I reminded him that I hadn’t even seen the mine yet, but he only glared at me. ‘What the hell’s that matter? The mine’s my pigeon. All Ferdie wants from you is geological know-how.’ And he added, ‘They’ll be here about noon. That gives you three hours.’
Clear of Boulder, we took the dirt road that parallels the Golden Mile, the sun blazing hot and the mineworkings looking as though an army had fought a desert campaign across the scarred wasteland. ‘I’ll drop you in Macdonald Street. There’s Western Mining on one side, the School of Mines on the other. And Smithie’s usually at the Palace bar around eleven. I’ll pick you up there at eleven forty-five. Right?’
TWO
It wasn’t much more than a couple of miles out to the airport, but it seemed a lot longer with Culpin sitting morose and tense at the wheel, not saying a word. And I was thinking of my interview with Petersen, wondering whether to ask questions or keep my mouth shut.
When Culpin had dropped me in Macdonald Street, I hadn’t gone into Western Mining or the School of Mines, but had made straight for Petersen Geophysics, which was in Maritana, close by the railway bridge. Petersen was in, and when I showed him the samples, he agreed with me that it looked like antimony. He was a big man with a long sun-tanned face and hair the colour of bleached straw. He put one of the samples under a microscope and nodded. ‘The gold looks goot, at least fife ounces.’ His accent was strong, his manner non-committal. ‘The antimony — ‘ he shrugged. ‘That is for the laboratory to say. You want I do you an analysis?’
I nodded and asked him how soon he could do it. ‘Ve are snowed under, if you can say that in this goddammed country.’ Big teeth showed in a grin. ‘Also, this is a different kind of yob. Most of our lab tests are for nickel. We never before haf been asked for antimony tests.’ However, he agreed in the end to do it as a rush job, I think because he was intrigued. And once that was settled I asked him about Blackridge.
‘Blackridge? You ask about Blackridge — why?’ His slate grey eyes looked up at me over the top of the microscope. And when I told him I would be going out to look over the mine that afternoon, he said, ‘Blackridge is not like this.’ He held up the samples. ‘This is reef quartz, no? But Blackridge is surface dust. Half the work of my laboratory is concerning itself with dust picked up on the surface. This is an old country geologically and because a handful of dust picked up on the surface can indicate the rock structure below ground, men are easily fooled. You know Chris Culpin?’
I nodded and he stared at me a moment. Then he seemed to make up his mind. ‘Okay. You ask Chris where that dust come from. I ask him — last night in the Pal. I say is that yob you give me on the level? Ja, I tell him, there is nickel there. But there is also some rumours. You know what he say to me?’ The big teeth opened, a grin so wide that he looked like a horse about to laugh. ‘Pete, he say, you mind your own bloddy business or I’ll ram those tombstones of yours so far down your throat they’ll bite you in the arse.’ The horse’s mouth gaped wide, a gusty roar of laughter. ‘So I t’ink that is a yob I don’t want any more of. Nickel — pah!’ He had risen to his feet and he patted me on the back, still roaring with laughter, his fist like a pile driver. ‘I tell you because you are new here and I like your country. England is goot with green grass and trees like Sweden, eh? So be careful. This is better.’ He was looking with interest again at the sample in his big hand. ‘I tell my feller you want the results tomorrow. Mebbe you get it, mebbe no. Ve do our best, eh?’
The plane was late, the parking lot already thick with cars as we drew in. Culpin switched off, then turned to me. ‘I dunno what Ferdie has in mind, but this deal’s important, see.’ He stared at me a moment, his hands gripping the wheel. Then he got out and I followed him into the wood-verandahed passenger terminal.
The special flight was northbound after Kalgoorlie and the building was crowded with men headed for the bush or back up to the iron ore company towns. They were in shorts or khaki longs, with wide-brimmed hats, some with packs. There were a few women and children, and others like ourselves meeting people off the plane, but the place still had a frontier atmosphere. The interior was dark after the blinding heat outside. Culpin started talking to a station manager bound for Wittenoom and I went back on to the verandah where it was cooler, the ghost of a breeze raising dust on the airfield.
Soon I could hear the drone of a plane coming in from behind the terminal. In a few minutes Kadek would be stepping out of it, expecting me to help him sell a dud mine. Oh yes, I’m not going to pretend it was sprung on me so that I didn’t know what I was doing. I hadn’t wasted the few hours I had had on my own that morning.
The plane when I saw it was low on the horizon. I lit a cigarette and leaned on the balustrade, watching it as it started the wide circuit of the airfield. One of the Cessnas parked on the apron in front roared into life. It had loaded a survey party and now it was off, scuttling for the runway end. My gaze switched back to the incoming plane, a glint of silver in the sun.
I watched it turn on to the flight path for landing, and my mind was still undecided. I was thinking of what the English geologist I had seen at Western Mining had said. Carter had given me the better part of an hour, I think because he had heard of Trevis, Parkes amp; Pierce, and I had used the name of my old firm as an introduction. ‘It’s unique,’ he had said. ‘Most of Australia is unique, the flora, the fauna — and the geophysical nature of the country. It’s flat and it’s dry. Erosion occurs in situ, from wind and violent changes in the temperature. There’s no surface movement of the soil, no draining away in river beds.’ He had digressed for a moment, talking about the gold finds that had been made earlier in the century. They had been made over an area of about a million square miles, mainly in the mafic and ultra-mafic rocks of the greenstone belt. The same rocks that could produce nickel. These were Archaean rocks of the pre-Cambrian Shield which covered almost half Australia, outcropping in the Yilgarn Block, an area in the south-west that was about the size of Britain, and also in the smaller Pilbara Block, and continuing right through to the Centre, where the Shield was overlaid by sand and gravel. And then he was repeating what Petersen had said — ‘You can walk the Yilgarn and the Pilbara in the certain knowledge that what you find on the surface is a fair indication of the rock formation below ground.’
He talked about the stock market and the hangers-on in the Palace bar, but he saw it in perspective as an inevitable side-product of the boom, and the morals of it didn’t worry him. The fact that the mass of Australians had gone gambling mad and would get their fingers burned didn’t make any difference to what was happening on the ground, except that a lot of barren areas were being proved to be just that.
The plane was landing now, its wheels hitting the runway with a puff of smoke from the sun-hot tyres. Kadek belonged to the world of money that thrived on rumours, on leaked information and the dubious reports of scouts. Yet his world and Carter’s were all part of the same turmoil of excitement that had begun with Kambalda and a man called Cowcill searching the rock specimens in his garage more than a decade ago when uranium was what everyone was looking for.
I stubbed out my cigarette as the high-winged Fokker Friendship turned at the runway end, a bright blaze of metal in the sun. I was thinking of Petersen again, the way he had looked at me when I had asked him about Blackridge. I wished I had never mentioned it to that ugly Swede. It only complicated the issue. And now the plane was here, the roar of its engines drowning all sound as it swung into its parking position. The noise died to a whisper, the props stopped turning, then the fuselage gaped as the gangway was thrust against it and the passengers began to emerge. Kadek was one of the first, his dark face shaded by a panama hat and wearing a light blue suit.