‘That’s his prospector’s licence, I suppose.’
Kennie nodded. ‘Pa’s been making claims now for more than six years, but none of them came to anything, only Blackridge.’ He took me round the other three posts so that I could see for myself that the claim covered the whole area of the hollow, and the only encouragement he could give me was that there was a backlog of thousands of claims. ‘But they’ll get around to it in time.’
I was blazing with anger then, the drill still in hardish rock, down only 170 feet, and now this. ‘Do they know your father’s pegged the area?’ I nodded towards the rig.
‘ ‘Fraid so. We bin using that patch of wattle as a latrine and it was Georges who found the datum peg. Just after breakfast.’
So we couldn’t uproot the pegs, and with Garrety ill there wasn’t a hope of registering a claim ahead of Culpin. I stood there, staring at the rig, the blazing heat oppressive now. That bloody drill burning up my hard-earned cash, and for what? I was drilling another man’s claim. A curse, Ed Garrety had said, and by God he was right. ‘Go down and tell Duhamel to pack it in.’ I saw the boy hesitate and I screamed at him, ‘Stop that bloody rig, I tell you.’
FOUR
It wasn’t as easy as that, of course. Duhamel didn’t have any work for his rig until January 26, when he was due back at Mt Goldsworthy. He was a decent enough sort, but he had wages to pay and he insisted on completing the programme we had originally agreed. I was stuck up on that spur another three days and the joke of it was we did strike the reef. They broke through into softer rock that Friday evening and at dawn on the Sunday Josh Meyer called me to examine the first dust sample to show the white of quartz crystals. They were then just on 700 feet and the gold in the quartz was visible to the naked eye. But in less than five minutes the compressed air was bringing up granite dust samples. We had struck the reef, but only through a drill hole length of about 3 inches. And less than an hour later the dust samples ceased and the drill slowed. We were down to the water table and it would need a diamond bit and the lubrication of wet mud to drill further. Whether it was the edge of the reef we had struck or whether it dwindled here to a mere 3 inches in width there was no means of knowing without drilling another hole alongside. It would have been exciting, a cause for celebration, if that bastard Culpin hadn’t got in ahead of me. And all Duhamel could do was pat me on the shoulder and say, ‘You’ll catch on, mon brave. You’re in Australia now and they don’t use the word crook for nothing. Everything’s crook here — the climate, the country, the people.’ He was grinning, his wild bright eyes laughing at me. ‘You put it down to experience, hnn? And next time you make dam’ sure you got a claim registered before you start drilling.’ But he had the decency not to insist on double rates for striking the reef first go. We started packing up then, and by sundown we were off the ridge and camped at the foot of the gully in sight of the mine buildings. After the evening meal I took a torch and climbed with Kennie the sides of the gully. The rock drawings Ed Garrety had talked about were everywhere. Some of them were painted, some just scratchings on the surface of the outcrops, the best of them in what looked like waterworn caverns. It was a strange, haunting place — the ghostly presence of long-dead people substantiated by their primitive ritual drawings. And below us the embers of the cook fire glowing through the ghost-white boles of the gum trees, the faint sound of Josh’s guitar and the mine buildings pale in the starlight.
We slept stretched out beside the Land-Rover and I was woken in the middle of the night by a black man on a horse. It was one of the two Jarra Jarra boys. He sat his horse in the darkness calling my name in a way I barely recognized, and when I stood up, he said, ‘Come, you come quick. Jan say you come.’ The others were awake by then and to my surprise Duhamel knew something of the language — one of the few people I met in Australia who ever bothered. ‘It’s not a dialect I know, but far as I can gather the Boss has disappeared and the girl’s gone to Lynn Peak to look for him. She told this feller to come down here and get you.’
Put like that I could visualize her panic, the native boy riding through the night and Janet heading for the Andersons’ place, driving the ute flat out in the hope of catching up with her father. We got going straight away. We were sleeping in our clothes and all we had to do was roll up our swags and toss them in the back, say goodbye to Georges Duhamel and his drillers and hit the track.
I was thinking then of the rock drawings, of the Soak as it had been before the white men came, a source of water for ritual gatherings of life in time of drought, and remembering all that had happened there since Big Bill Garrety started blasting that quartz for gold. I knew that if I were Ed Garrety I’d leave the mine alone. I knew exactly what I’d do, and as I drove through the night up that track I was determined to turn the homestead inside out in search of the missing pages of that Journal.
Oh yes. I knew they were missing. Whatever Janet might say, you don’t end your life story like that — not when you’ve been keeping a record as long as he had. He might conceal the truth about Mcllroy’s death from his son, but I couldn’t believe he hadn’t confided it to his Journal. And Ed Garrety, reading it after his death, had done the only thing he could; but whether he had destroyed those pages, or merely hidden them away — that was something I couldn’t be sure about. Janet said she had searched the house, but she would hardly have searched her father’s den, not without his permission, and she certainly wouldn’t have gone through his private papers. If he hadn’t burned them, that’s where the missing papers would be, in that room amongst the litter of papers that had strewn his desk, the chairs, even the floor, when I had last seen him.
I was thinking of the Gibson then, clear of the dry watercourses and driving flat out, the dirt track faintly red in the headlights. Why else would he want me to witness a new will? And the Land-Rover loaded for a two-week journey, the faithful Tom waiting beside it. I knew nothing about the Gibson, only that my tourist map showed it blank, apart from the Canning Stock Route, and the end of summer not a good time to drive the red wastes of one of Australia’s worst deserts. Was he bent on suicide? Or did he really believe in the Monster? Pushed to the point of desperation, did all Australians clutch at straws? ‘Ever been in desert country?’ I asked Kennie.
‘The edge of the Nullarbor, that’s all.’
‘Not the Gibson?’
‘Jesus! no.’
‘What about your father? He ever been in the Gibson?’
‘Part of the Canning, yes. But no dogger goes into the desert and no white man strays from the Woomera Range tracks if he can help it.’
We crossed the grid into the paddock, the Windbreaks a familiar outline against the stars. There was nobody about as we drew up by the poinciana trees, no sound when I cut the engine, the outbuildings silent shadows. The house was open, her bed not slept in, no sign of life and the door of her father’s den locked, but nobody there. Back in the cool house Kennie had lit a candle and was staring at the table still laid for two.
‘Doesn’t look as though they had any supper.’
I went into the kitchen. Two steaks uncooked beside the paraffin stove, potatoes in a pan and onions already sliced. She had obviously waited supper for him, hoping against hope that he’d return, and then about eleven, or a little after, had finally decided he wasn’t coming back. It would have taken the boy about an hour and a half to ride to the mine and he had woken me shortly after one.