‘Yuh bin a long time on that third level.’ She was leaning down towards me. ‘Find anything?’ I was almost level with the top of the shaft, and looking up at her, the beam of my lamp showed her eyes bright as beads. I heaved myself out, glad to be on firm ground again. ‘Well, what did yuh find?’ She had seen the bulging haversack and her voice had a grasping urgency.
I handed her a piece of the quartz and she picked up her torch, bending over it, examining it eagerly. Her hands trembled, the glitter of the gold exciting her. ‘Where did yuh find this — On the third level?’ She looked up at me, her thin dry hair in wisps across her face and her eyes gleaming. ‘Is this from the reef?’
I knew then that I wasn’t going to tell her what else I’d found, the footprints, the evidence of work in that gallery. ‘Yes. There’s a section of the reef exposed. But it’s quite unworkable.’ And I explained about the state of the mine.
It took a little time to convince her. Gold still had a powerful attraction, and having made money out of one claim, she was eager to peg another, insisting that we try our luck higher up the gully. Even when I told her what the grey smudges in the quartz could mean, I don’t think she really believed me — she didn’t want to. ‘Yuh get it analysed,’ she said finally. ‘Then we’ll see.’
This was obviously the next stop, and when I asked her where the nearest laboratory was she said, ‘Kalgoorlie.’
We collected our gear then and went back down the adit to the mine entrance. The sun was already well up and the heat hit us as we went out into the red glare of the gully. I closed the door and screwed the bolt back into place. It was just after eight as we drove down the tramline track to the mine buildings. ‘If wot yuh say is true and it is antimony in that quartz then it explains why they never made any money out of the mine.’
‘Yes.’
She had obviously been thinking it over.
‘And I bet that sample runs out at near on six ounces to the ton.’
She was a woman who didn’t give up easily and she was talking about it all the way to the cut-off by the paddock fencing. I didn’t say much, for I was driving and wondering what I’d tell Ed Garrety if I met him coming down the track from Jarra Jarra. But we didn’t meet a soul and shortly after nine-thirty we pulled into Lynn Peak, a mobile drilling rig the only vehicle there. We were both of us very tired by then and I was glad Andie was out seeing to one of his wind bores. His wife cooked us breakfast and while we were waiting for it I picked up a copy of the West Australian somebody had left and turned to the financial page. It gave the London price of antimony — £1130 per ton. Only a few months ago it had been £340.
The bacon and eggs came and we ate it with the children on the floor at our feet and the four drillers at the next table. They were ‘dust’ drillers and their rig was a rotary percussion drill, a May hew 1000 that relied on compressed air instead of mud to bring the rock chips to the surface. They were on their way from Mt Goldworthy to a temporary job at Mt Newman. Georges Duhamel, the owner of the rig, had been born in the French island of New Caledonia and all through breakfast he was telling me how important it was for Britain to retain her Pacific colonies. ‘Some day Australia will need those islands as bases against the pressure of Asiatic populations — the Chinese, the Japanese, mebbe the Philippines, too. You give everything away. Why? Do you no longer believe in the future? Perhaps you think there is no future, hnn?’ He was a wiry, dynamic little man with wild penetrating eyes under a thick dark thatch of hair, and a quick, explosive way of speaking. Listening to him, I felt that being an Englishman in Australia had its disadvantages; I seemed to be a target for everybody who had a gripe against the Old Country. But at least he could tell me something about the cost of drilling in this part of the country. It worked out at around £6.50 a foot dust drilling and went up to about £16.50 if he used a diamond drill.
Later, two drivers came in. They had a refrigerator truck loaded with fish from the coast and were headed for Perth by way of Meekatharra and Mt Magnet. From Meekatharra Prophecy said I should have no difficulty in getting a lift to Kalgoorlie, and shortly after eleven I left her sitting there in the Andersons’ diner clutching the samples I’d given her, a dreamy look on her face. I had asked her to say nothing to anybody until I had had the analysis done, but as we started out on the long haul south, three of us crammed into the stifling heat of the truck’s driving cabin, I thought it was too much to expect that she’d be able to keep her mouth shut.
CHAPTER FOUR
ONE
There had never been anything quite like it in Australia, probably never will be again. Gold rushes, yes, but the nickel boom is something different. Poseidon, its symbol, was rocketed frm 7s. 6d. to £112 on the London market, and gamblers in faraway Britain caught nickel fever, calling it the Windarra Wonder and rushing to buy the shares of any company with a hole in the ground and the faintest whiff of ultrabasics. So many claims have been pegged recently the mining registrars have been unable to cope and rumour has it that the Perth Government’s Minister of Mines is considering a ban on further pegging until the backlog had been cleared. The Windarra Range is not much more than a hundred miles north of Kalgoorlie, and with Western Mining’s Kambalda nickel mine already in production twenty miles to the south, this old gold town became the focal centre of the boom. When I arrived there late on the Saturday afternoon the place was seething with scouts and newspaper men, stockbrokers, business executives, survey parties, crooks, drillers, gamblers, anybody with money enough and a place to lay his head.
The hub of all this feverish activity was the Palace Bar. In quieter days it was no doubt adequate enough, but now it overflowed the pavement, a mob of men in every conceivable garb, talking, arguing, drinking in the slanting sunlight. The survey truck in which I had travelled the last stretch from Leonora had dropped me at the corner of Hannan and Maritana, and as I crossed the broad intersection the roar of voices almost drowned the traffic. It was the same across the street outside the dark cavern of a bar where a florid Edwardian design in frosted glass proclaimed it Church’s Exchange Hotel — The Jacksons of Kalgoorlie. It was a town of white-wood buildings with verandahed sidewalks, and Hannan Street, with brothels virtually at one end of it and the Mt Charlotte gold mine at the other, was wide enough for camel trains to turn in. The whole place was a municipal monument to Hannan’s discovery of 1893 and the Golden Mile.