‘I was there for a few hours, yes.’
‘What did the abo say?’
‘Nothing.’
I don’t know whether he believed me or not. The tarmac had ceased and we were on a black grit track that ran across a flat wasteland to the long rampart walls of the gold tailings. ‘Okay, we’ll talk about it later — when we’ve settled this Blackridge deal.’
The tailing walls were golden in the slanting sun. They were enormous, like Egyptian tombs. A pony all alone eyed us doubtfully as we swung south, the wheels ploughing through grit so fine and black it looked like coal dust, and ahead was a solitary house standing in the shade of two gaunt gum trees. The ugly tin fencing was rusty, and where it wasn’t supported by old iron bed-ends, it had fallen in. We stopped in a whirl of dust beside a pair of rusting traction engine wheels that served to mark the entrance. ‘Well, this is it,’ he said, and climbed out.
I got my suitcase out of the back and followed him through a scattering of hens to the verandah entrance. Like the other houses I had seen, the verandah had a delicately curved tin roof, but it was dilapidated, the holes showing ragged. The smell of pigs hung heavy in the hot stillness. He nodded to a corrugated iron shack. ‘The bog’s over there when you want it.’ He climbed the verandah steps and pushed open the fly-screen. ‘Edith!’
‘That you, Chris?’ a woman’s voice answered, thin and high, with an edge of nerves in it.
‘I got Ferdie’s pal with me.’
‘Coming.’
I put my suitcase down and he took me into the parlour. It was cool and dark, the windows shuttered, and the furniture Victorian with lace curtains, even antimacassars, a period piece and spotlessly clean. A small dried-up little woman appeared in the doorway, standing hesitant, brushing a wisp of hair. ‘You didn’t say anything about company tonight, Chris.’
‘Didn’t know, so how could I?’ He told her my name and she came forward to greet me, wiping her hands on her apron. Her handshake was surprisingly firm, the skin dry and hard. ‘I expect you’re hungry.’ She smiled at me, her eyes almost green in a shaft of sunlight. ‘It’s all ready. I only got to lay another place.’
We ate in the kitchen at a plain scrubbed table, cold ham and pickles with fried potatoes and thick sweet Indian tea. Edith Culpin hardly spoke, picking daintily at her food, with the big china teapot in front of her. I was hungry and very tired after the long ride south, but I thought it time I found out exactly what Kadek wanted of me. Culpin didn’t seem to know. ‘He’ll tell you when he gets back from Perth. I’ve wired him the results of the analysis and he’ll have the boss of Lone Minerals with him.’ He took a gulp of tea, sucking it in noisily, his mouth full. ‘All I know is he’s expecting you to give Les Freeman the lowdown on the geology of the area. He’s got it all worked out. You’re the expert, see.’
‘When do you expect him?’ I asked.
‘Monday. He’s going to ring me.’
It didn’t give me much time and I soon discovered he knew next to nothing about the geological structure of the country. He could give me the results of geochemical and geomagnetic surveys carried out on various claims, but he couldn’t explain the gossans and anomalies usually associated with sulphide minerals or even talk sensibly about the theory of ultrabasics. ‘You’d better go and see Petersen first thing Monday morning. Either Pete or somebody at Western Mining. And there’s Smithie. He knows the nickel belt as well as anybody.’
‘What about the School of Mines?’ I asked. ‘D’you know anybody there?’
‘No.’
‘Kennie does,’ his wife said. ‘If Kennie were here — ‘
‘Well, he isn’t.’ He swallowed the last of his tea and got to his feet. ‘I better go now.’
‘I baked an apple pie for you.’ Her voice sounded aggrieved.
He shook his head. ‘Red’s just in from the mulga country up beyond Warburton and I wanta get hold of that abo he had with him.’
‘Dick Gnarlbine?’ Her voice was frozen. ‘It’s not right, you drinking with a black.’
‘Who said anything about drinking?’ He laughed. ‘All right. I’m going to pour some liquor into the bastard before any of my pals get at him.’ He turned to me. ‘Red’s been filming up north of the Gunbarrel, over towards the Clutterbucks, says they ran into a bunch of natives been walkabout east from Disappointment.’ He reached for his hat. ‘A few beers and Dick’ll tell me anything he knows.’
‘It’s not right,’ she repeated wearily.
‘To hell with whether it’s right or not. If he’s learned something that’ll make our fortunes, then I don’t reckon you’d come it so bloody high and mighty about my feeding a few beers to an abo.’ He clapped his hat on his head. ‘See you in the morning,’ he told me and went out. A moment later we heard the door of the ute slam, the whine of the starter.
‘You mustn’t mind Chris,’ she said as the sound of the engine faded up the track. ‘He’s had a hard life.’ She gave a little sigh. ‘We both have.’ And she went over to the oven and got out the pie, fussing over me as she served it. ‘You were asking a lot of geological questions. I hope you won’t do that again. It upsets him. He’s not a geologist.’
‘No, I realize that.’
‘He’s not even a prospector, not really.’
The pie was good and I told her so.
She smiled and I caught a glimpse of the girl she had once been, before the dry air and the hard life had shrivelled her. ‘Would you like some more tea?’
I let her refill my cup, sensing her loneliness, her need to talk. But the world she lived in was a limited one, her husband out most of the time and the nearest house a fifteen-minute walk across the empty wasteland. ‘It’s the summers I can’t stand. I’m from the South West, from Yeagarup, and I miss the trees. I grew up with great forests of karri all round me and the sea not more’n twenty miles away.’ She gave a little shrug. ‘There’s worse places than Kalgoorlie, I know that. But January, and next month too — the heat and the flies, and the dust from the tailings, it drives you crazy.’
Her family had been small farmers owning a few paddocks and about fifty acres of forest. That was how she’d met her husband. He was just back from the war, working in the timber mills at Pemberton, and at weekends he was felling for a neighbouring farmer. ‘Chris has tried almost everything in the twenty-four years we been married. He ran a sheep station for a time, a big place out on the edge of Nullarbor. He was a butcher, then a dogger. I think he liked dogging best. He was all through the Pilbara, living bush and on his own. And I had the child. I wasn’t too lonely. But Kennie’s grown up now and finally we came here. It was the nickel boom brought Chris back. He went to Kambalda as a driller. Then up Laverton way. Now he’s on his own and calls himself a prospector, and all he thinks about is striking it rich.’ Her thin lips stretched themselves into a sad little smile. ‘If he ever did, I don’t think we’d know what to do with it, not now.’
I asked her about the mine then, but she couldn’t tell me much, only that it was near Ora Banda and she didn’t think there’d be much in it for them. ‘Even a place like Blackridge costs money these days. Chris is only the agent. It was Mr Kadek bought it.’
I think she’d have gone on talking for the rest of the evening, but I wanted to stretch my legs before it got dark. She took me across the hall and showed me into a small room with a single bed and home-made shelves littered with rock samples, all carefully labelled. There was a desk with a battered typewriter on it, and above it, another shelf stacked with books on geology, physics, metallurgy — Mason’s Principles of Geochemistry, Elements of Mineralogy, Elements of Geology for Australian Students, Bragg’s Atomic Structure of Minerals; I hadn’t seen that since I was a student.
‘It’s Kennie’s room really.’
‘Yes, I guessed that.’
‘He’s twenty-three now, a real bright boy. Solid, too — not restless like his father.’ She was smiling. ‘I’ve got a photograph of him in the parlour if you’d care to see it.’ She went and got it and I found myself looking at the picture of a tall, slightly-built lad with his mother’s features showing through a wisp of beard, an unruly mop of fair hair falling over his face. ‘That was taken the day he passed out from the School of Mines. He did very well there.’ She said it with a mother’s fondness, adding, ‘He should be back any day now.’