.
Long before, he said, when the country was being opened up, Afghan cameleers had travelled the watercourses like the De Grey or Shaw rivers, which ran from the coastline in towards Nullagine and Marble Bar, and they had even hit on their own terminology for the different landscapes they traversed. Kelvin had been following up their paths for years and had found an Afghan rock road, cut straight through the peaks behind Roebourne. The cameleers knew the Hamersley Ranges, which are dissected by dark narrow gorge-systems, as the “Underworld”, while the plains round the Chichesters, where Millstream Park’s boundaries run today, were “Middle Earth”, and the landscape closer to the sea, where we were, was the “Low Land”.
“And do you feel them,” I asked, “the Afghans, in the country, when you’re driving round?”
“The country’s full of presences, of course,” said Kelvin, softly.
“Of course – everywhere you turn. The spot that looks most empty is heaviest in memories – memories clinging on.”
“It’s pretty quiet in here now,” I said.
“Quiet now – but in the mining times, this place would have been full. The whole bank was full of vehicles, and families camping, down that end: and there’d be mad drivers careering about across the bank. Up this way, though, it was a different zone. This was where you’d come for romance. It’s where you’d find someone, if you were looking for them. The venturesome women – they were all here. I remember an aerobics instructor, from Hedland” – his voice became distinctly appreciative – “I used to come out to the river with her, for a while – but eventually we lost touch, of course. Life out here was exactly like that – scenes from a movie, no beginnings, no real endings, just fade-outs.”
Soon, the sun sank, and cold evening came: round the fire, our picture of Goldsworthy, like some old photographic negative, took on ever greater definition; and I felt almost as if my listening was some vital part of the whole exercise, and by my presence I was helping Kelvin to reach into and frame his recollections. There was a common flavour to the stories that he told me in those night-time hours: they would be full of life’s immediacy and jump, yet back-lit by the sadness of his retrospect. Things he had not glimpsed seemed plain now; and patterns that meant every thing to him when they were lived out were all but gone. His union days; the struggles at Robe, the changes of his later years – he touched on them all, but he was drawn back repeatedly to Goldsworthy itself: the town, its tribes, their habits and affiliations, as if he had become an anthropologist of his own experiences, and wished to reach into the hidden wellsprings of his restlessness.
And the place did submit to this kind of classifying operation, much as if there really had been clan groups or subsections in the workforce – and I found myself half-wondering if the elaborate divisions of desert Aboriginal society were triggered in the first place by some need for differentiation against the landscape’s relentless backdrop. At Goldsworthy, where labour was regimented, leisure had been the vital indicator of type: there were river people at the mine, and ocean people too: and the ocean crowd had special needs, and inclinations – so much so that the mining company had graded them a back road out to Cape Keraudren and built a dedicated boat ramp for their cabin cruisers. They could sail out from there to Bedout Island and dive into the clear water and pick up battalions of large, unresisting crayfish. The boat people tended to take their wives and families on these weekend trips, and fill vast freezers full of marine plunder which was transported back to town and divided among friends. Or if the journeys out were all-male affairs, they involved extreme drinking: the Keraudren Road was littered with crash sites where boat-trailers had been tipped over and wrecked.
But for the river people, the totemic transportation object was the four-wheel-drive, and a crucial day in the history of Golds-worthy dawned when the first Honda Odyssey was brought out to the mine. This was a light, low-slung vehicle, a kind of distant cousin of the go-kart, which could hurtle at high speed up near-vertical sandy banks, or zip and twist between the paperbarks – and during the brief space of years that the Odyssey remained in production, the sand country of the De Grey was alive each weekend with the sound of its engines hurtling here and there.
Movement, velocity, escape: this was a shared obsession for many at the mine, where the sense of isolation and separation from the settled, southern world was so pronounced. The freedom to move, the sense that one could elude the landscape’s still monotony – these became goals in themselves: one would drive out not just to go to Hedland, but for the sheer pleasure of momentum. This particular appetite was strong in Kelvin, who regarded the mine’s vehicle repair workshops, where the giant Haulpak trucks were maintained, as a holy shrine to high-speed transport. Distance served only as a challenge to him: an open road almost demanded acceleration to an engine’s limits, and as a consequence many of his most striking Pilbara exploits involved chases, highway crashes or long journeys undertaken at a whim.
One of these stood out, for its neat combining of disparate themes as much as for its tone of recklessness. He had come into possession of an early model Commodore, the top of the line, a vehicle more spaceship than sedan: it had seats of soft velour, and it was the first Australian-made car with push-button controls. Its presence in the Pilbara naturally spurred thoughts of transcontinental driving, so one morning Kelvin set off from Golds-worthy, bound for Adelaide, down the back dirt tracks through Marble Bar and Nullagine, and onwards to the Goldfields, on the inland road, which was still in those days a rough gravel ride. His first stop came only at Kalgoorlie. He parked in Hannan Street: eyes turned to gaze at the Commodore, which was now suspended between states of being: a smooth-lined cruiser, covered in thick red mud and dust. There was a little throng clustered round a stand in the block opposite the main hotel. He wandered over. There was Albert Facey, by then a man of great age, seated behind a desk with his daughter alongside him, selling copies of his masterpiece, A Fortunate Life, which had only just appeared in print.
“I bought the book, of course,” said Kelvin, “I would read anything that I could get my hands on in those days: I had it signed by him. But old Facey barely even knew he’d written a book by then: his hand was trembling as it moved across the page.” Onwards the Commodore plunged, across the Nullarbor: Kelvin drove at 200 kilometres an hour, as was customary in those days, “pissed as a cricket”, and reading his way at the wheel through A Fortunate Life, which seized hold of him: he turned the last page just as he was pulling into Ceduna, the little town that marks the approach of South Australian civilisation after the empty plain.
His return trip had a slightly less literary flavour: for everything, in the deep inland, seems to exact its balance and its cost. He drove the whole journey in a single hit, from Adelaide across the Nullarbor, and north, very much under the influence of various savage forms of alcohol, until he drew near to Nullagine: then the car began to vibrate and shudder, just where the track crosses a series of bands of sharp protruding basalt. He stopped outside the Conglomerate Hotel, his body shaking, his mind quite blurred by days of motion. It was sunset. An Aboriginal woman, well-built, dressed in a tiger-print top, was leaning against the doorway. She beckoned Kelvin with her finger. “Do you want a fuck?” He gazed back, scarcely able to form a word. “Well, you might as well,” she drawled, and pointed at the Commodore. “You’re not going anywhere in that thing!” Kelvin glanced behind him. The car had been so systematically shaken and pulverised that its li
nes had altered. A flow of blackened, oily liquid was pouring from below the radiator; the shadow of its drooping transmission loomed between the wheels. His mind filled with bleak thoughts about the distance that still separated him from the nearest service centre. He went into the saloon: it was empty, except for an enormous barman, heavily tattooed. Might there be a possibility of stop-gap repairs, Kelvin wondered. “But of course,” said the barman. “I’m a qualified mechanic. Just bring the car round to the back entrance. I always keep my oxy torches beside the drinks refrigerators, right here.” I slept uneasily that night, pursued by dreams of high-speed chases involving Afghan cameleers. When morning came, I suggested, tentatively, that we might, since we were so close, think of taking a look at Goldsworthy itself.
“Maybe,” said Kelvin, sighing heavily. “Of course that’s really why we’re here – to see the old place. But it’s just an old mining town, you know. Not even that. Don’t get your hopes up!” And we set off. Kelvin was quiet. “When were you last here?” I asked him, after some while, to break the tension. “I haven’t been here for twenty years,” he said. “I never came back. I came nearby, on union business, to Shay: but never here. I see it all still: why would I need to? I suppose I’m about to find out.”
Then, abruptly, even as he was speaking, the feel of the landscape round us changed. There had been no shift in the texture of the bush, but I knew. We had reached Goldsworthy, or where it once was: that, there, must be the water-tank, where the men played two-up on the Marble Bar Road; there was the entrance driveway, with its tall line of trees, which Kelvin had described to me with such pride a day or two before.
Another Country Page 7