GHOST

TOWNS

OF

AUSTRALIA

THE TWILIGHT ZONE  

WAUKARINGA

          If we had come to Waukaringa around nightfall, the queer feeling it engendered would have been easier to understand.

Yet it was midday. Everything was normal. A strong sun illuminated the wide plain. The spare grasses were the colour of gold under a cloudless sky. The dusty road twisted away towards a brown and rumpled range, and in the distance small groups of sheep stood motionless amid the saltbush. It was one of those clear autumn days on the north-east plains of South Australia when the world seems peaceful and serene.

“What d’ you expect to find in Waukaringa?” the man who filled our petrol tank had asked at Yunta twenty-five miles back. “There's nothing in the town. It’s dead.”

Exactly what made the place so interesting. This was a rare town in which no one lived at all.

We turned north from the Broken Hill railway line, passed one station homestead, a large stone-walled woolshed, and drove for another forty minutes without sighting anything but sheep. Then quite suddenly the road topped a small rise-and there was the town. It was not in the least what we expected. It looked so normal. Just like any other small outback town. Ghost towns usually have an atmosphere of disrepair; roofless buildings, ruins, heaps of rubble, and old iron. Here was a cluster of houses, solid rooftops, and a wide road in the middle of a plain. Someone must have misled us. The place was surely inhabited. Perhaps this was some other town.

Then, as we drove slowly into the main street, we began to sense its peculiar quality, its strange sense of quiet.

Nothing moved. There was not even a wind. Two or three windmills in back gardens stood motionless above the silent houses. On our right we passed what was dearly some kind of community hall- it had corrugated iron walls and a firmly closed door. Yet there were curtains behind the windows. Opposite was a small weatherboard cottage. The iron gate to its small, flowerless garden was shut. Next door was a draper's shop, the panes of its lattice windows broken. We pulled up to look inside.

On each side was a long wooden counter. They were bare. Behind them the shelves were empty. No goods were displayed on the long rows of hooks and nails. On the farther side of this deserted shop were two tall chimneys of whitewashed brick. Once those blackened fireplaces must have been part of a large living-room. Now there were no walls at all. Across the street was a solid little cottage with freestone walls, iron roof, and iron railings that leaned at an odd angle. The gate was missing. In an empty allotment beyond it stood a heavy box wagon, with huge iron-tyred wheels.

We drove slowly on again to the intersection of four tracks, beyond which two more naked chimneys stood in solitude against the skyline. Fifty yards away to the right was a long and impressive stone building, with WAUKARINGA HOTEL painted in large, bold lettering high on one stone wall. As we turned into this equally deserted street, someone said:

“Look! There's a man.”

“Nonsense,” David Dridan, who was driving, said. “No one lives here. They told us.”

But we all looked.

There, just behind that stone cottage, motionless, was what looked like the figure of a man. An old man.

It was a queer feeling. Eerie. Only then, I think, did any of us become fully conscious of the town’s odd silence. As if it had stopped breathing.

“That’s not a man,” David said. “It doesn't move.”

The car had stopped now.

“Must be a scarecrow.”

It was as if some-one had stuck that figure there in the backyard; dressed it in old khaki shirt and pants, a battered, broad-brimmed hat on the almost fleshless face. A dummy. Something to scare away trespassers in this abandoned town.

Yet it seemed to be looking back at us. One arm was raised, resting on an old sulky, whose shafts leaned on the sandy ground.

“Let’s drive on,” somebody said.

The vision was quite uncanny. It reminded me of those weird Ray Bradbury tales; a Martian apparition in human guise. The twilight zone. Afterwards my wife said it had made her think of a Nolan painting; the decomposing Burke beside his skeletal horse. We turned away, wondering why David did not drive on. Then we looked again.

The thing had moved slightly. The left arm now hung loose. Its eyes still stared at us.

“Why don't we drive on?” I said.

“No! It is a man.”

Clearly now it was. He moved his head. You could see him breathing. Perhaps he, too, had been shocked by us. None of us were quite sure if we liked this lonely town.

Yet the sun shone tranquilly on the empty street.

I got out of the car and went across to speak to him.

He seemed a decent old character. He said yes, it was a bit lonely, this old town.

“Nobody lives here any more,” he said. “Nobody at all. Not even me.”

Now we had broken the silence, the town seemed less disquieting. A little less. The old man told us he lived out on Koonamore Station, did a little contracting sometimes. Sometimes, at a week-end, he came into town. He camped in the stone cottage, drove back again in the dilapidated sulky. He had five work-horses feeding out on the plain right now.

“You own the house?” I asked.

“Not me. Cove that owns it lets men camp here, but. When I first took over, I’d hell’s own job trying to find who was the rightful owner. He’s offered to let me buy, if I want to.”

I asked him how much the place was worth. He grew cagey again, refused to tell. As if we wanted to take it away from him! Frankly I was more interested in that large, solid-seeming hotel.

“Ah, she’s not a bad proposition,” he said. “Bob de Pury had it for many years. Only died last Christmas. Kept a store here, too. Maybe you won’t believe it, but he did good business here. Told me onetime he cleared two thousand pounds a year.”

“In a town without people?”

“There’s a few pass by. And, out on the stations, a man gets a mighty thirst. They reckon some coloured drover’s bought it now. Paid up three hundred and fifty quid. Why, all that iron roofing’s worth more than that.”

“No chance of getting a drink there now?”

The old man shook his head. “All carted off soon after he passed away.”

De Pury. It was a familiar name. I had known him years ago, when he kept another lonely pub at Innamincka. That, too, had become a ghost town. Out on Coopers Creek, three hundred miles north, Innamincka had once won de Pury a good living from passing stockmen and drovers. The publican, once an outback policeman- among other things- had acquired quite a history, which was perhaps one reason why he always kept on the fringe of the modern world. At all events, with his death, the entire life of Waukaringa had passed away. He had been its last inhabitant. And, with the closing of his hotel the last reason for the town’s existence had also vanished.

Soon afterwards the old man left us, slowly pedaling a rusted bicycle in search of his horses. We saw them cropping on the hill-side half a mile to the north, where great piles of tumbled stone and one tall chimney-stack, with a broken top, gave the landscape an appearance of some ruined castle. These were the old mine workings we had come to see. First, having the township to ourselves again, we decided on an inspection tour.

It seemed that each of us had something particular to see, as we walked in different directions. In less than a minute each of us was alone. It was curious how a town so empty could swallow people, leaving each in his own little pool of silence.

I went first to those two whitewashed chimneys, which gave the main street a perspective of desolation. This had been the post office, the old man had said. The place had somehow burnt down a year or two ago, and the postmistress had retreated into Yunta. One charred telephone pole stood beside the chimneys, although the insulators were stripped of wire. Each cottage in this little row had once had an extensive backyard. The fences were now a tangle of wire; weeds grew everywhere and what flowers had struggled from the sandy soil were now blackened and dead. Each yard had the remains of a chicken coop. In one outhouse was an empty corn-sack. You could imagine the departing residents carrying the last of their fowls with them, and the womenfolk fussing about what small possessions should, or should not, be left behind.

In the main, no doubt, such decisions had been made at leisure. It could hardly have been a sudden evacuation. And yet two of these cottages did not have such an atmosphere at all.

Behind the drapery store, abandoned at least ten years before, some temporary dwellers had more recently been living. The back door was still unlatched. Inside one small, musty room was a camp stretcher with coverlet, bush blanket, and a pillow. Another had a kettle, frying pan, and tin pannikins on a shelf, as though waiting for the owner to come home that evening. Both rooms had an air of expectancy that was unnerving.

I felt uneasy there, an intruder in someone’s home, looking over my shoulder in case they walked in and found me trespassing. I went out into the deserted backyard again.

It was a shock to find someone coming out of the building across the fence. There was someone living there!

Then I saw it was David's wife. Queer how jumpy you became in this ghostly little town. She, too, looked startled when she saw me unexpectedly appear.

“I don’t like it in there,” Sarah said. “Not on my own. It’s somehow spooky.”

That cottage had been old man Strempel’s place. He was then living on a pension, back in Yunta. Much better to live among a hundred others, within sound of the railway and highway traffic, than in a forgotten town of ghosts.

In the kitchen an iron kettle was on the stove. Pannikins stood on the kitchen shelf. There were clean tea towels hanging behind the door. An elaborate ice-chest held several lemonade bottles, half empty. The cold stove had a mesh of cobwebs between it and the mantelpiece. Under the kitchen table another large cobweb stretched between one leg and the next. Hanging from it was a huge black spider. This, too, was dead. Rip Van Winkle's home.

I found the others gathered in the back room of the Community Hall across the road.

It was as if there had been a party in progress when everyone left town. Or was it a party for which people were still preparing? A large board on one wall was covered with Christmas cards, pinned there with drawing pins. Many of them carried hand-written messages. Best wishes for a Happy Christmas…from Mir and Mrs Strempel…from Miss Hassall, who had been the postmistress…from other names unknown to us. Which Christmas the cards did not say. Again there was a kettle on the stove; clean cups and saucers. The caretaker had left behind him on the table a heart-shaped honour roll.

“For those who gave their lives in war…” Which war was not clear.

It could hardly have been the second World War, for there were a dozen names on the list. There had not been that many people in town since the 1930’s.

Inside the main hall floorboards creaked to our tread. Party decorations hung from the rafters. Pink, white and blue streamers trailed to the floor. One rose-coloured Christmas bell, made of papiermâché, lay in the centre of the dance floor, on which were traces of French chalk. The benches around the walls were dusted, but empty. Gay pictures, cut from old magazines, enlivened the wall paneling. Not all of them seemed suited to a village hall. Sabrina, for instance, in the kind of décolleté that must have shocked the local virgins. These at least dated that last Waukaringa Christmas Ball. They were publicity photographs for Sabrina's Australian tour, which we recalled had been in 1961.

Had the dancers really gone home three years before- and never come back? What dancers? How many? …

After all, Waukaringa had known no more than half a dozen residents in years.

According to old mining reports there had been six hundred people here in the 1890s. By 1932 there were only forty. At the end of the second World War, eight, or even six- the tally varied with the seasonal work in the country round about.

The only real arbiter of population here had been the mines. And these had ceased to be of any account by the turn of the century. Yet their ghostly outlines still dominated the little town.

We drove uphill to their spectacular remains for a barbecue lunch. This steep, sparsely grassed, treeless hill was not exceptionally high for these parts, though it dominated the level plains on either side. Perhaps three hundred feet at the broken, ferruginous crest. However, without the wealth it once contained, Waukaringa, would never have been more than a name in the hunting vocabulary of a long-forgotten aboriginal tribe.

Up there in the thin air, with a splendid view of the golden plains, you might wonder how the lonely shepherd on Melton station ever stumbled on an outcrop so remote from human settlement. It is a story now of small interest to any but antiquarians; or young geologists in search of an original thesis.

Yet Waukaringa gold had once held more promise of wealth than any other South Australian field since the Burra Burra and Moonta mines began to lose their attractions in the 1860s. To uncover the real origins of Waukaringa, you need to travel farther east- another twenty miles on the rough bush track towards a sheep run named Plumbago.

The gold rush at Teetulpa was the first South Australia had ever known. Other States had recorded spectacular, history-making finds: Ophir and the Turon in New South Wales; Mount Alexander, Ballarat, and Bendigo, in Victoria. And then- a quarter of a century after those great rushes had transformed Australian life - a comparatively minor show called the Teetulpa Strike. It meant a great deal to South Australia, which had hitherto lost so much population to the eastern States.

In 1886 two prospectors, Brady and Smith, found gold in a dry and nameless creek. Smith was the first to strike it. He gouged several small nuggets out of slate crevices with his pocket knife. For some reason or other the dry gully acquired the name of Brady’s. The two men won a reward of £1,000 offered by the State Government for a discovery that might prevent citizens drifting across the Victorian border; and in no time at all there were several thousand people at the creek.

Looking at this arid plain now, you might wonder how so many came to live here, or where they lived. There is no sign of any habitation. Not a building; no shanties, no crumbling ruins. The landscape is as empty as it was before they came.

Only the gouged-out creek bank, the shallow shafts, the abandoned mounds remain.

The finding of gold caused enormous excitement in Adelaide. Men threw in their jobs, bought horses, hired wagons, shouldered swags they hardly knew how to roll, booked themselves seats on Hill & Co.’s coaches, and travelled in an insatiable stream across the north-east plains. According to one old-timer, James Penna, who ended his days in Yunta without the riches some others acquired, there were eight to ten thousand men on the field in a matter of months. The doyen of South Australian geologists, H. Y. L. Brown, assessed their number more cautiously at a maximum of five thousand.

At all events, they made a lively and impressive crowd upon an arid plain that had never supported half that number of sheep. Teetulpa became, temporarily, one of the biggest centres outside Adelaide

The place had seven or eight hotels, as many boarding houses, many stores, its own police station, a telegraph line to the city, and all manner of entertainment houses. Among these was at least two circuses, one of them kept by an enterprising John Davey. “Circus Jack” Davey, they called him in these parts. He had a rare facility for driving a circus        team of horses with one hand, while playing the cornet with his other. His genial, off-stage manner made him equally popular with the miner.

Circus Jack later went into the more lucrative business of running a mail coach from Yunta to Teetulpa, in opposition to Hill & Co. It was on this service that James Penna eventually made himself a better living than by fossicking for gold.

In his old age Penna confessed that he had never had any luck with pick or prospecting dish, however much his contemporaries had boasted of their easy successes. Arriving on the field from Hammond only a month after the first diggers pegged out claims, he found the best prospects already gone and turned to driving a horse team with supplies. Then came a more secure job on the box seat of a mail coach. It was probably a wise decision, for the rush petered out within a year and the whole township vanished in a matter of months.

Yet, in that short time, it was estimated that more than £300,000 worth of gold was won from that evanescent field. Perhaps the most enduring gain was that of the South Australian Government, which bought twenty-seven nuggets, weighing 240 fine ounces of gold, and displayed them at the jubilee Exhibition of 1887 in Adelaide.

For the rest, the proceeds of the field seem to have been dissipated in less time than it took for men to develop these short-lived claims.

As for the town of Teetulpa itself, there is no trace of it today. It was a portable town, consisting largely of canvas and galvanized iron. When the lonely shepherd struck gold on the hill-top above Waukaringa, men moved over the plains with all their possessions; includ­ing the flimsy shells they lived in. For the free-roving prospector this field was disappointing. There was no easy surface gold, once the outcropping quartz had been removed. It became a question of deep leads, sinking shafts, boring into hard rock; essentially a company affair. The capital came from Adelaide, and the miners had to settle down to work for wages.

In the end they did rather better than the syndicates employing them. It was tough country. Large amounts of capital had to be spent on machinery and developmental work. When the mines closed shortly before the turn of the century, having exhausted payable ores, the tally of dividends proved rather less than wages. On the Alma and Victoria twelve shafts were sunk and six thousand feet of drives blasted through solid rock at various levels. The deepest shaft went down 1,180 feet before the reef cut out. Yet the total gold won in the twenty-two years since its initial discovery amounted to no more than £180,000. To win this the company had spent £225,000 on plant, materials, and wages. The neighbouring Alma Extended made an effort to find the lost lode, failed, and stopped work in 1892.

After 1900 the hopes of local miners depended largely on a third lease, the Ajax, which had been winning pay­able gold since 1890, eight miles away across another low range. Soon this, too, closed down for lack of water. Once more the landscapes became immersed in their ancient silences.

You have only to climb the hill above Waukaringa today to sense the tremendous effort involved in large­ scale mining there. Heavy machinery had to be hauled a hundred miles across rough country on bullock drays travelling from the nearest railhead at Terowie. You can still see the rutted tracks where they came uphill to the shaft-heads, and the massive stone foundations on which the boilers, haulage plant, and batteries were mounted. The building of these foundations alone must have been a mighty job. They were lucky enough to find plenty of stone in the hereabouts, and freestone is fairly soft to cut and dress when first taken from the earth. But the transport of these heavy blocks, the manhandling of them on a steep hillside, the construction of thick walls, tunnels, flues, and chimney stacks, makes you wonder at the stubborn energies of the men who laboured here.

The one remaining stack is a model of nineteenth century craftsmanship. It has lost some of its upper brickwork, but still rises more than fifty feet above the ruins of the Alma mine. The large freestone blocks have been so firmly set and rounded it should last a long time yet, remaining as a monument to lost endeavour. All the evidence suggests that Cornishmen were employed here, for they were masters of building in this style. Their workmanship follows much the same pattern as that of other mines at Moonta and Burra Burra. No others have ever equaled the dour, hard-working Cousin jacks who came to South Australia in such numbers in those days.

The manager’s house was said to have been a piece of outstanding craftsmanship in its day. It lies in ruins now.

Yet it must have been a solid home. Its inner chimneypieces are still standing, though the outer walls have collapsed. Among the rubble we found the well-preserved plaster that once gave a touch of colour to, the spacious living-room and the fractured remains of finely moulded archways. Around this seven-room homestead were clustered the freestone stumps of other, smaller buildings, as if the manager inhabited a little smooth running empire of his own.

The company may not have made large or long-term profits, but while the gold lasted some men at least acquired the habit of living well.

A hundred yards or so from the manager’s home we came upon a fascinating rubbish dump. It was a little like discovering the kitchen midden of some lost tribe. The place was littered with hundreds of broken bottles. Many of them had intriguing and unusual shapes, the most prevalent being deeply indented magnums and quart bottles of French champagne.

What were the causes of so much celebration?

Perhaps they were connected with the periodic visits of the Adelaide directors. It was their custom to travel to Waukaringa for a two-day visit every now and then. They came in the early days by Hill & Co. coach from Terowie, but the journey became easier when the railway went through to Broken Hill in the boom days preceding the 1890s. By then Circus Jack Davey was running his opposition coach. When they arrived by train at Yunta, he used to meet them in grand style, harnessing up his special team of chestnuts and driving them four-in-hand.

It must have been a fine sight to see his chestnuts drawing that coach at a great pace across the dusty plains.

First stop would have been the vanished post office to deliver mail. Then the last steep haul past the now silent Waukaringa Hotel and the scattered miners’ cottages to the big mine on the hill.

Up there nowadays, standing beside the homestead’s tumbled masonry, it is not easy to visualize the thriving town once spread out below. There was a second pub along the road to Newtown and Baratta stations in the 1890s. Now it has only a stark kitchen chimney and old iron to recall its crowded bar. There were three butchers’ shops, two large stores, a wine saloon, a billiard hall, and a dancing saloon for the young bloods of the town.

Every two weeks, in the good days, a gold escort set off for Yunta, with mounted police troopers riding alongside.

Now even the police station has disappeared. All that remains is a single lock-up standing like some forgotten threat directly across the road from the padlocked doors of the Waukaringa Hotel. There is no lock now on its heavy door, which the last curious visitor in town left ajar.

Perhaps it was remarkable that any population remained at all so long after the big mines died. The town survived mainly as a small centre for the station people, with a few hopeful prospectors returning now and then, as if reluctant to believe that any field could come to an end so suddenly. There is always some old hand ready to fossick around old leads, to voice rumours of another strike. In fact several small strikes have been made in recent years.

One man found galena a few miles east of Blackfellow’s Reef in 1903, touching off another search when it was found that his ore assayed twelve ounces of silver to the ton. But nothing much came of it. A few years later two experienced prospectors tried their luck, driving below ground towards the Alma lode. Finding nothing, they decided instead to treat the massive dumps the company had left behind. They built a cyanide plant and recovered quite a lot of gold from many hundreds of tons. The results were never published, but the profits are believed to have been considerable.

They left behind them, a picturesque addition to the scenery.

Just below the Cornishmen’s tall stack is a mass of slime dumps, stained all manner of brilliant colours; red ochre, acid yellow, green, cinnamon, and magenta.

But it is the colour of gold men still come here seeking.

That was what brought James Penna back in 1932. Long years of driving his mail coach between Yunta, Teetulpa, and Mannahill had kept alive his dream of another lode. He took up the old Alma claim, found what he believed to be a second reef, toiled hard in the hot sun to produce forty promising tons of ore. He sent it down to Peterborough and waited impatiently for the assayer’s report. It was found to contain only five dwt. to the ton.

He did not come back again.

No one disturbed this great hill again until 1958, when a railway worker from Yunta pegged a new claim on that ungenerous Alma lease. He had another mineral in mind- silver-lead. Forming a partnership with a local buyer of rabbit skins, he arranged for a trial shipment of ore to be carted to the smelters at Port Pirie. The first sample seemed promising enough. It assayed at 7.6 ounces of silver to the ton and 39.5 per cent lead, with traces of gold and zinc. He followed it up with a four-ton parcel of ore, which was dismissed as having values too low to be worth treating. Port Pirie was not interested in receiving any more. Towards the end of the year the Mines Department notified him that his claim had been cancelled.

It is a story that had echoes all around the continent. Thousands of new claims registered; thousands of individuals toiling under the stubborn earth; and almost as many thousands of curt reports, all of them dictated without a whit of sympathy for shattered hopes.

And now the main street has no one at all to give it life. Only the ghosts walk. The draper’s store, with its broken panes, stares blindly across at the padlocked Community Hall. The Christmas streamers flutter in the draught from a half-open window. No wire links the burnt-out shell of a post office with the outside world. Cobwebs gather on Strempel’s kitchen stove, and the iron kettle waits on the hob. The big box wagon weighs heavily on the earth, its iron rusting. Dust gathers on empty verandas. Gardens silt up a little more with each hot wind or dust storm.

The big yard of the hotel seems to be awaiting the next delivery of beer. But no one comes out of the door. The clothes lines droop with no clean table linen to dry in the sun.

The only thing that moves is a broken wind-light in the hotel yard. It flutters and creaks rustily in the erratic breeze.

Waukaringa has entered the twilight zone.

And after dark not a light glimmers in un-curtained windows. Not a dog barks, nor a rooster crows. It is more than a little eerie to walk the silent street when the sun has gone.

HEARTBREAK PLAINS

HAMMOND

          There are certain towns that belong to the classical tradition of ghost towns. Waukaringa is one of them. It was once a place of some significance, then conditions changed; it died. Others, like Hammond, have managed somehow to linger on.

It will not do to dismiss such towns as of small value to the present age. They are part of our landscape still. There are scores of them around Australia, and few of us could even make a comprehensive list. They stand half-way between the affluent present and a past we tend to ignore. You come upon them unexpectedly, often with surprise, in remote valleys at the centre of some otherwise featureless plain, in the northern jungle, at the back of some coastal range, or on a forgotten mining field; and suddenly you become aware of a name you thought you had never known. They belong almost to the prehistory of a continent that has advanced and aged at a rate unappreciated among civilizations said to be much older and more mature.

And so it is with Hammond, which is a small town aged before its time. Its wrinkled and shriveled limbs have shown up far too soon.

Yet it is quite unlike the usual mining centre that hangs on after its claim to riches is gone. Hammond had no mining. There are no mullock heaps, no skeletons of shaft heads, or dangerous chasms in the earth. Its features have not changed at all; except there are now less of them.

Sixty miles west of Waukaringa, if you could drive to it direct, it lies among the low, sun-reddened foothills of the Flinders Ranges. You reach it across a dry plain totally devoid of creeks, and wonder why men ever settled there. The houses are all old, brown as the earth, built of freestone and pug. It seems as if no one has thought it worth the trouble to set up new ones in fifty or sixty years.

Now no more than half a dozen of them are habitable. The rest have been abandoned. In some cases roofing iron has been removed; in others window frames and doors are missing. And once the weather gets in, their life span is pretty short. The most handsome of its buildings is, as usual in such towns, the pub. At least on the outside.

It stands at the junction of two bare thoroughfares at the western end of the town. The large freestone blocks give it an air of permanence. You feel that the place could easily last another century or two; if there should still be a Hammond by that time.

The inner bar is a shadowy, utilitarian place. Rather disappointing. Along the walls are a couple of old benches, with a long cedar bar counter cheapened by a coat of paint. The one notable wall decoration is a large framed photograph of Rome, with the ruins of the Coliseum well in the foreground.

Why make a feature of this noble ruin here?

As if Hammond did not have ruins enough; on a rather more ordinary scale.

The publican was not taken with such remarks. After all, he had lived here a long while; the scenery was no doubt part of the natural order.

“Not many believe me when I say I’ve seen two hundred families shopping here at the one time,” he said.

“That’s going back a long way. Now you can tot up those that live here on the fingers of both hands.”

There was only one small store left these days, he told us, pointing across the road. Isolated at the crossroads was a converted cottage, with a single show window; the kind of corner store you find selling a few pennyworth of lollies to children in some city suburb. In the good days there had been three large general stores to supply townsfolk and farmers. One had been burnt down; the second vanished; and the third a pathetic relic opposite the hotel.

Its bay windows, with most of the panes smashed, had a quaint Dickensian air. Inside were two enormous counters; the dusty floor and high ceiling had planks of excellent cedar. An underground cellar was completely lined with valuable white cedar. “Worth a fortune if you could sell it,” was the publican’s comment. “But it’d cost a fortune to pull down the building first.”

The shoppers here had been protected from the weather by a shady veranda, whose stout posts now leaned crazily in all directions. We had to tread carefully on the footpath fronting the store, for the paving stones were broken and loose. In several of the posts iron rings had been bolted for tying up saddle horses when farmers came to town.

No doors were locked here, so that you could walk into the living quarters, where the only piece of furniture remaining was a magnificent double bed of early Victorian vintage. Head and foot rails were of elaborate wrought iron, with silver mountings. I doubt if anyone had occupied it for many years.

Somehow I have since come to associate Hammond with the baroque magnificence of that discarded bed.

So much here was in the discard; the solid-looking houses you could now buy for a few score pounds; even the one bank, which appeared to have monopolized credit since the early days. And credits, it seemed, had always outnumbered savings. The pleasant little freestone bank had now become a private home, where an eighty-six year-old grazier and his wife were living in retirement. John Bunting had been born in the town, married here, prospered where others had failed or moved away, and was content to live out his existence in an atmosphere that left him to himself and imposed no social strains. He was a moderately successful man whose career had spanned the entire life cycle of the town. It came into existence the year he was born. He was one of the first to be christened here, at a time when three churches drew full congregations. Now there is only one church.

He talked of more exuberant days when the Hammond Racing Club ran regular meetings, when dressmakers as well as saddlers did a thriving business with local families, when a man like C. H. Tuckwell could build a successful butter factory, David Barker employ thirty to forty men in the largest blacksmith shop outside Port Augusta, and a teacher of music make a good living from the young ladies of the town.

Of Barker’s smithy no trace can be found today. Only a vacant allotment. Yet, at the end of the nineteenth century, it was turning out wagons, buggies, and ploughs for seemingly prosperous farmers on the plains.

Farmers…

Not one farm remains.

You can travel for miles in any direction and see no farmsteads standing. At least, none of them intact. There are ruins everywhere. These pathetic little houses are swiftly returning to the earth from which they came. Some are of freestone, some of pisé or rammed earth. There are complete walls standing on some paddocks; in others only a pile of rubble or solitary fireplace still blackened by the smoke of homely fires.

Along the twelve-mile road from Willowie north to Hammond you pass such places repeatedly, each on what was once its own block of land. The old fence posts have rotted, too, and the landscape is now one large sheep paddock.

What happened to cause this bygone blight? How did a thriving town of six hundred people recede to a cluster of decaying houses for which no one will these days bid?

The founders of Hammond, though they did not know it, had staked all their savings on a gamble. Yet they were by no means gambling men. They were quiet folk, good churchgoers, hard-working people with families to support. Nor was it even their fault they staked the little capital they had against the indifference of nature. The Government of the day had assured them that climate and fortune would favour them.

They were hoodwinked by a single, deceptive phrase.

“Rain follows the plough.”

It was a proverb imported from old England. A splendid proverb in a land where rain was commonplace. In semi-arid South Australia it made no sense at all. If the mere use of a plough could work such miracles in ten-inch rainfall country- then men could have afforded golden ploughs. The kind of plough that Barkers made in Hammond used no such metals at all.

During the 1870s a run of exceptionally good seasons had lured South Australian settlers farther and farther north. They forgot the droughts of 1864 to 1866, which should have urged caution in a community still largely ignorant of farming conditions in an arid zone. They forgot George Woodroffe Goyder’s warnings. The Surveyor-General had long ago drawn his famous line through the northern regions, dividing what he considered pastoral lands from those suitable for cropping. Beyond Goyder’s Line was saltbush country, adaptable to sheep- as long as there were shepherds to watch them and keep the dingoes off.

Then came the big spread of farming, especially wheat. Men moved up beyond Gladstone, Laura, Wirrabara, and Booleroo, until all the land was taken. And still distant horizons looked more promising. They began to agitate for the removal of Goyder's restrictions, and in 1874 the Government gave in. The Waste Lands Act was amended, credit offered to farmers as far north as the 26^th parallel if they wanted it, and a new advance began.

In the new climate of optimism men could only talk exuberantly of “the golden north.”

And, for a few years, the dry plains were warmed by the gold of wheat. Settlers moved into the flat country and the valleys of the southern Flinders, they raked up stones to drill their seed, they cut down trees, and used Ridley’s famous stump-jump plough to clear ever more acres for their golden harvests. New towns began to appear on the maps.

Carrieton, Cradock, Hammond, Gordon, Amyton, Johnsburg…

Several of these were named as a tribute to the new Governor Jervois, whose children were Hammond, Amy, and John. As the friable red soils were scored by a hundred ploughs, other industries began to follow. Two flour mills went up at Hawker, of all places; two more at Quorn. There were more at Port Augusta, Melrose, Wilmington. Even farming equipment was fabricated at such places as Carrieton, Hammond, and Quorn.

In 1880 another of those long-forgotten droughts returned. It was a bad one. The harvest was very poor. Farmers barely made expenses the following season. A year later no wheat came up at all. There was an outcry for government aid. A number of men abandoned their homes, walked off, leaving the machinery to rust. But others hung on; quite a number of them. When slightly better seasons came, they produced more crops. They were never quite so good.

More abandoned homesteads appeared on the landscape. Once there had been one wheat cocky to every mile. The Government had apportioned him a mile square as a safe minimum for sowing. By the turn of the century there were hardly any farms at all.

Nowadays the golden wheat is only a memory in these parts. Not only around Hammond, but around all those other optimistic towns as well. Hammond, in fact, is one of the few that still remains. You can drive through this country and hardly be aware that any group of people made homes, lived, and celebrated their good harvest years on the empty plains.

Amyton: there is nothing there at all, except a few shells of homes. Johnsburg: deserted. Eurelia: one house only beside the road. And farther north, on the notorious Willochra Plains: Gordon, Wilson, Cradock… Absolutely nothing.

Gordon and Wilson, once thriving townships, managed to exist as late as the second World War simply because there were wayside hotels along the road to Hawker. One of these was owned by “Barefoot” Hermann Schmidt; the other by his wife. Barefoot had been a great character in his day; he had driven the mail up the far more arid Strzelecki Track to Innamincka, and was accustomed to these dry landscapes, as long as an occasional traveller arrived with a decent thirst. But fewer and fewer of these drove by, and he had to close his doors. The two pubs were pulled down, and their walls used for road metal.

Hammond, then, is comparatively lucky. Yet no one knows how much longer it can survive. In 1948 a government survey on marginal lands reported, “During the last decade, thirty-one per cent of the people of this area have departed. Further depopulation is inevitable.”

The decline went one stage further in 1963, when Hammond alone lost another half-dozen families. They said they could no longer afford to live there, because their children needed better schooling. The following year it was announced that the school itself was soon to close.

These days the southern Flinders has been given over entirely to sheep. Here and there you can see them browsing peaceably around the crumbled homes of farmsteads. On other holdings- and all of them are large- the masonry and freestone blocks have found constructive use. They make excellent foundations for ground tanks and the damming of rarely flowing creeks.

To see this variable country in perspective you need only talk to Liddon Fry. He would have been born in Hammond had his father taken a lease of the hotel a few months earlier. He grew up there in the 1890s, went to work in Tuckwell’s store for ten shillings a week, and knew the Hammond Hotel when it needed two barmen, three housemaids, two waitresses, an ostler, and a cook.

“We used to send a buggy down to the railway for commercial travellers coming up from the south,” he told me in Melrose, where he has now retired. “And there were two trains in each day.”

The town is lucky to see one a week these days, and few passengers arrive or depart. There is not even a stationmaster any more.

As for the wheat trains, there were plenty of those, too. “I can remember two hundred thousand bags of wheat passing through here,” Fry said. “All in the one year. The wheat used to arrive on horse-drawn German wagons and bullock drays. Why, there were four buyers of wheat here permanently.”

As a lad he used to go down to the great storage shed, marveling at the quantity of wheat stacked in four-bushel bags. He would spend hours there, listening to the talk of bullockies and carters, to their tales of long haulage over the plains beyond. When the town began its decline, he too moved out to those plains. He made a living carrying stores to stations hereabouts, then found more lucrative work as a stock and station agent.

Liddon Fry is one of the few men who remember the change-over from wheat-farming to sheep. It was a reversal of the earlier order that had brought Hammond and other towns to life.

“The farmers should never have gone up there,” he said. “The Government should have known better. You know, things were so bad by the time I left that if a man had a five-pound note you’d look at him twice.”

“In the drought times most farmers gave up the wheat to raise cows. And even that wasn’t too dependable. I’ve seen them going up into the Horseshoe Hills to gather porcupine grass. What you fellows call spinifex these days. They used to boil it down, mix it with molasses, and feed that to the cows to keep them alive.”

Nor was the raising of sheep too profitable then.

“My old man used to send us out to buy sheep on the Willochra Plains; just three or four sheep at a time. You know, you could buy them for five bob each. Fat sheep they were, too. These days you couldn’t buy much more than a pound of chops for that.”

“I recall the time when E. N. Twopenny was managing Kanyaka station and reckoned he’d like to buy it. They wanted four thousand pounds for the place. So he went down to Adelaide and arranged a meeting with Sir Jenkyn Coles. ‘Twopenny,’ the old man said and he had plenty of money, ‘I’d be mad to lend you four thousand to throw away on that drought-stricken country.’ So he had to go home again without the money.”

“Later on, Twopenny managed to buy a smaller place over by Quorn. In those days you could buy land at four and six an acre. Sheep country, that is. You’d be lucky now to get it for a fiver. All the same, the district wasn’t always that bad. There were a good few young men in my day who hung on, weathering the dry times. They were mostly original landholders’ sons. They stuck to the land. They made a success of it. They’re well off today.”

At sundown the hills around Hammond are slag-red and bare. It is a country of spare grasses, of saltbush that supports sheep if a man has a large enough acreage. When a good rain comes, which is rare, these soils will nurture all manner of growing things. But the early settlers had to learn the rules of it. They came from an easier land, even though there had not been enough of it. They have learnt now. They have learnt what they need to know about food, crops, and the conserving of water.

The fading towns like Hammond, whose ruined homes have become almost picturesque, are little monuments on the landscape to record the struggles and the courage of those whose challenge to these heartbreak plains was sometimes quixotic, sometimes an unforeseen success.

ON THE BARRIER

THACKARINGA

          Thackaringa is one of those places you cannot find on any map. Not even geological maps. To reach it you have to depend on local knowledge, if you think the search is worth while. Until recently no one had lived there for more than forty years, and even now you can count its temporary residents on one hand.

As for the old town- a place that fashioned a new history for the Barrier Ranges- not a trace remains.

Thackaringa is only a short way from the South Australian-New South Wales border. Follow the dingo fence from the border town of Cockburn and you can't go wrong. As for the road, it was only a set of half-obliterated wheel tracks until Mrs Kumm requisitioned new mining machinery a year or two ago. The former wife of a German-born prospector from Broken Hill, Tess Kumm recently celebrated her new prospects by marring a young Italian and setting off on a honeymoon around the world. It is widely believed that the silver­ lead she discovered will make their fortune. If so, local opinion will once more be confounded. The outcrops and shallow workings of Thackaringa have been looked over many times since the turn of the century, but the experts have often been proved wrong before.

          It may even be a repetition of this region’s early story. Men needed much more faith and perseverance when, in the 1870s, there was no settlement at all between the Darling River and Terowie, only a few small homesteads and boundary riders’ huts. It was pretty uncertain sheep country, too, haunted by recurrent drought. No flowing rivers. No permanent waterholes or surface waters from one end of the Barrier to the other.

And yet, somehow, a shanty sprang up at Thackaringa. Its origins went back to one of the worst disasters in outback New South Wales- the White Quartz Rush. It was an abortive, foolhardy affair fostered by some unknown stockman who had wandered alone too long in the heat hazy ranges. But there were plenty of new chums to believe the slightest rumour, for alluvial mining around Ballarat and Bendigo was petering out. Nearer at hand, too, the great Burra Burra copper field had nothing more to offer the small prospector. Word went around the back country that the western Barrier Ranges were littered with quartz. Anything was good enough to start a rush. The first men struggled across the barren plains in 1867, and some of them never saw home again. Of five men who rode through the ranges from distant Bendigo, only two returned. Others buried their companions under the white quartz pebbles near Thackaringa, as the blacks called the narrow valley where wallaby were plentiful. They were lucky to reach Burra alive.

What persuaded John Stokie to build his shanty here a few years later will never be known. Perhaps it was its proximity to Thackaringa station, then being run by Elder Smith of Adelaide. A rough, infrequently used stock route went past his door, and it seems possible that drovers camped there a night or two. At all events he made some kind of a living. Now and again a few teamsters passed, hauling wool bales consigned to Adelaide and stores east-bound for the few other stations hereabouts; Purnamoota and Mount Gipps. Otherwise there was no settlement on the three-hundred-mile track between the railhead at Terowie and Menindee on the Darling. Had the Darling been a more reliable river, Stokie might have had no grog trade at all, for the horse and bullock teams only travelled when the paddle steamers were held up by low water. The fact that Stokie remained in business at all was due to a couple of distant friends. One was Paddy Green, a former prospector, who had set up a small store at Menindee and sometimes made the journey himself into South Australia to cart back supplies. The other, one of the Barrier's most notorious men, was German Charley; or, to give him his proper name, Charles Carl. No gamble was too rough for this immigrant from Hanover. He had another bush shanty up near Mount Gipps station where, despite the animosity of successive managers, he managed to thrive on the supply of forbidden spirits to the stockmen’s quarters. Before long he had acquired a half-share in Stokie’s pub as well. Stokie must have welcomed the rare visits of Paddy Green from Menindee, for most of his clients were men of more dubious character. In the main they were gentry whose names figured in police records; horse-thieves, cattle-duffers, men wanted for one reason or another in the “inside country.” West of the Darling was too remote for New South Wales police patrols to operate, and South Australian police were debarred from crossing the border. Hence the mid-nineteenth century description of a man with something to hide. They said, “He's gone to the Barrier,” just as today they would say, “He’s gone into smoke.” It was the age of the wild west.

It would have remained wild very much longer, but for the arrival, in 1876, of a new man in the district. The man introduced himself as Charles Nickel. He was another German. It must have been a good rum John Stokie served, for after a while he produced a large, glittering stone and set it on the bar. He said he had heard Stokie was an authority on minerals, and asked him what it was. The publican looked at it.

“Galena,” he said without hesitation. “Silver-lead. Where did you find it?”

Nickel was cautious. “I’m not saying.”

“Look, you’ll want money for this kind of mining. Just tell me where it is and we’ll work it together. I know a man that’ll put up the money. Mate o’ mine over in Menindee. Paddy Green. He’s not short of sugar.”

“No, mister,” the German said. “Right now I’m going south. Another time maybe. If I come back, we’ll have a talk, eh?”

Stokie shrugged.

“I’m a pretty fair bushman, y’ know. If you can find it, I reckon I can, too.”

The rum had given Nickel confidence. “If you can find it, then it’s yours.”

Soon after the German had ridden off, Stokie saddled up his own horse and went bush. It was not hard to learn more of Nickel’s movements. He had been employed, it seemed, to excavate a dam on Thackaringa station. A long drought had done severe damage, and the manager was desperately trying to conserve water in this arid land. While driving a horse-drawn scoop between two stony hills, Nickel had come across his outcrop. Beneath it was a rich pipe of silver. At once Stokie sent a message to Paddy Green asking him to come out as soon as possible. He knew his man, for the storekeeper had a habit of staking any prospector with a reasonable claim, giving him credit for a share in future returns. When Green arrived, the two men pegged out claims. Green set his pegs around a modest forty acres; Stokie took twice as much. Then they rode east to put in for a miner’s right. They had to ride as far as Wilcannia, where Police Magistrate Gower showed immediate interest. But he would not register their claim until he, too, had been given a share.

It was then left to Stokie to do the hard work of digging, under the hot Barrier sun. He wasted no time, fearing that Nickel might soon return. Before long he had thirty tons of ore to send in by dray to Paddy Green, who had to leave it on the Menindee wharf for nine months until the next steamer arrived. By that time the drought had closed the river entirely. Eventually the ore went down river by barge, was transshipped to Adelaide, and from there to England.

Three years passed. No assayer’s report came back. Nor was it likely to. They heard at last that the sailing ship had run into heavy weather, deciding the captain to jettison the ore along with other cargo.

The syndicate tried again. This time they sent a parcel of a hundred tons across the seas. The report that came back was most exciting. The samples had been assayed at 65 per cent lead, with 35 ounces of silver to the ton. They tried to keep it quiet. But, by some means known only to prospectors, news of the strike soon travelled through the outback. And so began the first genuine Barrier rush; the first of many.

Yet nothing came of the Thackaringa mine. At least not for the time being. It was grandly named the Pioneer, but the expense of developing it was too much for a syndicate bereft of labour or a smelting plant. The few men available vanished soon after in the lead of another rush, after the discovery of gold at Mount Browne two hundred miles farther north. Gold, even if there was little of it around Milparinka, was rather more easy to mine than silver-lead.

The one man who did not believe so was yet another German, named Schmidt.

Travelling through Thackaringa for the Mount Browne track, he stopped to investigate the workings around the Pioneer. Finding no one there, he decided to peg it out afresh, then rode on north. Less than a year later, with nothing to show for his toil in those harsh landscapes, he led a party of miners back to the Pioneer. That was when trouble really started. Stokie and Green took him to court, and the money they spent on lawyers decided them to go ahead. The Pioneer Mining Company began real work for the first time, and for a year or two some profitable silver-lead was actually produced.

All they did was to open the way to other, more profitable mines. For a year or two Thackaringa boomed.

The tally of mines worked looked almost as impressive as their names were picturesque. Among those that actually returned a profit were the Gipsy Girl, Gipsy Boy, Gipsy Queen, the Outward Bound, Lady Brassey, Bonanza, Lily Extended, Hercules, and Maggie’s Secret. And then again, as these comparatively small shows petered out, a new scent was picked up elsewhere. New names were still appearing on a hitherto featureless map: Purnamoota, Umberumberka, the Pinnacles.

And the major title among all these was a barren, rock-bound little pocket of the Apollyon Valley. There was some poetic justice here.

The first man to enter this unknown valley was the forgotten Charles Nickel, so far the only character to gain nothing from the invasion he had inspired some years before. He took a wrong turn in these featureless hills, and became lost. He had no water and nothing left in his tucker-bags, so when he came to a dry creek bed he decided to sleep beside it, hoping to recover his bearings next morning. It was a cold, uncomfortable night. The rock he used for a pillow was damnably hard. He rose soon after daylight, cursing his luck, then struck angrily at the rock his head had rested on. It must have been a mighty friable rock, for it burst in fragments.

It was rich with silver chlorides.

So began the Maybell mine, which yielded many thousands of pounds, enabling Nickel to develop equally fruitful ones such as the Clifton and One Tree Hill.

Looking back now, you feel such men must have been touched with some kind of magic. Almost everywhere they went they stumbled upon riches. It was easier than winning even a lowly prize in Tatts. Take the cases of Joe Meech and Allan Sinclair.

They were partners, good bushmen, knowledgeable on minerals. Deciding to take separate tracks, they both discovered rich finds on the same day. Sinclair stumbled over an outcrop that yielded him thousands as the Apollyon mine. Before the sun went down in that lonely valley, Meech had discovered an extraordinary “blow.”

He had begun his prospecting at dawn. By midday the stony slopes and gullies had quite exhausted him. He lay down for a spell, slept till nearly sundown. He sat up to find the sun throwing long shadows on a strangely shaped “blow” of jumbled rocks. The many colours of it fascinated him.

“Another daydream,” he thought, and closed his eyes.

The rich colours were still there when he opened them. It was a beautiful array of stones. Many of them were brilliantly hued carbonates. The silver had been lying there for perhaps a million years waiting for someone to recognize its value for the contemporary world.

That was the beginning of the Daydream mine. It was to become one of the richest in the Apollyon Valley.

It was so rich that Meech forgot to tell his partner he had discovered it. Sinclair was somewhat offended. He went to court about the affair, attesting that Meech had registered the claim in an assumed name simply to cheat him out of his half share. The judge had some difficulty in arriving at a just verdict. Before he did, another enterprise moved in, styling itself the Barrier Ranges Silver Mining Company. And it was this company that soon took over the direction of the entire field. Its only real rival in the Apollyon Valley was the smaller but equally rich Hen and Chicken mine, which Thomas Crisp pegged out within a week of Meech’s daydreaming discovery.

There was no time for daydreams in those ruthless, thrusting years. Men had to move swiftly, expand or die and many of those Apollyon shows were short-lived. The promise of their surface showings simply did not persist at depth. It was those who could work fairly low-grade ores who endured. By 1883, for instance, the Hen and Chicken had built its own smelting plant and refined its own silver. Yet the entire valley had been abandoned by 1890.

Now this deserted little pocket amid stony hills seems as remote from the modern world as some crater on the moon.

I drove out there from Broken Hill some time ago with two geologists who, planned to write a thesis on early Australian silver mines. In the wide stillness the lost quality of this valley seemed even more exaggerated; the silent hills, crows cawing and circling above the stunted mulga, the mouldering stumps of houses where scores of miners had once made a strident community for themselves. Hard to believe that people had once caroused here, toiled year after year, mated, quarreled, and tried to bring up families. Scrambling over granite outcrops, we found little but dry shrubs like needle-bush and the aptly named dead finish. They rattled in the hot wind, scratched the flesh as we brushed past.

Reckless in the cause of science, those geologists scrambled down loose- walled, perilous shafts, most of which were merely hand-gouged holes in the ground. Most of them, to save ladders or timbering, had been driven at 45 or 50 degrees to the ground, so that rubble and earth cascaded down behind us. The air below was rank. We trod on the bones of long dead wallabies. Gaunt shadows leaned over us in the light of flickering candles. Miners must have been men of courage to spend long daylight hours underground in those days. I wondered if any of our party would make the surface again to see those theses written.

Even the names of these caved-in mines had a sinister fascination. The Terrible Dick, War Dance, Black Prince.

We paid special attention to the Daydream mine, which had given its name to a whole settlement hereabouts, including its neighbour, the Hen and Chicken. Here was a complete township reduced to walls no more than six inches high, laid out for our inspection as neatly as some architect’s blueprint. Wandering about the rubble, we could trace the history of Daydream, the miners’ homes, the street corners where they had lounged and yarned, the large hotel whose public bar now had nothing but tiny blue crows-foot blossoming from what had once been a timber floor. The manager’s house, topping a stony rise, had a concrete hip-bath built into one wing. A rare luxury this, and apparently the only bath in town.

Clearly, W. R. Wilson had been a man accustomed to living well. No slumming it for him on a back blocks scale. He was, in fact, the driving force of the Barrier Ranges Company, absorbing the Daydream, Hen and Chicken, and Gipsy Girl into one highly productive unit before the field declined. He himself survived that decline, too. When a new rival threatened his virtual monopoly in 1884, he began manoeuvres to buy a 50 per cent share in it. The new venture was the great, still unexploited hill of silver lead some twenty miles away at Broken Hill. Though he was not successful, he did buy sufficient shares in the newly floated Broken Hill Proprietary Company the following year, and became one of the first directors on its board.

By that time the last plume of smoke from the Hen and Chicken smelter had drifted away in a hot sky. That great chimney is still standing, the only monument to so much finance and endeavour, rising steeply above the settlement’s ruins, visible miles off as you approach the valley along its one rutted and stony track. The chimney’s outline is a little jagged now, crumbling at its top. But those vanished stonemasons built it well, and it should stand there in solitude a long while yet.

The larger town of Thackaringa did not long outlive the Daydream mine. In 1887 it had nearly three hundred people. Within three years not one of them remained; nor is there anything to show where they lived. Unlike those of the Apollyon Valley, its inhabitants did not build in stone. Thackaringa, one of its contemporaries said, “belonged to the iron age.” Its houses, the hotel, post office, and only store were built of galvanized iron. All that can be traced now are a rusted and fallen smokestack, one holed boiler, and a few scattered slabs of concrete; the remnants of that ambitious Thackaringa mine.

As for the men who made it, they were to achieve more fame on other, near-by stages. Chief among these were John Stokie, also the founder of Silverton; the notorious German Charley who made and lost a fortune with a chain of outback shanties; and Harry Meany, W. R. Wilson’s predecessor at the Daydream mine, who made so much money from its early silver chlorides he became known throughout the Barrier as the Silver King.

And only a wedge-tailed eagle roosted in the tall Hen and Chicken chimney last time I passed that way.

AGE OF SILVER

SILVERTON

          Those were lively days when Silverton was the gilt-edged town of the Barrier. Champagne by the dozen at De Baun’s now fire-gutted hotel; Harry Meany, the Silver King, coming in to celebrate a fortune in silver chlorides at the Daydream; Apple Jack, the town crier, clanging his bell down Burke Street to announce the opening of the boom town's railway line.

They wouldn’t recognize the old place now.

There is little of it left. Only the railway gives it some sense of life. And even the trains seldom stop there any more.

Yet the station is trimly kept, its box-like waiting-room freshly painted and a warning sign to mark the level crossing over which traffic seldom passes. There was still a stationmaster-porter to look after this empty sector of a line that belonged to the last private railway in Australia. The Silverton Tramway Company, to give the line its proper title, must be the wealthiest for its size in the world. It only ran for forty miles. Yet it has paid something in the order of £10,000,000 in dividends since its exuberant beginnings in 1887.

Ironically, that year was almost the last in the brief history of the town.

Little has gone on since this remarkable railway opened with so much optimism and champagne. Its shareholders, however, were never citizens of this now crumbling hamlet. They belonged to the new rich worlds of Broken Hill or of Melbourne.

And now the trains run swiftly past the single platform, totally disregarding its important-looking destination board. Most of these are not passenger trains, but long strings of impersonal steel trucks bearing powder-fine ores to Port Pirie, three hundred miles away, on the South Australian coast. Broken Hill these days is the only name that matters. The vast tonnage of silver-lead and zinc concentrates that passes through is something the local mines could never have matched. Yet without Silverton there might well have been no Hill at all.

I much prefer the old name, Umberumberka. It has a fine, flamboyant sound. It belongs to the back country; to the worn old Barrier Ranges; to the sturdy tribesmen who survived in the dry gullies and un-watered plains as the first hungering prospectors could never have done. A pity they abolished the name of Umberumberka. Silverton; it shows a mawkish lack of imagination.

Maybe it expressed single-mindedness as well. Silver was all that mattered. Silver was the sole reason for fashioning such a bare-ribbed township in this wilderness.

Its founder was the same John Stokie who pioneered the rush to Thackaringa.

Having failed to find a profitable lode there, Stokie tried his luck in the ranges farther cast, eventually staking out what was to prove a moderately successful lease at a blackfellows’ soak called Umberumberka. He went into partnership with a man named Pegler, but neither of them gained the wealth of those who followed. In 1882 there was nothing but one roughly built hotel and a wayside store. A year later, thirty-six licences had been issued for various business enterprises. By the end of 1884 even New South Wales government officials had become aware of the place, more than seven hundred miles away.

“It seems beyond doubt,” read a somewhat incredulous report from the Department of Mines, “that there are rich silver chlorides at Silverton. The place is attracting the serious attention of many Melbourne capitalists.”

Other less productive characters were soon being attracted to the new settlement as well, for the local correspondent of the Town and Country Journal told Sydney readers that the population also included “the scum of the country-horse breakers, cattle duffers, mining sharks, and rogues of all descriptions.” He went on to say that at times there were as many as twenty arrested men chained to trees in the rear of Umberumberka’s police camp. But no one expected the Barrier Ranges to be a region of decorum or the Sunday virtues.

Bushmen were apt to retort that neither were Melbourne nor Sydney.

At all events, there were quick profits to be made other than from mining. The first Silverton hotel was, as might be expected, in the hands of that experienced publican John Stokie. He was soon surpassed by a new chum Canadian, John De Baun, a man of enormous paunch and affability, with a strangely high voice.

In the first four weeks of trading during 1883, De Baun sold nineteen tons of beer. Silverton must have been the only place in Australia where they sold beer by the ton.

Perhaps the old records really meant “tun.”

The population soon began to expand in an impressive way. By June 1884 there were two thousand people in the town. In just over a year, another thousand arrived. All of which was surprising when you considered the mode of transport. Even those hardened to outback travel complained. Sydneysiders had to make a long, slow train journey out to Hay, then spend three days on a Cobb & Co coach over the black soil plains. If they came in from Adelaide, they had to leave the train at Terowie, where another coaching line took them on a shorter, but equally exhausting route.

The Silverton-Terowie service was described by sophisticated travellers as being a “mean one.” It was said the coaches were not lit at night. Even candles were missing from the interior lamps. If a passenger fell sick, he had to be examined by the light of matches. In 1886, that observant correspondent for the Town and Country Journal also noted that “the road is much cut up and requires careful driving even by daylight; by night it needs nothing short of second sight to travel without accident.”

Not surprisingly, the roads through these rough ranges were shocking. There were potholes, bull-dust, tree stumps to negotiate; fallen boulders, outcrops, stony creek beds, and sudden steep pinches where the second-class passengers had to get out and walk.

But to call the Terowie run a “mean service” seemed unduly hard on one driver at least. He was one of the great characters of the period. Big Jim Wilkinson, another Canadian, at once made himself popular among the miners. He appears to have become rapidly acclimatized; a true Australian in thought and dialect.

That shrewd adventurous journalist of the period, Randolph Bedford, in Naught to Thirty-three, has left us a vivid picture of Big Jim. He wrote of his long, hard jaw, the sun-beaten face whose only wrinkles were caused by laughing, and crows-feet due only to long looking at the mirages on the heated plains. He had curling yellow hair, great yellow moustaches, and a passion for verse that sometimes upset his less extraverted passengers. He was, above all, an Adam Lindsay Gordon man.

At night he would shout Gordon's verses from the box seat, the wind blowing through his yellow hair, and urge his horses on with the infectious rhythm of the words.

Wilkinson was a close friend of his fellow Canadian, De Baun, acted as his attorney, and even looked after the hotel when the owner was overseas. Not that it paid him much, Bedford commented, for De Baun once returned from a two-year visit to his homeland, casually thanked Big Jim, for all he had done, and made him a present of a pipe worth four and six.

De Baun was very much a man of his age. He never worried over much about silver if a sovereign came his way. The hotel he raised in Burke Street was an imposing two-storey affair, with three bars opening on to the footpath, and spacious bedrooms. You could have lived in style there, had you been allowed. But the boom years in Silverton brought so much custom, he decided to ration his space. He put six sleepers in each of the larger bedrooms, and charged the same price for casuals assigned to the chaff-house.

All the same, De Baun’s was the place if you wanted to cut a figure.

It was here that Silver King Meany arranged his wedding breakfast. Nothing but the best was to be good enough for his bride. The breakfast champagne was ordered in dozens, and afterwards they paraded the streets in a drag drawn by four greys. The town crier, Apple Jack, bewhiskered and clarion-voiced, rode ahead of the drag, clanging his bell. At the main street-corner a brass band had been stationed to play wedding marches and other lively tunes. Hotel balconies were crowded with miners to cheer the wedding party on. It might have been a royal progress, so much enthusiasm was engendered, no doubt with the aid of further champagne. The triumphant moment came when young Harry Meany drove off with his bride on the dusty track to the Daydream.

This was a daydream all right. An ebullient period that has rarely been equaled since in the history of Australia.

But why not? Since then there has seldom been so much money to squander.

They were rich finds, those early ones in Silverton. In 1883 the Chanticleer assayed 10,000 ounces of silver to the ton. And silver at the time was worth four shillings an ounce.

Everything seemed to have a silver lining, though many of the propositions offered the newcomer were not convertible to cash at all. Soon the Barrier Miners’ Directory felt obliged to state that “numerous companies were floated; many of them wild cat schemes without a shadow of reason, simply on spurious assays from self-constituted experts…Water cost sixpence a bucket, and inferior stuff at that; a purer quality alleged to be brought from Mingary in South Australia, forty-five miles distant, was retailed at a shilling a bucket.”

There was also sly grog, much more accessible, and bad grog, loaded dice, five aces to the pack, and champagne suppers to help pluck the goose. The newly rich of today were tomorrow’s paupers. The down-at-heels prospector might suddenly order a slap-up dinner at De Baun’s. The sharebroker was always at the best table, and wine and whisky were more readily tapped than water, which of course was not tapped at all. In a single sitting one night at De Baun’s a somewhat convivial party disposed of sixty dozen bottles of champagne. But underground men toiled in dust-heavy air, coughed, sweated, and blasphemed as they blasted their way through stubborn rock.

Headstones began to gather rapidly in the graveyard across Blackhill Creek.

A disease new to Australia made an appearance. Davenport Cleland described it at the time as “a pest more fatal than drink.” This was typhoid fever.

It was due no doubt to the brackish water men were drinking, suitable enough for stock, but by the time stock had drunk at it not nearly so suitable for humans. More often than not it was flavoured with rotting vegetation, or the carcasses of sheep and kangaroos. Adults began to die from typhoid; infants from gastro-enteritis.

“There was only one decent well in the whole district,” old Bill Lord told me once in Silverton, recalling those first boom years. “The rest were only soaks by a creek. Why, bless me, when the drovers watered their horses, they’d be dipping billycans into buckets.”

Bill Lord was then working on the huge Umberumberka reservoir which supplied modern Broken Hill with much of its water till the Darling pipeline came through in the 1950s. But the dam was not built until 1917, when the pressure of Barrier population was such that progress could be held back no longer.

German Charley’s last surviving son, Jim Carl, still in the 1950s living in Silverton, had even more vivid memories of that rank water supply. He used to cart water himself, working on a five-horse wagon that brought it in from a government tank known as the Rathole.

“We’d sell it by the billy to housewives outside their doors,” he said. “The people found it pretty expensive in those times even to make a cup of tea. That’s why tea didn't have much of a sale in early Silverton.”

Jim Carl was looking rather frail when I last saw him. After all, he had just turned eighty-four. He lived in an old shack half a mile out of town, seldom moving away from the kitchen where he cooked his meagre dinners on an ancient stove. He was suffering from low blood pressure, which made it difficult to move around, and he supported himself on two sticks. He was not too badly off, he said, for one or two people in town kept an eye on him, sending a boy out to run his messages to the local store.

Around his shack were two or three shells of pisé buildings, worn down now to their stumps. This was what used to be the suburb of Carlton. It was named, of course, after his famous father.

“Sure, there used to be three suburbs to Silverton,” he said, looking out into the strong sunlight with pale, bloodshot eyes. He seemed to have had trouble with sandy blight.

“These were all houses out here once,” he said. “All the way from here to town. Thousands of people living here. I suppose now you could throw a stone down Burke Street and not hit anybody.”

It was the understatement of Silverton’s year. There was seldom a moving figure in the street from daylight to dark. And afterwards, not a light anywhere to prevent you stumbling across vacant allotments.

Old Jim was still living in sight of his father’s last pub. To judge by its ruins, it had been a pretty small place. Not much more than a shanty. Both the German and De Baun had made fortunes in the first two or three years of Silverton’s boom, despite having to compete with eight other hotels. German Charley had also done well with a number of other pubs and shanties he kept around the bush. At Mount Gipps, where he sold sly grog to stockmen in defiance of managerial disapproval, and where a dead drover had made Barrier history by shouting everyone present unlimited drinks four days after collapsing at the bar. At several other roadside shanties he sold near lethal liquors compounded of rum, tobacco, and sugar.

Then he made the mistake, according to his son, of acquiring a taste for the grog himself. He was nearly broke when he built this shanty; his eyesight was bad and his health poor. There was a mortgage over the place, which soon forced him to sell. A syndicate bought it for two thousand pounds, paying half the price in cash, which just about covered what he owed. The rest was paid in IOU’s, and they were never met.

The picturesque old rogue who had fleeced so many outback travellers died here in poverty. Having given so much to Barrier folklore, he deserved a little better from his ruthless times.

De Baun fared very much better. When Silverton’s population declined- a mere ten years after its exciting discovery- the stout, high-voiced Canadian sold his interests briskly, reaching Western Australia in time for the boom at Coolgardie, and built more prosperous pubs on the Golden Mile and in Perth.

His Silverton Hotel is the most spectacular ruin I have seen anywhere in the outback.

It stands at the far end of Burke Street, gaunt and imposing, like a minor Coliseum. The two-storey building has been reduced to its outer walls. The verandas have gone, leaving a tier of full-length windows and archways, where guests had once looked down from balconies at a busy street below. Inside this fire-gutted wreck you can see chimney places suspended in mid-air, fragments of bedroom walls lurching at odd angles, the hint of corridors and staircases traced upon sun-baked brick, from which torn strips of wallpaper still hang. On the ground floor is only a rubble of fallen bricks where the throngs of miners, share-pushers, and hopeful investors had once jostled for elbow room in De Baun’s three gaudily decorated bars.

According to Jim Carl, this wreckage was of fairly recent origin. It happened in 1921. The hotel was then still a going concern, the last of its kind in town. It had changed hands twice, and its last owner found himself in difficulties. He is said to have offered a passing stranger six hundred pounds to burn it down. The man made a first-class job of it, setting off the fire with petrol-soaked rags. The fine cedar timbers lining upper and lower rooms burned fiercely, and now only the solid stonework is left. No witnesses appeared to prove a case of arson, and the insurance company was obliged to pay.

Now a smaller hotel, with fenced-in beer garden, has been built alongside the ruin, and travellers can park their cars in the long shadows thrown by those impressive, roofless walls. How long they will remain there no one can say. There is no hint of them caving in, or anyone to order their destruction.

Silverton is a town without local authority. No councilors have met in the deserted Municipal Chambers since the year of its completion. The foundation stone, as you can read on one of its bluestone walls, was laid by H. Brown, Mayor, in 1889. That was the year the last mine on the Silverton field closed down.

All told, Burke Street is hardly recognizable as such these days. Old photographs show it as a crowded thoroughfare with uninterrupted lines of weatherboard and bluestone buildings; butchers’ and saddlers’ shops, hotels, small and large stores, mining agents, stock agents, the mail coach office, and scores of other businesses of various kinds. Now there is more grass and weeds than buildings, vacant lots where little but tobacco bush grows. The windows of the Municipal Chambers are mostly without glass; its doors open only with difficulty. The only time it is ever used today is for an occasional dance, and it has no furnishings whatever except for a bench or two placed around the floor for the wallflowers. There was only one small store in the whole town today (1950s).

On the farther side of the railway line, where hundreds of miners once lived, there were only four buildings, in various states of disrepair.

Best of these was the school, which needed only one teacher for the handful of children crossing the line. On a slight rise beyond was a church that lost its entire congregation. The last Methodist had gone, so the Presbyterians bought it for a modest price. With its narrow stone front, very high, windowless walls, and steep-pitched roof, it leant gauntly against the sky. Alongside were two tumbledown cottages girt about by rusty fences that enclose no other growing things but saltbush.

The desolate scene had all the qualities of a Drysdale painting. Even to the lean-legged, elusive figures of two aborigines who inhabited the one cottage still occupied. The other I found to be bare of anything but two dead goannas pinned to the rotting floorboards by a stone.

Strange to think that from this little hamlet, with its perennial tobacco bush, overgrown tracks, and half-obliterated mullock heaps, has stemmed the largest enterprise the continent has known. In the brief lifetime of Silverton the Broken Hill Proprietary meant little. When the first syndicate was formed in August 1884, styling itself the Broken Hill Mining Company, the local populace ignored it. It was not even mentioned in the widely read Silver Age. This was a self-centred, intolerant, and raucous town, caring nothing for any but immediate gain. Men had already looked over that black, boulder-strewn Broken Hill some fifteen miles away, dismissing its outcrops as worthless. “The hill of mullock,” they called it contemptuously. There was no hint that the riches beneath its surface would soon overwhelm the complacency of Silverton, reducing it to a ghost town almost overnight. Even the Silver Age, so disdainful in early editorials, was soon to be filched away, installed in new offices in a new boom town no one hat yet heard of. But this story belongs to a different location, the cluster of freestone station buildings that went by the name of Mount Gipps.

Silverton was to have good cause to remember it.

And now the old town’s last claim to national importance was the railway line that carried its name. Sometimes, in wealthy Broken Hill, people ask, “Have you seen our gold mine?” But these are all silver-lead mines, you reply.

“You’ve forgotten the Silverton Tramway.”

The line opened in 1887, built by private capital, because the South Australian Government refused to extend its own railway across the New South Wales border to Broken Hill. A mere forty miles. Its directors made a shrewd agreement with both State Governments. If at any time one of them should want to take over this private line, they would have to pay the equivalent of twenty‑one years’ profits. No one expected the Hill to last long in those days.

Who would have dreamed that in less than eighty years it was to earn more than £10,000,000 on its initial capital of £62,800?

It was to be a mighty expensive little railway if bought.

[Note: The Silverton Tramway Company mainline operation was effectively made redundant in 1970 when the new standard gauge line opened. The Indian Pacific runs on the new standard gauge. The Silverton Tramway Company continued to shunt the mineral sidings in Broken Hill using diesel electrics, introduced from 1961. The Broken Hill Railway, Mineral and Train Museum is located in the former Sulphide Street railway station (built 1905) of the Silverton Tramway Company. Three Silverton Tramway Company locomotives Y1 a 2-6-0 of 1888, W24, a 4-8-2 of 1951 and a 0-6-0Dh of 1953, and an ex-SAR T-class 4-8-0 locomotive No 18 and rolling stock are displayed in the former railway yard. An A Class of the type also used by Silverton Tramway Company up to 1960 is to be found at Mile End, Adelaide Museum.]

THE EUCHRE GAME

MOUNT GIPPS

          IT is surprising how few people these days have heard of Mount Gipps. Even in Broken Hill.

Yet it is only a decade since its great stone shearing shed was a prominent landmark on the road to Milparinka. Now you could pass it by without knowing.

Nine miles north of the Hill, along what is euphemistically named the Silver City Highway- a dirt road, like most others in these parts- you come to an isolated pub at Stephen’s Creek. It is a pleasant old place, with white stone walls and low, bush-style roof, set against the beautiful river gums of the creek itself. Anyone there will tell you how to find the homestead, even if it is no longer recognizable as such.

“Follow the main road up,” the publican tells you, “and you’ll come to a winding red hill. There’s a cairn to the Kennedys that were drowned in the creek, set away in the bluebush on the right-hand side. Don’t take that turn-off, well. Half a mile on you’ll come to another, crossing the dry creek by Kennedy’s tank. And on the other side’s what used to be the shearing shed.”

Everything seems to be in the past tense here.

Yet it is only a ten-minute drive from one of the most pragmatic, industrious cities on the continent. Broken Hill thinks in terms of the present only; of wages, betting, union conditions, and beer. If it did not, it might well be swamped by the timeless quality of the land lapping around its drab suburbs like a tranquil sea. It has a strange, untouched quality. From the road you see hardly a sign of human habitation. Now and then the glinting roof of a distant homestead; a plume of dust from some grazier’s car; a few sheep standing warily amid the stunted timber and old man saltbush. The land itself has a gentle, low-keyed beauty. Especially in the early morning or the afternoon’s late shadows. It is all in pastel shades. The worn old hills on the skyline; gamboge or magenta; the salmon-hued, friable soils. At sundown the earth acquires a delicate, reddish glow. Yet it is not red, but more subtly stained by the retreating sun. Even the stones that litter the undulating hills, the bold outcrops, the boulders set as if at random over the bluebush plains, have an ageless patina. You feel that this soft, arid country has hardly known the slightest change for a million years.

That is why the stones of Mount Gipps are not easily seen.

You can drive up that gentle, winding road through the reddish hills beyond Stephen’s Creek, and not recognize the remains of the shearing shed at all. They have returned to the earth from which they were hewn a century ago.

But stop the car, walk to the roadside, and their origins are obvious. Long rows of hand-adzed freestone blocks lie embedded in the soil, making druidic patterns. It must have been a mighty effort to build that shearing shed, for it was fifty yards long and half that distance wide. You can see gaps in one wall where the sheep pens were, and the stumps of the stone fences that held the unshorn wethers. Similar remains of other buildings flanked that mighty shed. One of them had clearly been the shearers’ quarters. A slightly higher inner wall held the suggestion of a fireplace. There had clearly been a third building, too, less easy to identify. It stood at some distance, farther down the hill.

To my mind it could only have been the grog shanty German Charley raised there, when he found that his original Mount Gipps Hotel, some miles south, had a ban placed on it by station manager George McCulloch. Here he could have been sure of custom at least when the shed was operating, with the stockmen’s quarters less than half a mile away beyond the roadside creek.

On the eastern side of the quiet road, across that dry creek bed, was another ruin. It was only fifty paces from Kennedy’s tank, and thus assured of a water supply whether the creek flowed or not. Again no one appeared to know, but I assumed these crumbling stones to have been a homestead crucial to Barrier history.

Was this Trooper O’Connell’s cottage where Charles Rasp had revolutionized the country by his surreptitious application for a miner’s right? The policeman was said to have lived within a short distance of the head station at Mount Gipps.

The tank itself was obviously of more recent origin. It was a rectangular concrete structure, some four feet deep, and I wondered how anyone could have drowned there. The cairn stated that both Kennedy and his ten year old son had perished there in 1901. Presumably the boy had fallen into the water, and his father had drowned in an attempt to save him. Now disused, the tank had been fed from the narrow well-shaft immediately alongside. No doubt this well which had the air of an old mine shaft, had been sunk at a much earlier time. There was still a glint of water twenty feet down, implying that it tapped a soakage beneath the deep sands of the creek itself.

How quickly the details of earlier generations are forgotten in this timeless country.

Yet the actual shearing shed had been demolished not so long ago. I remembered it in the early 1950s, when its gaunt outline stood against the clear skies like the pillars of some Roman ruin. It was sad to see it had been so heedlessly knocked down. There are too few examples of how the early bushmen built and lived, and expertly fashioned stone structures of this type are even more rare. But the stonemasons of the 1870s constructed it only too well, tempting the local landowner to sell much of it when the Exchange Hotel was built in Broken Hill after the first World War. Even so, enough stonework remained to give it character and quality until a few years ago.

It is small compensation that the Barrier Historical Society has now set a small cairn beside the ruins, as if to apologize for the vandalism of fellow countrymen.

From this primitive watering point- now known laconically as “K Tank” on local maps- you can look east towards what was once a large group of station buildings. It had been virtually a township in its own right. Most of these early stations were. In the context of outback grazing, men had to be self-sufficient, for there was no township nearer than Menindee on the Darling when Mount Gipps was formed; and even that river settlement was a pretty backward place.

Today these ruins are not easily discernible, except in certain lights. Near the top of a broad gully, under a stony hill, these man-made stones merge with their background, almost camouflaged. Only in the late afternoon sun do they acquire some kind of profile. Best preserved of them is the manager’s home- “government house” as sheepmen called it in those days. It must have been a substantial place, with eight or nine rooms. The highest wall stands only five feet high; an inner wall that was probably one corner of McCulloch’s living-room. The outer walls had lost much of their substance since I had seen them ten years before. They had become a mere heap of brown masonry, with rubble scattered round them. Outside, in what was perhaps the remnants of a garden, were three, dying pepper trees.

The carpet in that bygone living-room was saltbush. Milk daisies softened the bare brown paddock surrounding it.

Near by were the stumps of five or six other buildings; how many, it was impossible to say. Set about “government house” at a respectful distance, they would no doubt have included stockmen’s quarters, blacksmith’s shop, a butchery, saddle and harness room, and sheds for wheeled vehicles and station stores. It would have been an active, masculine community, as all such places were; a stopping place for bush travellers of all kinds; a welcome oasis at the centre of an inhospitable waste of stony, saltbush plains.

Such factors have vanished now in the West Darling. The region is more closely settled. Stations have been cut up. No longer are there such runs as Mount Gipps, which covered fourteen hundred square miles. There is now a city of 30,000 people to light up the sky by night, producing millions of pounds annually from what used to be a mere barren ridge; the Hill of Mullock.

The homestead, too, is missing from the landscape. They carried off most of its stone to build a new ground tank for watering sheep.

Even McCulloch would have been surprised by such changes. In the first place he had not even wanted them. He was a sheepman. His job was the producing of wool, not galena and other mysterious ores from the earth. In fact, his mind had been closed to such things. If there was one thing he detested, it was the prospector who now and then hoofed it in from the plains thereabouts.

Goodness knows where they came from. Every few months another would camp on his run, fossick about stony gullies and outcrops, ask for mutton and rations before vanishing over the skyline again. In the end he issued orders that no strangers at all were to enter the run. His station hands, too, were forbidden to use pick or prospector’s dish this side of the huge, unfenced boundaries.

He was a tough, blunt-spoken Scot. He had a quick temper. His men knew that to disregard his edict would mean rolling their swags; and it was sixty miles or more to the nearest settlement along the Darling. The nephew of Sir James McCulloch, then serving his third term as Victoria’ s Premier, George was sent up to manage Mount Gipps for its Melbourne owners, McCulloch, Sellars & Co. It was no easy assignment. There were few surface waters; droughts were only a hairline beyond normal aridity; and most of the labour to be engaged was as rough as the Barrier Ranges. Few men went to the Far West without persuasive reasons for going; wife-starvers, alcoholics, men on the run. Only a man as dour as this middle-aged Scot could have remained for long in command of Mount Gipps.

Even so, his rule was undermined by a tenacious immigrant he had himself placed on the station books.

Charles Rasp, a German who had drifted in from Menindee, did not spend much time around the homestead. He was engaged as a boundary rider and spent most of his year in a fifty thousand acre paddock flanked by a broken-backed hill. His nights were passed in a tumbledown hut of cane-grass and galvanized iron. It was a lonely existence. He used to stare at the hill’s black and rugged outline, watch the wheel of stars behind it, speculate on its bold outcrops, the strange glitter of its dark surface, its iron-hard consistency.

He talked to a passing drover or two, bullockies, shearers. They told him of recent finds around the country; of the Apollyon Valley, Umberumberka, One Tree Hill. They recalled earlier rushes in these parts. Especially that disastrous White Quartz Rush of 1875, when the Hill of Mullock had acquired its name. Prospectors had gone over it then, before water shortages drove them back to the Darling River. They said there was nothing in that hill; just a useless, glittering pile of mullock.

But the slow, thoughtful boundary rider was not so sure.

At the end of 1883, when his annual leave was due, he told McCulloch he was going down to Adelaide. He must have been astonished by the new town of Silverton, where he joined the stage coach for the city. There would have been crowds everywhere; men roistering, parading the dusty streets with gaudily dressed women, dining in style, pushing in and out of the swing doors of De Baun’s hotel. And all of them talking of mines, rich syndicates, a brilliant future that had no relation to the monotonous riding of one lone man after dismal sheep.

In Adelaide he bought a copy of the current Prospector’s Guide- the bushman's bible of the time.

Whatever he read there excited him. He did not stay long in the south, returning by coach as soon as possible, hurrying on through Silverton for home- if you could call a boundary rider’s hut a home. No doubt the dour McCulloch was astonished to see him again for it was unusual for station hands, once they had escaped, to return.

Rasp soon rode across to the broken hill, chipped off fragments of the glittering outcrop. At first he dared not believe what he read. Unless he had misread the Guide, this stuff must surely be oxide of tin.

He cantered across to a camp where two dam-sinkers were working and talked them into pegging out a claim. Then he rode on to the local policeman’s hut, not far from “government house.”

“I want a miner’s right,” he told the astonished Trooper O’Connell.

The trooper rode back with him to make sure it was not a mirage.

It was only then that Rasp began to realize what he had done. What about McCulloch’s embargo? How was he to justify his daring and insolent act?

To his surprise, the manager took the announcement calmly.

“So ye’ve been at the broken hill,” he said gruffly. “How much did ye peg out?”

“Just the one block, Sir.”

“What? One block! Are ye crazy, mon? Ye’ll have all the ruffians in the West swarming over yon hill. There’s only one thing for it now.”

“What’s that, Mr. McCulloch?”

“Why, we’ll peg out the whole hill. You and me together.”

The claim was at once registered in the names of a Syndicate of Seven. The other six were summoned to the homestead by George McCulloch and ordered to sign the document he set on a table in the inner room. In addition to himself, Rasp, and the two dam-sinkers, there were the station’s storekeeper, overseer, and another boundary rider. McCulloch insisted that each subscribe £70 as working capital.

But there was only one error in Charlie Rasp’s calculations.

A government assayer in Silverton said it was not tin at all. It was an equally promising material- silver-lead.

And so the Broken Hill Mining Company came into being; forerunner of a much more famous enterprise. Not that it looked too promising in the year of 1884. The syndicate sank its first shaft and brought up carbonate of lead, which was low in silver. The faith of these seven in an unproved mine began to flag. The overseer withdrew, then the storekeeper, selling their shares to McCulloch and Rasp. The government surveyor at Silverton, William Jamieson, rode over to inspect, offering to buy three shares. A second shaft was sunk. More withdrawals.

Poole, one of the dam-sinkers, found he needed more bullocks, and was sold four by a passing drover. He had no money, so gave him half his seventh share. The drover took it, saying he had no interest in doubtful mines, and soon converted it into cash through a Cockburn stock agent, who gave him £150, less £50 commission. Had the drover kept that share it would have been worth more than a million within a few years.

However, he too made his first million soon after. His name was Sidney Kidman. What he did not tell Poole was that those bullocks had been stolen off the common.

Before long that share changed hands again, being bought by Bowes Kelly, a station manager along the Wilcannia track. He was soon to become one of the big names around Melbourne board room tables. Shrewd enough to see that the Broken Hill could never be a poor man’s show, he reorganized the local syndicate, brought in some fellow squatters, and raised enough finance to begin serious mining.

Another newcomer also moved in at the right time. This was a young Englishman who had been sent out to Australia for “colonial experience.” They had a nice turn of phrase in those days. It was not for experience of the colonies he came, but to escape the results of other, less salubrious experiences at “Home.” In the case of A. W. Cox, the trouble had been gambling.

Family connections with the Premier of Victoria led to his being sent as “parcel post” to the station. George McCulloch would have been all too familiar with that term. The young man was given a ticket on the first mail coach out of Melbourne, carried by Cobb & Co. up to Menindee, and thence to Silverton. George McCulloch gave him a job as jackeroo.

In the homestead at Mount Gipps there was then less talk of sheep than of silver-lead. Here was a gamble that at once appealed to Cox. He offered to buy the manager’s share for a hundred pounds.

“It’s pretty long odds,” he said. “But a man can't back losers all the time.”

From his cane chair on the homestead veranda, McCulloch answered dourly, “I’m not so keen on selling, laddie. Anyhow, two hundred pounds is my price.”

“I’m not after the entire hill.”

“For two hundred pounds?”

“One hundred or nothing.”

They made a sharp pair, the cautious Scot and the reckless young Britisher. Cox was the first to give way.

“Make it a hundred and twenty, Sir,” he said.

McCulloch was unmoved.

Then Cox made another bid. Why he was so keen he could never afterwards explain. At all events, he refused to risk two hundred.

“How about deciding it at cards,” he said. “Two hundred if you win. A hundred and twenty if the game’s mine.”

McCulloch found the challenge dourly amusing.

“Right,” he said. “Come to the homestead tomorrow evening. My game’s euchre.”

It was to be the most celebrated card game in Australia’s history. The story of it has been retold many times, sometimes in the setting of the stone homestead, sometimes set in “hardly more than a hut.” It had quite an audience, if all who claimed to watch it are to be believed. Among them was at least one distinguished traveller in the region, Archdeacon G. S. Oakes, who was then touring the West Darling in the hope of finding souls to save especially from drink and gambling.

        The first game went to McCulloch, who dealt with a steady hand. After all, he had nothing to lose. The second was won by young Cox. In the deciding game, the jackeroo’s cards favoured him all the way.

It was not a bad win, as things turned out. For £120, Cox won a share that was to be worth no less than £1,250,000 within six years. That is, if the young man had kept his nerve and not sold it again just too soon. All the same, it made him enough money to return to London, to resume playing at tables from which he had been expelled some years before. He bought land in England and bred his own racehorses which won the Derby on two occasions. In one year he carried off the triple crown, winning the Derby at Epsom, the Two Thousand Guineas at Newmarket, and the St Leger at Doncaster.

I have since heard of him losing £8,000 on a single horse,” Archdeacon Oakes wrote later. “But, as far as I know, he is still a millionaire.”

It was a rare kind of colonial experience.

As for McCulloch, he lost nothing either. Having signed over his share to Cox, he bought another straight away from a Mount Gipps station hand. And he paid only £90, thus making a profit on his loss at cards.

Meantime, fossicking about the first disappointing shaft, Charlie Rasp found a piece of ore that glittered like the Milky Way. It was rich with silver chlorides. Another was found, assaying 800 ounces to the ton. When shaft sinking began in earnest, hired miners one hundred and fifty feet down struck chlorides fifteen feet wide. Shares in the newly formed B.H.P. began to soar. By May 1886, the yield from 10,000 tons of ore was 870,000 ounces of silver, 1,990 tons of lead, and a gross value of £157,215. Within a further two years dividends rose to 26 per cent.

The subsequent story of the Broken Hill mines is too well known for further retelling. From that uncertain morning when Rasp chipped his first sample off the Hill of Mullock to the present day, the output of this field has been fantastic. The total value of silver-lead and zinc has now reached £400,000,000.

And what happened to Rasp?

His name did not appear on the first board of directors. By 1885 the game had risen beyond the reach of a humble boundary rider. There were some big guns on the board by then; men with good connections in the financial centres, of Melbourne and Adelaide. No matter. Rasp left Mount Gipps for a world tour, visited the country of his birth, and returned to live a solid bourgeois life in Adelaide.

His died in his own mansion at Medindie; one of those suburbs synonymous with money. It was a splendid two storey house, with towers and wrought-iron balconies. He called it Willyama, the aboriginal name for Broken Hill.

Yet, a few years before he built it, Rasp was accustomed to taking his hat off before entering the rough homestead on Mount Gipps.

I wish they had preserved its crumbling stones. But perhaps sheep are more important out this way.

THE INLAND SEA

MILPARINKA

          Milparinka has always reminded me of those pictures of war-shelled villages in Europe or North Africa. As you drive up the Tibooburra road towards it, you can see the place outlined against the sky upon a small, stony rise.

Surely this is an evacuated village. Roofless stone dwellings spread along the little ridge, their doors and windows staring blankly because beyond their frames you can see only sky. Chimneys are worn to stumps; outbuildings vanished. It is impossible to believe anyone could live among these ruins. Had the enemy retreated, perhaps, or the battle moved farther north?

Sometimes, at sunset, the russet and galah-pink sky seems to carry a hint of gunsmoke. It could be the dust of the mail truck approaching town; a bushfire perhaps in the gidyea scrub; or just the atmosphere settling after a day of wind on the sandy plains. It is all so silent here. Not an ordinary silence. After a spell in town down south you tend to forget that the normal climate of Australia is not necessarily one of crowds and noise. Cities here seem incredibly remote, and a million years is nothing to the geologist fascinated by these Jurassic plains.

Nothing has changed here since man was created.

The low residual hills and ridges around Milparinka have been eroding slowly to the level of the earth for countless millions of years. The gibber plains recall some lost age of mountains. The sands beneath carry the forgotten echo of a surging Cretaceous sea. This was the Inland Sea for which Charles Sturt went searching; a million years too late.

It is rather humbling to walk out into the silence of these eternal plains, not only by night, and realize what antiquity means out here. The Pharaohs built their temples, the Etruscans perished, Rome was built and sacked, and out here were only residual ridges and gibbers littering the plains. At Mount Arrowsmith near by I have seen great boles of petrified trees. I have picked up the fossils of tree ferns and unidentifiable logs on stony flats where only an occasional stockman or sheep has passed since the pastoral age began.

In such a context Milparinka is a modern town. It does not appear so when you drive into its only street. These derelict buildings have likewise the patina of age.

The first time I came here the total population was three. Two of them ran the graceful hotel with its low veranda. The third was in temporary occupation of one of the last houses to sport an intact roof. Another time I was asked to play cricket against a visiting team from Tibooburra. It took a long while to live down the jibe that I had only been twelfth man for Milparinka. There would have been no team at all, if nine station people had not chanced to be in town. The notable fact was that we won. It became the cause of great celebration in the hotel, having beaten a great metropolis of fully eighty people.

Milparinka had once boasted nearly forty times that population. Rather a long time ago.

It began with the Mount Browne diggings. That same rush that drew prospectors away from Thackaringa in 1880. The first nugget was actually found near Mount Poole, a few miles west, by John Thompson, a station hand searching for lost sheep. It was not much of a nugget, weighing a mere 1 oz. 18 dwt. But it was enough to start a rush. They came over those harsh, sun-heated plains from Thackaringa, Wilcannia, and Bourke; they came up from the cities by mail coach and dray and paddle-steamer. They camped under canvas, or in bough huts, or slept under an open sky in their swags. A few men were lucky, but not many. Yet by early 1881 there were a thousand on this field.

It was a notable fact that John Thompson's discovery was made right beside Depot Glen, on Preservation Creek, where Charles Sturt had been imprisoned by drought thirty-six years before. During his enforced six months' stay there, before he could strike into the far grimmer country to the north-west, Sturt had commented upon the brilliant coloration of the rocks surrounding this permanent waterhole. That gold might be here did not occur to him. Which was just as well. An earlier rush might have developed, with tragic consequences in such a waterless region. Besides, none other than Thompson’s nugget was ever found.

          There was trouble enough over water as it was.

          Men struck rather better prospects at Mount Browne, but were forced almost at once to shift their embryo township. They found a reliable waterhole some miles away, on Evelyn Creek, and thus laid the foundations of Milparinka. Not for another year did they live in anything more substantial than canvas, galvanized iron, or bough dwellings. It needed a firmer promise of gold on the field to create anything permanent.

          They soon found useful gold at Whittabrinnah; and then, on Good Friday, in quartz-streaked Waratta Range; a series of rugged cliffs that from a distance look like pink and white marble.

          On Easter Monday alluvial gold was struck amid the tumbled granite walls of Tibooburra, thirty miles north. All told, it was an erratic and scattered field.

          By the middle of 1881 it was not only lack of water that harassed these tough-living miners. Food was scarce as well. The position was made worse by the attitude of local squatters who had no desire to see so many useless people, as they regarded them, ranging over country that was fit only for sheep. They refused to supply them with meat or other necessities from their station stores.

          Amid the cluster of pisé or wattle and daub houses at Whittabrinnah feelings were growing strong. No flour supplies were coming out from Wilcannia, because carriers found more profit in grog. Diggers rode down to the Four Mile at Mount Browne and threatened to pull down the roof over the local storekeeper's head unless he sold them flour. Several teamsters were also waylaid on the track and forced to sell flour at sixpence a pound.

          The Town and Country Journal’s local correspondent sent back a despatch soon afterwards:

          “Four tons of flour are on their way to the diggings. It is expected that they will be taken possession of by the diggers on the road. The miners willingly give one shilling for half a pannikin of flour. There are now about two thousand people there, some of whom estimate that for every one pound’s worth of gold twenty pounds has been expended. Money is scarce and many diggers could not purchase flour if it were procurable. Hundreds are begging at adjacent stations. Tea is worth six shillings a pound.”

          Soon after this crisis, a new saviour came in. This was the camel, already a familiar figure on the outback plains. Camel trains began to make the long, plodding journey up from Beltana and Port Augusta in South Australia. At about the same time Morrison Brothers, as well as Cobb & Co., began a weekly service from Wilcannia.

          The far outback was beginning to respond to civilization. But only just.

          The New South Wales Department of Mines summed it up in this way:

          “Three years ago this part of Australia could hardly be considered a sheep walk, as few of the pastoral blocks were even partly stocked. Since the opening of the goldfield, the country in Central Australia has been rapidly opened up.”

          Milparinka, in fact, set a little fresh light on the old hallowed subject of pioneering. It was not always the squatter who paved the way. The miner, so often, regarded as a nuisance, had shown it was possible to live in this painfully arid country. Had he been aware of it, he might also have pointed out that the squatter frequently came out without anyone’s permission, least of all the Government’s. Squatting in those days meant exactly what it said. From Wentworth to Wilcannia, Bourke, and over the Queensland border, men took the land they wanted, without legal claim, and then petitioned for the right to keep it.

          The miner’s fate depended on what was beneath the ground. When there was nothing, as happened too often on this field, he starved or went into retreat.

          Sometimes, as in 1882, when an epidemic of typhoid went through the field, he was unable to retreat. More people died of scurvy. Temporary hospitals were set up in both Milparinka and Tibooburra, and other cases were carried away on camel wagons to Wilcannia. To add to the general depression water supplies, even bad water, began to dwindle, and a year later men were talking despondently of giving up the field.

          What gave them fresh heart was that most maligned character of the outback- the Chinese. A number of them began to drift across from the Darling River. They planted vegetable gardens and almost miraculously the new diet ended the disease.

          By 1886 Milparinka appeared to have taken permanent root. It had a well-built court house of local stone, several large stores, a photographic studio, its own newspaper, and a number of boarding houses. Excellent dining standards were claimed for Connor’s Royal Standard, while McIndoe’s Royal and Penrose’s Albert Hotel both found plenty of bar trade. In Sydney the Commercial Banking Company thought enough of mining prospects to open up a new branch. Two other towns swiftly grew not far away, both of them now vanished to their foundations. Mount Browne put up three pubs and a store of its own, while Albert, in the stark Waratta Hills, had nine hundred people, two pubs, and a post office.

          All of this seems quite incredible today.

          You can travel out to Mount Browne and find nothing but shallow holes in the ground. From the air the square mile or so looks like gruyère cheese. The shafts have long been waterlogged, for ironically there was plenty of brackish water underground. Old hands at mining declare that, but for this water, some of these claims would still be operating, though the only successful company there wound up in 1891. The Waratta field, thanks largely to Good Friday, supported a number of companies for several years. Reading the official reports, you wonder how they kept going at all. Capital expenditure was reported as £20,000, for a net return of £3,000 worth of gold.

          All told, the entire field had produced only 42,000 ounces when the last remaining miner walked off in 1933. A poor reward for so much effort and hope.

          If it were not for its one hotel, which, like Waukaringa, has somehow kept its bar doors open for the passing traveller, Milparinka must surely have died many years ago.

          On the other hand, graziers have prospered in a manner they were never able to do before the second World War. Good seasons, more successful boring for water, and better husbandry have all transformed the West Darling into what may now be regarded as safe country. It was never that in its mining days. Yet there are men who declare that in other ways the region has gone back.

          It was George Alder who said to me, last time I camped with his huge, travelling tank-sinking plant, “Look, I’ve been up and down this country since 1926. I’ve seen it in good years and drought. But there’s less life along the Tibooburra road than ever there was.”

          “You know, there used to be hotels- good ones, too, every thirty or so miles. Stephen’s Creek, Yanco Glen, Euriowie, Fowler’s Gap, Bancannia. They were all main changes in the coaching days. They kept good houses, too. I remember that pub at Bancannia well. It was built of stone and had three separate wings, with a paved courtyard in the centre for dancing. Now there’s only one hotel left alive between Milparinka and Broken Hill.”

          Somehow Tibooburra managed to survive the petering out of its alluvial field. In recent years I have seen one or two old men poking about the granite outcrops that surround the little town. Mostly they used dry-blowers, because local water did not exist. They seldom found more than a few specks of gold. No one alive today can recall the days when Tibooburra had four hotels, five general stores, a bank, two butchers, and a chemist shop. In the 1880s it had a population of two hundred and fifty. You could divide that by five today.

          What saved the declining town was a decision in the 1930s to build a small bush hospital, which the Flying Doctor now uses for a service based on distant Broken Hill. Even so its streets are normally empty, except when Saturday socials bring graziers, into town.

          Tibooburra has been lucky to stay in business, while Milparinka declined. Local history reminds us it is unwise to boast about such things too soon. It might easily have gone the other way.

[2003- Tibooburra has two motels, two hotels, a caravan park and a camping ground. The town is still small, has a population of 150; one general store and a roadhouse provide the necessities.  Check for tours through Sturt National Park at Park headquarters. Gold has continued to be found by modern metal detectors. Old dry blower heaps from the old timers are still in evidence.]

The Willow Tree

TIBOOBURRA

Alf Redpath told me the story of the willow tree.

He had been living in Tibooburra longer than anyone could remember; its second oldest inhabitant, and well over eighty. With his white, drooping moustaches stained with tobacco; his pale eyes, and frail, withered figure, he leaned against an old stable door in the yard behind the Family Hotel, drawing on a stunted pipe as if to extract from it the history of the tree. As it turned out it was almost the history of Tibooburra.

There had been few changes since I first travelled the three hundred miles out west from Bourke.

A five-year drought had given way to a runof prolific seasons; dry lakes were brimming, alive with geese and wild duck; miles of Mitchell grass had come up where none had been known since those deceptive years preceding the grandfather of all droughts in 1901; booming wool prices had created a sense of prosperity the hardworking graziers hereabouts had seldom known. Yet the township itself was little altered.

It was still the same small cluster of iron-roofed, stone houses about a single, wide, dusty street, and beyond, like a walled city of medieval times, the eroded rampart of great granite boulders protecting it from the heated winds of the gibber plains. Tibooburra may not be a ghost town in the fullest sense, although on week-days you can often walk right through it and not see a soul. I drove in there one day and spent fifteen minutes looking in and out of the scattered buildings before finding any sign of life. The two pubs, the police station and lock-up, the stock inspector’s office, and the general store were empty. At last, hearing a man’s laugh, I walked over to the old coaching office, now a pool room, and there were half a dozen around the snooker table. In the pebbly street only goats pattered under the midday sun.

It is at week-ends that Tibooburra really comes to life. Then many cars are parked outside the two hotels; the big store takes heavy orders from the station folk, and the C.W.A. rest room opens its normally closed doors. Now and then the Flying Doctor plane comes in across Dead Horse Gully, or a stock truck raises the red dust on its way to Broken Hill from sheep or cattle stations along the Queensland border.

On my last visit I was puzzled by the changed look of this quiet street. It was the missing tree.

I asked someone about it, for this graceful and leaning willow had given the township a special character. It grew outside what used to be Tommy the Chinaman’s store, throwing one patch of shade in an avenue of glare.

“You want to ask old Alf about that tree,” the barman in the Family Hotel said.

“Alf?” I asked.

“Sure, Alf Redpath. Remember him? He’s still around. You’ll find him cleaning up the yard.”

Everyone, it seemed, took pride in the old man’s eternal vigour. Folk just did not die up here, they said. I recalled what Constable Eric Madden had once told me. The only representative of mining and public records as well as the law, he said he had only buried eighteen people throughout his 16,000 square mile area in six years. He took me down to meet old Jim Huxley, then eighty-five, whose early shearing had been done with hand blades, and who was still a useful horseman. Then there was George Sincock, also in his eighties, still fossicking around the granite outcrops; and old Tom Emmett, one of Kidman’s early stockmen and now touching ninety.

Alf Redpath, I found, was nearly blind. He has the red-rimmed eyes of a man affected with sandy blight. But his memory was clear; tending, as so often happens, to reach back towards his youth.

“That Willow tree,” he said. “Yes, I remember him being planted. That was back in ‘95. He’s a rare style of tree, for he’s a native only of western Queensland. Couple of young coves brought him in from Yalpunga, by the border gate. Used to be a mail office there one time, and a horse change for the mails. Now it’s only a tank for travelling stock.

“He was a mere shoot in a posthole, that willow, when they found him just outside the general store.

“They found him because his suckers were twined around a pepper tree that had perished for want of rain. They’d never seen two trees twined around each other before, so they planted the willow in a Cossack boot, and they fetched him in on the Yalpunga mail coach to Tibooburra. Tommy the Chinaman saw him then. He was greatly shook on the idea of this willow growing outside his door. He used to water it regular. By ghost, that meant something in those days. Remember the drought of 1901?

“He was a good poor beggar, Tommy, and he kept a few squatters going through lean times. You’d be given anything you wanted in that old store of his, and plenty of credit, too. Good luck to old Tommy. When he passed in the marble at last, he was worth a few thousand quid.

“Tommy looked after that tree well. He nursed it proper. There was a single peppercorn farther up the street, and a gum sapling. But no one watered them ever. Too ordinary maybe. They struggled up to about nine foot high, and then they chucked it in.

“This willow, he had a lot to contend with, too. Dry spells, the hot nor’-westerlies of summer, dust storms year after year. There’s never been too much water to spare around here. Maybe you’ve noticed this year we’re not even using camels to draw the water cart. The tank outside the town’s gone dry, and we’ve a motor truck carting it in from Whittabrinnah.

“When he was still a sapling, the goats gave this willow a bit of worrying. So did the camels. The old Ghans used to let them browse up and down the street, coming in from Wilcannia, Wanaaring, and the Hill. When the motor trucks started carrying the wool- and, mind you, that weren’t until 1926 or even 1927- they’d mostly be parked under this tree for a bit of shade. There just weren’t no other shade.

“Now, there’s one or two flowering gums been planted down by the other pub. Maybe they’ll grow, or maybe not. But none of them’s got the style or look this old willow had. Nor the shade. That’s what old Tommy always thought. Remember Frank Forster? Used to be stock inspector here one time. Painted pictures, too. He did a sketch of old Tommy standing outside his store. When he’d finished the Chinaman looked it over. Then he said, ‘That not Tommy. Where willow tree?’ So Frank had to do that painting all over again.”

Frank Forster, too, had been part of the scenery, as I remembered the town. The bottom pub had been hung with his cartoons of local identities; he drew caricatures for Country Life, and his house, even his garden, was crowded with all manner of stones.

“My garden won’t grow anything,” he had told me once. “So I’ve filled it with these…”

“These” represented the prehistory of the Tibooburra region. These ancient, eroded landscapes had once been the bed of the Cretaceous sea, from which Tibooburra rose like a granite island. There were fossils of many kinds, lengths of petrified wood, a two-foot section of tree fern turned to stone, an opalized iguanadon’s tooth, the fossilized thigh bone of a diprotodon, said to be a million years old. His stone garden was planted with the artefacts, of aborigines; axeheads, nardoo stones, patiently worked flints, a whittled bullroarer, and rare initiation stones of mysterious, phallic shape. On his mantelshelf, too, were several jam jars containing gold dust and fragments of gold.

Tibooburra has been called Australia’s only township paved with gold, for you can fossick in the street for specks after every shower of rain. It is no way to make a fortune, as the early miners found. Men have been scouring these arid soils since Easter Monday 1881, and have seldom found more than a jam jar of dust. There is still a claim called Easter Monday at the south end of the town. But, for the past thirty years, there have been no rewards beyond occasional specking after rain.

As Alf Redpath said, these soils in a seven-inch rainfall belt have been even less kind to growing things.

“I used to warn Tommy the Chinaman,” he told me. “The roots of his willow tree were never too good. One day, I said, he’ll fall right on top of your store. But Tommy had passed on by the time that happened, and his roof was not hit at all. He blew down in a dust storm. Then only the stump was left.

“No one seemed to know about it for a while. They’d grown kind of used to that tree being there. One day young Mr. Blore came in from Mokeley and parked his car in the same old spot, looking for his usual bit of shade. He never even noticed the tree was gone. He hung it right on the stump, and had to call us out to lift it off. They’ve grubbed out the stump now, and Bert Flood’s still burning the roots for his fire. You recall Bert Flood, don’t you? Been around this back country just about as long as I have. We used to shepherd sheep together, before there were fences, when the wild dogs were bad.

“I tell you we’ve crossed a few dry gullies since they brought in that willow on the Yalpunga Mail.”

In the life span of that hardy little willow tree generations had spent their childhood here, mustered their own properties, moved on. It had taken half a century to struggle to a height of twenty feet, hung on where others failed. It was a sucker in that Cossack boot when those gold rushes out by Milparinka swelled and ebbed; was still a sapling when prospectors worked their dry blowers in the shadow of these granite outcrops, had seen the long camel trains padding north with station stores, wool bales, piping for artesian bores, shearers knocking down their cheques in fantastic sprees, and drovers from Queensland hitching their reins to the growing butt.

For Alf such associations must have been too much to bear. In that willow was his own life’s battling and decline. When his tree blew down, he went at once to the hotel and mourned its loss. They said it was a noble wake. He kept it going for two days.

Now he was reconciled. The story had a sequel.

“You know what I discovered by and by,” Alf said. “There’s a bit of a sapling coming up today. just outside the old court house. Only twenty yards away. It’s a wild willow that’s starting to come up. Wind must have carried the seed along. Must have lodged in a crack in the soil there somehow, got smothered by dust and grew.

“That’s the old tree’s offspring. The old fellow’s passed his life on after all, and he’s growing again.”

It was almost the history of Tibooburra, I thought.

On Coopers Creek

INNAMINCKA

Life has a tendency to extreme simplicity in the back country, fined down to the few essentials needed for survival. Matters of town planning, public buildings, lighting, even sewerage seldom trouble men accustomed to looking at the world in terms of thousands of square miles. The main public building has mostly been the pub, the bushman’s forum as well as his release. As for beautifying his landscapes, it would have been arrogance to think of it. Impossible to make the least impression on the vast plains or a background of natural hills that seal the place off from the outer world. Sometimes these have a beauty of their own.

Sometimes, as with Innamincka, their starkness is impossible to mitigate. Sturt has left a full record of how he felt about the iron-shod gibber plains of his Stony Desert. West of Innamincka township they spread away to a purple haze of skyline, blinding in the summer sun.

Yet there was an austerely beautiful waterhole within a quarter-mile of the town. I say was, for the town exists no longer. Beside this waterhole Burke and Wills camped in the final extremities of their suffering, before wandering downstream through the dusty coolibahs to their separate deaths. The overtones of this silent, placid waterhole have little to do with beauty. Yet, with an adequately filled stomach, with a good stock horse under you, the atmosphere could be sufficiently attractive. There were good fish to be caught there, too; yellow tail and perch, although those explorers managed to starve to their deaths. The bird life is often fantastic- wild duck, geese, pelican, ibis, spoonbills, waders, and white and sulphur-crested cockatoos by the thousand.

I remember Jack Button, a western Queensland stockman of the old school, telling me how he spent six months beside one of these waterholes during a drought. It was actually the Queerbidie waterhole, a few miles down by the junction of Coopers Creek and the dry Strzelecki. It was the drought of 1901, when cattle died by their thousands all over the West, owners walked off their stations, and runs like the then 11,000 square-mile Innamincka had their numbers reduced from 30,000 head to 3,000.

“We lived for six months beside this waterhole,” Jack Button said. “A few of us reduced to our swags and no work. Cattle were dying all around us, and those still alive were too poor to eat. We used to cut out the tongues of the bullocks and boil them up on the river bank. It was the only part of the beast fit to eat. Mighty dry it was at that. Afterwards I could never bring myself to eat tongue again.”

At least they had a town behind them, too. Not much of a town. Three buildings there were at the time, that was all. They had no money to spend in the pub, and nothing but dubious credit in the small, galvanized-iron store. As for the third building, where the local police trooper lived- they kept well away from that.

When I first saw Innamincka, shortly after the second World War, a fourth building had given more substance to the town. This was the two-storey hostel built by the Australian Inland Mission in 1928. It was an important little base in the surrounding country for the Flying Doctor Service (it had not become Royal then), and the Dragon Rapide used to fly up there from Broken Hill once a month for a clinic day, in addition to local emergency flights. That was how I happened to reach the town. After we landed on the clay pan beside Strzelecki Creek, a perfect drome for light aircraft, Dr John Woods said, “You’d better go down to the hotel this evening if you want to know this town. Bound to be one or two men in from the stations. There always are. But, if you’ll take my advice, you’ll ask for a bed in the A.I.M. hostel. You’ll have a better sleep up there.”

I did as he suggested and spent two nights in the labour ward, which had the only spare bed available. It was mighty hard, but the sisters said I would have fared worse in the pub.

At that time Bob de Pury had the pub, which he managed for his lady friend who owned it; Sister Dunn was running the two-sister hospital; Trooper Harry Power had charge of the enormous police district; and Jack the Ripper worked as his black tracker and general roustabout. When the policeman’s wife had her first baby in the hostel two weeks later, the town’s official population rose by one-seventh. That was if you excluded the aborigines, as censor-takers always did for some obscure racial reason. Still it was difficult to estimate their numbers. The police tracker had a wife and two small daughters, but no others actually lived in town. They belonged to Kidman’s Innamincka. station, to Nappa Merrie, Cordillo Downs, and Coongie out on the endless plains.

The local Cooper tribe had disintegrated long before, though it was said that the tracker, who had been one of its elders, still had a great deal of influence here. He was the last adept in tribal lore, could exercise a little black magic, and acted for his people in any local troubles. He was both of the law, and outside it; the white man’s law, that is.

What his native name was, I never discovered. No one hereabouts ever knew him as anything but Jack the Ripper. I found it rather shocking that a man so intelligent and dignified should go by the name of a London garrotter. Jack was unaware of the reference, and it troubled him not at all.

“No more name,” he answered slyly, when I asked him for his proper name.

There was also an old woman, somewhere in the neighbourhood, who claimed to remember seeing John King, last survivor of Burke’s expedition, when he stumbled into an aboriginal camp after the others had died. It seemed a great feat either of recollection or of age. But, after all, the expedition had come to its tragic climax only eighty-four years before. It was just possible.

Innamincka was at least a town rich in historical association. Two cairns had been built beside the hostel. One honoured Sturt who crossed the Cooper here in 1844, making his unsuccessful assault on the Simpson Desert to the north-west; the other the Burke and Wills calamity of 1861. Four miles west was the tree beneath which Burke died. When I saw it a wire fence had been set around the massive, grey-barked coolibah to keep wandering stock away. The celebrated DIG tree is farther downstream on one of Nappa Merrie’s flood flats. Behind is a lovely and tranquil waterhole, shaped like a giant boomerang. This, too, by one of those ironies of history, is frequently alive with edible waterfowl.

Although the fate of that reckless, unbushmanlike Irish policeman led city dwellers to believe this country was nothing but desert, it was little more than a decade before more enterprising cattlemen were stocking it and making a fair living here. John Conrick took up Nappa Merrie in 1872, and others soon followed. The stock routes of drovers and overlanders followed the old aboriginal tracks, for there had been trade routes here for centuries. The pituri gathered in the Simpson was traded from one tribe to another right across to the Queensland coast. This desert plant, which had the quality of a drug when chewed, was highly valued throughout Australia and gave the Cooper and Mulligan River tribes considerable bargaining power. In exchange for it they gained red ochre for ceremonials from the northern Flinders Range, and other goods they needed.

The town of Innamincka had its origins in that farcical situation of pre-federation days, when tax had to be paid on all stock travelling from one State to another. Close to the South Australian- Queensland border, Innamincka became a post for a customs officer. The fact that drovers were held up here meant a demand for strong liquors. And so arrived the pub. Then a police station, to police the pub; and a lock-up behind it, like an oversize sentry box. The last need for the bushman was a store, perennially stocked with bagged flour and sugar, tea in cases, quartpots, stockwhips, saddlecloths, surcingles, stirrup irons, bedourie ovens, and all the portable paraphernalia required by men who lived upon a horse.

This was the town of Innamincka. It had its counterparts all over the inland; from Windorah to Birdsville, Betoota, Oodnadatta, or Marree.

It was a spacious little town.

There was no need to crowd these few spare buildings close together. As I remember it, the pub and police station faced each other across what passed for the single street. They were a hundred yards apart. The pub was a long, low, rakish building of local stone, L-shaped, with a narrow, shadowy bar and a few half-furnished bedrooms like dark monastic cells. The stone-walled store stood alongside it, for de Pury ran both for many years. Three minutes’ walk along the bare, stony street was the nursing hostel. This, too, was built of stone. It had a wire fence around it, protecting a stony garden from the stony street, for nothing much grew in a hot climate where water was scarce; at least, without the considerable expense of pumping it from an often muddy waterhole.

Yet this hostel was one of the most comfortable buildings of its kind anywhere in the outback. It had broad concrete steps at the entrance, wide verandas, lobbies floored with polished jarrah, several impeccably clean wards, and, wonder of the back country, two bathrooms. Each had a porcelain bath.

I shall not easily forget the luxury of lying in such a bath, after the sweat and the dust of these gibber plains.

“What does the temperature go up to here?” I asked in the cool, comfortably furnished lounge.

The summer’s heat was almost forgotten, with these chintz covers, cool green cushions, and cane chairs. On one wall was a soothing colour print of a ship under full canvas on a rich blue sea. Water along Coopers Creek was silty and milk-hued.

“Practically anything,” Sister Blanch said. She was the Flying Sister from the Broken Hill base, who had flown up with us. “Depends just where you put the thermometer.”

“It’s not an easy job taking temperatures here,” Dr Woods said. “To start with, you’ve got to get the thermometer down to blood heat. We keep ours in the ice-chest, take readings before taking it out of the patient’s mouth. If you didn’t, you’d start diagnosing the most unlikely fevers.”

Apart from his ambulance plane, it was a fairly rugged business travelling to and from Innamincka. The only way south was by the mailman’s truck. This took four days to reach Broken Hill on its fortnightly runs, passing through sandhill country to the New South Wales border gate, then to Tibooburra and Milparinka with overnight stops in the bush. It had a northerly extension, too, through Arrabury station and ninety miles of furnace-red sandhills to the head station on Cordillo Downs.

Nowadays, a route that was one of the toughest in Australia has been taken over by TAA’s Channel Country Service, whose longest inter-State flight is less than half an hour. Innamincka was also the terminal of the last camel mail in Australia.

Until the beginning of the second World War, a motor service ploughed its way up through the sand drifts of the Strzelecki track from Farina, South Australia, then transferred its mail bags, parcels, and general supplies to camels that travelled on to Arrabury and Cordillo Downs. Then the Strzelecki was closed for lack of water, and the tiny township of Farina closed soon afterwards.

Now this place, too, is only a heap of stones.

Although the Strzelecki Track was opened briefly in recent years, with a partly graded road for cattle transports, it still carries no traffic. The few risky cattle runs that once existed along that waterless route were abandoned in the 1920s. Yet it was once a track that pulsed with a remarkable amount of life.

Cordillo was originally a sheep run, attracting large numbers of men up the track. Shearers, bagmen in search of a job, teamsters, hawkers, and Afghans with camels were constantly travelling up and down. To add to the traffic, the station had a bad name, and men were constantly leaving. It used to be known as “the bagman’s last resort.”

Frank Booth, an early mailman along the track, once told me it was a common sight to see shearers going up on bicycles. It must have been tough pedaling, for there were steep sand ridges as well as drift. Yet the late Jim Patterson, a former owner of the now forgotten Tinga- Tingana station, regularly drove his mail coach and five horses between Farina and Innamincka in two days.

All manner of rare characters, some notable eccentrics among them, travelled that route at the turn of the century and after. There was, for instance, the brother of Hermann Schmidt, who ran the Innamincka Hotel before and during the first World War.

Bill Schmidt took a job as stockman’s cook at Kidman’s Innamincka station. In the hot weather he used to wear two shirts to keep out the heat. He could also pick up wireless messages in his head. This was how he knew war was due to break out before 1914. He declared he had picked up a radio signal from the Russians. The German also had a habit of throwing in his job just before the stock camp was due home from a long muster. On one such occasion he told the head stockman he had decided to take a little walk.

He walked across the Cooper crossing with the idea of hoofing it as far as Oodnadatta. Not a bad step. As the crows fly out West, it would have taken him across three hundred miles of waterless country, most of it through the Simpson Desert. He made it only as far as Innamincka township, where he took another job instead.

Perhaps he got the idea from another famous walker in these parts. This was George Brown, who walked forty miles a day however hot the weather. He used to carry his swag between stations, and move on as soon as someone crossed him.

Once he bought a horse in Farina and started to ride it up the Strzelecki Track. Then he grew tired of the saddle, got down, and walked instead. He led the horse by the reins day after day. At Innamincka he decided to sell the thing, because of its stubbornness. It just wouldn’t walk fast enough to keep up with him.

Bill Schmidt had even more trouble with a pair of horses he bought on the Kidman station. He had just thrown in his job again, which was no doubt why some smart manager offered him these particular horses. They had come from a travelling circus; a brown mare and gelding. As soon as Bill stood in front of them, they would stand on their hind legs and try to shake hands with him.

Imagine the problems of travelling hundreds of miles with such horses. He sold them again in Innamincka, and once more had to take on a job.

The Strzelecki route also played a notable part in the pioneering days of the Flying Doctor. It was the scene of John Flynn’s first efforts at radio communication, the essential beginning for any aerial service outback. He and a radio man, George Towns, took an old Model T Ford up the Strzelecki in the early 1920s, then through Innamincka and Cordillo Downs, experimenting all the way with signals sent from a primitive set in Morse. Camping out on the plains by night, they worked hard with a set that seemed to produce no response. Sometimes they worked with spotlights, sometimes with a hurricane lamp.

When they reached Oodnadatta a month later, a station man told them he had picked up a faint signal from Cordillo Downs. It was the first positive result of several months of experimenting. No wonder Flynn of the Inland had a special regard for the hostel at Innamincka, when the Flying Doctors took to the air.

On the face of it, it seemed a backward step when the A.I.M. decided to close down Innamincka in 1951.

Yet the hostel had served its purpose by then. Once this had been the only airstrip in hundreds of miles. Then new strips were put in at every surrounding station. Faster planes made it easy to fly patients in to the more convenient hospital base at Tibooburra. The annual upkeep of remote Innamincka became too high.

The once vital radio transceiver in the nursing home was transferred to Innamincka station. Then de Pury closed his hotel, and the police station was abandoned on the last day of December 1952.

Another outback town had died.

That well-appointed hostel, however, was too good to be left to rot on the gibber plains. It was demolished and transported in sections to Arrabury station, where it has now replaced a more primitive homestead in which the manager lived.

Since then the stones of the hotel have also been carted away. They were used to build better stockmen’s quarters on Innamincka station. There is hardly anything left today to denote where the old town stood. Only one ineradicable relic- Innamincka’s bottle heap.

In its time it was the most celebrated heap of bottles in the world, talked about by travellers of several generations. It was the best part of two hundred yards long. The massive pile of glittering glass stood between four and five feet high. A mighty collection of bottles, it could have made a fortune for some city bottle- oh, if he happened to have a fortune to pay for the cartage.

According to prejudice, you could find that heap the text for a sermon, or the touchstone of the traditional Australia. It had symbolized some temporary happiness of lonely tank-sinkers, hawkers, and stockmen, their painkiller, their means of enduring what was a pretty grim country in those times. There were some fascinating bottles in that pile; many old types that have not been seen for half a century; stone beer bottles, square-face bottles of whisky or gin, forgotten brands of rotgut or wine; champagne bottles by the score.

When I last saw this monstrous pile it had been whittled away by floods. Even more have been washed down-river by recent Cooper floodings. But it will be a long time before the last, sand-covered layer ceases to glitter in the lonely outback sun.

To my mind it will always echo the late Bob de Pury’s characteristic phrase as you entered the bar.

“You want beer off the ice, mister? Sure, it’s five hundred miles off the ice at Innamincka.”

After the Flood

TALLANGATTA

On my second last visit to Tallangatta, I climbed with an artist friend of mine to a steep hill overlooking the long, curving main street of the town. Clem had been commissioned by the Sunday Herald to sketch the handsome, old-world place, which had just been sentenced to death.

Squatting under a leaning blue gum, he made a watercolour of the scene below. Five hundred feet beneath us, the broad street rested like a boomerang at the base of this narrow valley, on each side of which brown and pale green hills rose steeply to a summer sky. The red rooftops of houses, stores, and hotels gave a touch of colour to the curving, dusty street. Beyond it was the railway line, linking Wodonga with Corryong beneath the Alps. Beyond again were vividly green grazing flats where the Kiewa and Mitta Mitta Rivers joined the Murray, here a narrow, rush-lined thread quite different from the grand stream west of the Hume Dam and Albury.

It was those waters, in fact, that had decided Tallangatta’s fate by drowning.

Yet, half-way up this thousand-foot hill, with the sounds of cattle and a distant sawmill clearly rising, I could not believe such a solid town could vanish utterly. It had such an air of permanence.

          “I’d like to come back here in a few years,” Clem said. “To this very tree. I wonder how it will look then?”

I don’t know whether he ever did come. I came, six years later.

There was no longer a road where that main street had curved through the town. There was no town. Instead a road diverged along the slope of this hill; perhaps two hundred feet lower than our gum tree.

The beautiful perspective of those red-roofed buildings against green hills had disappeared. No longer did cattle graze on those once lush flats. No railway line followed the line of river. It was all water down there; a broad and still expanse spreading away through flood-bound trees towards the top end of the Hume Reservoir.

It was now part of the reservoir, whose capacity had been increased by an extra million and a quarter cubic feet. A greater flow, created by the Snowy River Scheme, was coming down from the Alps; the Hume Dam had been increased in height to contain it. A community of seven hundred people had agreed to sacrifice their century-old town in the national interest. As I remembered it, from earlier visits, many had been reluctant to do so.

I drove slowly along that new road, looking down at the drowned town. It was true what one or two old hands had predicted. I remembered what old George Carver had told me in his cottage garden at the eastern end of the town. It was a pleasant little home, nearly a hundred years old, with mellow timbers., rambler roses, honeysuckle smothering the pergola outside the front door. George Carver had also been editor of the local Herald, had lived fifty years in town, and was then the chief inspiration of the Mitta Watershed Vigilance League. which had been fighting the threat of destruction since 1927.

Unless the raised level of the reservoir was kept at a permanently high level, he warned, the drowned town would be only partially submerged.

“At least three months of the year,” he assured me, “the water wouldn’t be over the main street at all. It would just be a boggy mess. A mud flat, breeding mosquitoes and flies. You’d stare down at the stumps and foundations of the old buildings we used to know. The place would be a graveyard. It wouldn’t be too good for the old people to look down and say, ‘That ruin’s where I was born. That’s where my old Dad died.”

It was no longer possible to walk down that hill-side to the town, for the railway had been diverted, and now ran alongside the new highway. Below I looked down at scattered houses that seemed to drift upon their own reflections in the tranquil lake. I tried to identify some of the buildings I had known.

I picked out the old Tallangatta Hotel, whose first floor windows, were well clear of the water. It had been a fine structure of heavy stone blocks, with stout veranda posts and worn stone slabs at the bar entrances, grooved by five generations of visitors. There had been a row of stables at the back, relics of the coaching days. Nowhere else have I seen such beautifully laid floors, which were made of logs driven endways into the soil. Much of the timber was century-old cedar and still in fine condition.

I remembered Stan McKay telling me one day in the low-ceilinged saloon bar that his pub was one of the last where guests could still stable their horses. Not that anyone did. The stables were then used for garaging cars.

“Crawford and Connelly always stabled their coach horses here,” Stan McKay said. “They ran the mail services up to Corryong and the Mitta Mitta Valley. The old firm took passengers and mails to many a settlement, going back to the days when the Mount Elliot rush began. Used to be pubs up in the hills that no one knows about today. And everything there cost a shilling. A shilling for horse feed; a shilling for a bed. Meals were only a shilling, too.

“D’you know, my old pub here was the last in the country where new arrivals were always asked, ‘Have you given your horse a feed?’ They reckoned you had to do that before booking yourself in, or even buying a drink.”

Those were the days, he added, when you reined in your horse or buggy as soon as another traveller came by. You dismounted, and sat half an hour in the shade for a yarn.

“What happens now?” he asked, drawing another handle of Melbourne, not country-brewed beer. “They flash past each other at seventy miles per hour, and curse the other man’s dust.”

There were other buildings down there I found hard to recognize. The element of water now introduced somehow threw the memory off balance. One two-storey affair, with a tall chimney, like a river steamer’s funnel, had clearly been a store. I thought I located the old Herald building, where George Carver had taken over from his father more than half a century before. The embankment where the railway used to run was easily picked out, although the line had been torn up. I also traced the spur line that had led across the river to the butter factory at what was known as Toorak, but now was just another section of the lake.

As for the saleyards, where I had seen sheep auctioned a few years earlier, there was no sign of them, except for the plane trees and willows that provided shade for the spectators.

I wondered what they had done with that picturesque little bell tower near the Catholic Church. It had been traditional to ring that bell only as a warning when bush fires converged down the wooded hill-sides towards the town. Come to that, where was the church itself?

I recalled Bill Hoystead, the burly, blunt-spoken stock agent, telling me a year or two before the flood began, “It’s a real calamity, destroying this fine old town. From a business point of view, it’s the most solid for its size anywhere in Australia. I’m dead against moving to the new site. Yes, I know it looks all right down-river. It’s safe from flooding; there’s plenty of good land and trees; and it’s nearer to the Hume Highway. But that’s not everything.

“There’s wonderful grazing around Tallangatta here. Thousands of acres of it, and now they're going to put it under water. You just can't replace this style of country. D’ you know, all that land on the flats is worth a hundred pounds an acre.”

The new Tallangatta, he said, would never become the stock market this place had been. At the junction of three river valleys, old Tallangatta had been something of a crossroads for sheep and fat cattle sales. Now, he said, farmers would simply truck them right through to Wodonga, and the town would be the poorer for it all.

Some had been in favour of shifting. They said the town had been built in the wrong place from the start. It was subject to flooding when the alpine snows melted, and the three rivers became swift-running, swollen streams. Others said the place was unhealthy; winter fogs gathered on the low ground. And there were those who said that today’s fast transport had abolished the value it once had for travellers as well as for local gatherings.

It took men like old George Carter, or the Paton family at near- by Noorongong, to call back to its early beginnings the historical importance it once had in developing the Upper Murray.

The pioneer settler had discovered these rich pastures one year after Hume and Hovell made their first crossing of the Murray. That was when Charles Wyse led a party of drovers from the Murrumbidgee to Tarcutta Creek, and formed Mungabareena station for C. H. Edben in the spring of 1835. A few weeks later, riding after some strayed cattle, Wyse came to the junction of the Mitta Mitta and the Murray. The first squatter south of the Murray, he formed Bonegilla run, although he and the cattlemen who followed were soon forced by drought to retreat to the Riverina. In the 1850s cattlemen could only sell their stock by droving it right down to Melbourne, three hundred miles and more through mountains and virgin bush where only a few rough tracks existed. They sold them for a pound a head or less in the old saleyards at the corner of Bourke and Queen Streets, then took back enough provisions on bullock drays, to last them a year.

Then came gold.

The first strike was at Towong Gap in 1890; the next at Mount Elliot, where the richest of the mines, the New Chum, yielded £100,000 in the first three years. This was only a small portion of the gold discovered in the district, but the records were lost and no one today knows the extent of that old field.

Legend has it that Corryong was described to Melbournites as a market town “paved with gold.” It was said that the sands and tailing of that New Chum mine were subsequently used to surface the dusty streets.

The rough roads, what there were of them, were only suitable for bullock drays for a long while, and the Corryong district boasted a number of famous characters who used the long, rawhide whips. Among the notabilities who passed through Tallangatta with their straining teams were men like “German Jack” Stubaus, “Long Andy” Codrington, and “King” Mildren. Sometimes a dozen drays would be camped down on the Murray flats. Unlike most bullockies, the Swiss-born German Jack had ambitions to do more than spend his life driving his long-horned beasts.

In the Tallangatta bars he used to tell his mates continually, “I’m going one day to top de market mit de bullocks, top de market mit de horses, and top de market mit de sheep.”

He lived to do so, for he took up land at Towong, selling off his bullock team-and topping the market with that, too.

While old Tallangatta remained alive, you felt somehow close to that age of bullockies, of mountain stockmen, and of champion riders. Perhaps it was the rustic streets, the fine old plane trees and oaks that gave shade outside churches and pubs, the old hitching posts in front of the older stores. It was country you could readily associate with the bygone coaching firms; Crawford & Connelly, Cobb & Co. It was nearly a hundred years since the first coaches toiled up those steep mountain tracks, or raced across the Upper Murray roads to Cudgewa, Corryong, and Tintaldra. Despite the rough country they kept just as good times as the modern motor mailman; sometimes better.

Men used to set their clocks by Harry Klippel’s mail coach in the 1880s. He left Tallangatta daily at 5 a.m., kept the same smart pace over the mountains whatever the weather was, and drew rein outside the Corryong mail office at exactly four in the afternoon.

From 1891 to 1914 Tom Berrigan set a record that was probably without equal anywhere. Three times a week he drove fifty miles from one town to the other; three times a week he drove back again. In twenty-two years he never missed a service. When he retired he had covered the astonishing distance of 343,000 miles.

Some wiseacre in Tallangatta worked it out as equivalent to fourteen journeys around the world.

The horse has always been so much a tradition along the Upper Murray, I was not surprised when I found that the Rev. Gordon Tavare had himself been a rider of some note. Outside his sixty-year-old weatherboard Anglican church he told me he had been cattleman, gold prospector, farmer, and horsebreeder, before taking the cloth. When I met him, he was celebrating his thirtieth year in this church.

        “It’s going to be hard leaving this place,” he said. “So many of the older people remember the church being built. Does that surprise you? People live to a great age here. They’ve a deal of sentiment, too, for the atmosphere in which they grew up.”

I asked him how he thought the townspeople would adjust themselves to their new home.

“Very hard to say. Maybe it’ll be a success. I think it will. It won’t have the character this place has accumulated over the years. But what makes a town good or bad is people. The people here are good. Moving away will cause a major dislocation. It may even take thirty years or more for the new town to achieve the kind of permanence and beauty we have here.”

The most detached man I discussed things with was Ben Button, one of the wealthiest men in town.

“No matter if they shift the town east, west, south, or north,” he said amiably, “they’ll still have to buy land off me to put it on.”

That represented a mighty large area in terms of today’s close settlement along the Murray.

“Well, I’ve been fifty-three years digging myself in,” Mr. Button said. “That’s how long ago I came up to Tallangatta with my brother. We came up in a dog cart, and had two and sixpence between us. It was a baker’s horse, too. It would eat nothing but bread. It was so weak that, going uphill, we had to get behind the cart and push.

“I started up in town with a lolly shop. I still remember the first order we sent down to Melbourne. We ordered £2. 2s. 2d worth of lollies, for that was all the money we had. Then I went into the cycle business, then built a garage. I sold the first Ford cars in Tallangatta. Model Ts, of course.”

Now the Button brothers, who had always refused to separate, were the owners of the leading butcher’s shop, the cinema, garage, and several farms.

During earlier visits I had found a large percentage opposed to leaving. As George Carver had put it, “You need thirty or forty years to grow a garden like mine. Look at these old peaches and plums. There’ll be nothing like that outside our new cottage.”

Later, as the shift grew inevitable, and the River Murray Commission promised a high rate of compensation, the opponents began to dwindle. I understand the transfer of the total population from one town to another went with surprisingly few upsets. All those buildings that could be moved were dismantled, or set wholly upon jinkers, and towed along the Murray Valley Highway. The new Tallangatta has settled in since its uncertain beginnings in 1956. Its builders set great emphasis on amenities and community services. There is a district hospital, new hotels, large, airy stores, a public swimming pool. There is a view of the great Hume Reservoir, considerably increased by the new waters pouring down from the Great Divide, the waters that have smothered and choked with debris that lovely, older town that no one thinks of any longer.

Or do they, perhaps?

Do these comfortably housed people in modern bungalows, with modern., dead-straight streets, good drainage, and electric light poles making their landscapes ugly; do they ever look back to the narrow, crooked side lanes of old Tallangatta, the steep footwalks up the hill to mellow cottages, the cedar doors and bar counter of the top hotel, the cool and cavernous general store, and the old bell sounding its warning of bushfires in fierce summer’s heat?

The spirit of Old Tallangatta was effectively summed up for me one day when, in the Herald’s shadowy office, I came upon an obituary notice to one of the early men of the district. This was Andrew Paton, who died on 7^th July, 1903. I had just come back from his property twelve miles out at Noorongong. It was a lovely place, with tall pines, lush river flats, and an old timber homestead with low, sloping roof beneath which you could see the distant, snow-covered outline of Kosciuszko. These pastures were said to have bred some of the finest beef cattle in Victoria.

For the text of his funeral oration in Tallangatta’s Presbyterian church, the Rev. Huey Steele had selected Verse 34 from Chapter XLVI of the Book of Genesis. It was aptly chosen.

        “Thy servants have been keepers of cattle from our youth, even until now, both we and our fathers . . .

The Rev. Steele went on:

“The life and the death of the patriarch Jacob present a striking resemblance in many respects to the life and death of another patriarch who is in our minds and hearts today. Born in Scotland, Andrew Paton was brought to Australia in infancy, and Australia was his home. For all those years, through good seasons and bad years, through summer heat and winter frosts, through drought and flood, he watched the Mitta Mitta River rise and fall and flow. And now that he is gone, the old river still swirls along by the foot of the hill, where his earthly remains are laid…”

And now, some of that earth, too, has been washed away. A whole town has gone. Its memories of a hundred creative years have sunk beneath the still waters.

Geese, Goats, and Girls

CLUNES

          A bitumen road runs northward these days from Ballarat to Clunes. The countryside is fertile and well farmed. It is not at all the kind of road you would expect to bring you to the backwaters of Victoria’s history. But this is a closely settled State, and farmers long ago ploughed up the old diggings around Creswick and beyond, leaving only occasional mullock heaps above the surface of the green and level plains.

Even the declining town of Clunes seems to retain an air of permanence, because it has merged with the farming life around it, as if surrendering at last its long dream of conjuring up new wealth from gold.

The first sight of it is as the highway dips steeply towards the once-famous Tulloorup Creek, whose high, eroded banks obscure a narrow stream. On the farther side rooftops seem crowded together on a sloping hill-side among dense trees. There are several church spires, white roads forking upwards as if to nowhere and sheep feeding in surprisingly small paddocks. The place has all the appearance of a thriving town- until you come to the eighty-year-old stone bridge that crosses the narrow, virtually waterless creek.

The first building you see, on the nearer bank, is a derelict one, with broken windows and a litter of old iron around its insecure stone walls. A faded sign announces CLUNES PRODUCE STORE, but clearly it has been closed for years.

In Fraser Street every second building has been abandoned, bare allotments separate the few remaining businesses and small stores, and even an occasional coat of paint fails to disguise the decrepit nature of a thoroughfare that was once as busy as the streets of Ballarat.

But, on your first entry into town, you may miss Fraser Street altogether, as we did. Another runs straight ahead, passing uphill between more solid buildings- the council chambers, a garage, the Wesleyan and Congregational churches- coming eventually to open country once again. It is then you begin to sense what has happened to a town whose earliest habitations took root almost a hundred and twenty years ago.

At its peak- in the 1870s- Clunes had more than seven thousand people. Now it has two hundred.

And even these mostly belong more to the country than the town. Whole streets and blocks of houses have long ago disappeared. In their place are open paddocks. A few sheep graze here; dairy cattle; or flocks of huge geese which give small attention to the occasional passer-by. What appears at a distance to be a close-knit town is not really so at all. The countryside has moved right into it. Small farms have almost overwhelmed the actual town.

“See this paddock of mine,” said one old farmer near the railway station, which was once close to the heart of things. “When I grew up here it was all houses. You can’t even tell where the streets were now.”

He ran a few sheep on the tussocky grasses, and had them shorn in a tiny shearing shed near by. Beyond it great piles of mullock occupied another empty paddock; the relic of one of the twenty-nine gold-mining companies that brought wealth to nineteenth-century Clunes.

It was Old George who gave us the clearest insight into the erosion of what had once been among the most famous of Victoria’s mining towns. The place, moreover, where the first gold had been discovered outside New South Wales.

Howard and I had been having a drink before lunch in the century-old Club Hotel down Fraser Street. It was an attractive, early Victorian building, two-storeyed, with its stone facade now painted a rich burgundy and white, full-length shutters on the upstairs windows above which a stone coping announced the hotel’s name and the date of construction: 1870. The publican subsequently told me that the date referred only to the addition of its upper storey. At all events, the place had managed to retain far more character than its last remaining rival across the road.

Apart from the publican, there had been only two others in the front bar. A normal attendance these days, we gathered, for a printed card beside the glass-panelled entrance stated in bold black type: WANTED-NEW CUSTOMERS-NO PREVIOUS EXPERIENCE REQUIRED.

The two men, both locals, were warming themselves in front of a pleasant fire. It was a cold winter’s morning. We were discussing the town’s decline.

“How many hotels used there to be here?” one asked. Before he could answer, the door swung open.

“Here’s just the man to tell us. Old George has been in Clunes longer than almost anyone.”

He was an alert, sturdily built man with grey hair and only one leg, who moved briskly enough on two, elbow length steel crutches. Old George did not look anywhere near the eighty years he presently announced himself to be. He had lost a leg in the first World War, and had since lived with a fair degree of comfort on a totally incapacitated pension.

“Well, I wasn’t born here, you know,” he said, accepting a glass of Ballarat beer. “But I can remember thirty seven pubs in town. Used to be a whole string of ‘em, right along Fraser Street and up the hill. There was the Royal Sovereign, Crown, Queen’s Head, Prince of Wales, the American…” He made something of a roll call of it, listing them in correct order down the hill.

“Mind you, there was a lot more than that when the gold boom was on. Back in the 1890s they reckon there were sixty-seven. She used to be quite a town.”

It was his habit to drop in for only a single drink each morning. Yet, in that short time, he managed to bring the old Clunes vividly to life.

“You won’t believe it now,” he said, looking out of the bar window at a lifeless street. “On Saturday nights Fraser Street used to be so crowded with miners you could hardly push your way through them. Often there just wasn’t room for horses and carts to move down the street.

“I recall one afternoon when some joker turned an old bull loose out there. Tied an old can to his tail, and let him go. By hokey, you should have seen what happened. There was people running everywhere. Now you’d drove a whole cattle mob through and scarcely raise a dust.”

Someone else said, “I don’t know about cattle. There’d always be a mob of goats somewhere around the streets.”

“And even the goats have gone now.”

Old George said, “Know what they used to call Clunes? The best town in Victoria for geese, goats, and girls.”

I remarked that only the geese seemed much in evidence today.

“Sure,” he said. “There’s something about Clunes that raises the fattest geese I know. The place is famed for them.”

One of the men by the fire said, “But where’s all the goats gone? Never seen an old mining town without goats.”

“And the girls,” his mate added.

Old George set his empty glass on the bar, prepared to leave. “I reckon it’s still easier catching girls than goats in Clunes.”

He swung briskly into the street on his short crutches, and the talk turned to the future of the town.

It was hard to see how even the existing population could be retained, the publican said. Mining had long since ceased; at the turn of the century, in fact. For many years the town had lived in hopes of reopening the old workings which, so the old-timers persistently claimed, had not been closed down for lack of gold. Many had been rich shows, he said. They had ceased to operate in the 1890s for two reasons only, and the main one had been the rich discoveries at Coolgardie, which drained away most of the active population. When the first deep mines closed, water had flooded in, extending from one lease to the next, thus making it a very costly operation to put them in production again.

Then, in the late 1950s, anew wave of optimism had quickened the town. One of Australia’s largest mining syndicates, significantly, from the Western Australian goldfields, had begun a major survey. It brought in geologists and other experts, heavy equipment, diamond drills, and for six years a small work force had given a new lift to population and local trade.

Late in 1963, after six years of costly exploration, a final verdict had been reached. As the old hands had never ceased to claim, gold did still exist in patches, but at too great a depth to make its recovery economic. Drilling had failed to establish any large-scale reef.

It was the end of a myth. A myth that had endured for more than sixty years; a myth that had done so much to keep alive a town’s uncertain faith in a more rewarding future.

“Ah,” one of the loyalists in front of the fire said. “It’s not really the lack of gold. Only the problems of getting it out. One day they’ll be mining here again. All they’re waiting on now is a rise in the world price for gold.”

And so, one by one, more of the small-time establishments closed their doors in Fraser Street. They offer a sad comment upon the crowded past remembered by still active survivors like Old George. When he first came to Clunes, such famous citizens as James Esmond were still living in the town; “Civil Jim” Esmond, to whose memory a stone cairn has been built on the east side of Tulloorup Creek, where the first Victorian gold was found. Between 1851 and 1890 fantastic quantities had been taken from alluvial deposits and from deep leads underground. The biggest aggregate was won by the Port Phillip Mining Company, which closed in 1881. From its six reefs came 486,297 fine ounces of gold, valued at £1,946,089. And its initial capital, by no means all of it subscribed, amounted to a mere £21,550.

        The total amount produced by the Clunes field was 1,338,882 fine ounces. Its value was £5,498,346.

Though most of these huge earnings went to shareholders in Melbourne and London, money enough remained to create a handsome and well-kept town. The early settlement of canvas, bark, wattle, and daub soon gave way to permanent homes of pleasant design, to public buildings of enduring stone and some more quaint examples of Victoriana. The two State schools, for example, with their stucco archways, porticoes, and minarets. Nowadays the town can support only one of these, and for primary schooling alone. The other has been converted into a small-scale knitting mill; the only industry in Clunes.

At the far end of Fraser Street you can still see the relic of its celebrated Free Library which, before the turn of the century, had three thousand books and its own reading rooms. “Established 1874” reads the legend above its paintless, padlocked door. Its stone walls are peeling and stained with damp, its windows boarded up or pockmarked with shattered glass.

Near by is F. W. Weekhardt’s Champion Tank Factory, its great wooden doors forever closed; the faded sign of an Italian fruiterer over a shuttered shop; butchers and dressmakers whose interiors are now damp and dark as caves; and Downes Boot Warehouse marked now only by a sagging veranda roof which once gave shelter from sun or rain to thousands of miners in search of stout bootleather for wet conditions underground.

Perhaps the most touching reminder of the belief that earlier generations invested in this seemingly enduring town are the ageing trees softening the harsh outlines of upturned soils and tumbled rock; the ever-present chaos that always surrounds a starkly utilitarian mining centre.

Along the town side of Tulloorup Creek is a fine windbreak of old elms, some of them gaunt now and spare of foliage. English willows planted in more exuberant days by migrants to these dry and alien landscapes have grown mightily beside the narrow creek, obscuring the shallow alluvial diggings over which there was once such quarrelling and litigation.

Now only a few cows, or the flocks of fat, waddling geese, feed leisurely along these flats.

It seems unreal to think that upon this placid creek bank the destinies of Victoria were shaped; virtually the whole of Australia, for that matter. A few specks of gold discovered here by a travelling medico, changed the entire future of a State for which sheep had appeared the only promise. In 1851 Victorians were much concerned about the gold rushes at Ophir and the Turon, for it looked as if most of the still small population would vanish over the New South Wales border. The newly set up Victorian Legislative Council offered £1,000 reward to anyone who found gold within a radius of two hundred miles from Melbourne.

Oddly enough, the man who found the first traces was interested neither in the reward nor in personal riches. Never can a rush have been started by a man with so little ambition. Dr George Bruhn, a doctor and geologist recently arrived from Germany, had acquired the habit of leaving Melbourne whenever possible for brief journeys into the bush. On one occasion he spent a few days with Donald Cameron, who had formed the Clunes cattle run some years before. Cameron asked him to look at a quartz outcrop beside this creek. The doctor casually remarked that one or two samples held traces of gold. The squatter was not very interested. He did not want men scrambling all over his run, so kept the matter quiet. Before returning to Melbourne Dr Bruhn happened to mention it to a local sawyer- Jim Esmond.

Civil Jim’s response was immediate. After all, he knew the country well, having driven a mail coach between Buninyong and Geelong for several years before trying his luck in the Californian diggings. By coincidence, he returned to Australia in the same ship as Edward Hammond Hargraves, whose discovery at Ophir immediately preceded Bruhn’s. Esmond contacted three of his mates, Pugh, Burns, and Kelly, and began to prospect the area beside Tulloorup Creek. Then, having located promising alluvial deposits, he drove to Melbourne and there fabricated his own gold-washing cradle.

By the beginning of 1852 the Clunes goldfield was in production. That there was no big initial rush was due to other finds, which offered larger immediate returns, at Buninyong and Ballarat. All the same, by 1855, Clunes had become a township of fifteen hundred people. Two years later the Government awarded Esmond  £1,000 for his find.

Ironically, this was the largest sum he earned. His own claim was not a rich one, and was soon abandoned. One by one the alluvial miners gave up their claims, for the field proved itself to be one of heavy reefs whose gold-bearing qualities were erratic and uncertain. There was so little confidence in it that the Government allowed Cameron to sell his sheep run to a fellow Scot, McDonald. He sold the homestead block, with government approval, as a freehold proposition.

Then, early in 1855, a prospector found alluvial gold on this block. There was an immediate rush, and four thousand miners camped on the new field.

McDonald protested. He declared they had no right to stake claims on freehold property and called in police. The miners angrily withdrew. Some of them were jailed or fined for trespassing. Others, who had fought at Eureka, argued that the new democratic regime meant equal rights for all and resolved to campaign against what they termed the old guard exclusives, like McDonald. They organized the Creswick and Clunes Mutual Protection Association. It was a militant body soon to bring about further strife.

What touched it off was the appearance in 1856 of an English company, which offered McDonald very attractive terms for mining gold on his property. Geologists employed by the Port Phillip and Colonial Gold Mining Co. had discovered the existence of rich quartz reefs. McDonald gave the company a twenty-one year lease, for which he was to receive a 10 per cent royalty on all gold recovered.

The company’s manager, Rivett Henry Brand, was a shrewd man. Sensing the mood of the Protection Association, he made no plans to work the gold himself. Instead he had a large treatment plant hauled up in sections by bullock teams from Melbourne, setting it beside the creek. Then he approached one of the association’s leaders, Charles Kinnear, and asked him to form a syndicate of miners to carry out the actual work. Kinnear recruited a hundred men, each of whom was invited to subscribe £15 as his working share. The Clunes Quartz Gold Mining Company thus formed was then asked to sell its ore to the Port Phillip Company for treatment.

Before long the field was operating with great profit.

In 1857 a number of mysterious shafts began to appear along the company’s southern boundary. Brand was puzzled. According to earlier surveys no reefs extended that far. Yet huge piles of mullock were growing beyond the boundary fence, while local bank returns revealed that more than £10,000 worth of gold had been bought from these independent syndicates.

Where was it all coming from?

It did not take long to find out that the outsiders had been tunneling beneath the Quartz Company boundary, pirating the insider’s gold. It was the start of an extraordinary underground war. A war, as the Ballarat Star recorded, between the Outsiders and Insiders.

To check this piracy, the Insiders sank two shafts just inside the boundary fence. One struck an illegal drive at twelve feet; the other at thirty-five. These were immediately boarded up, and supporting timbers farther along the tunnels destroyed.

Immediately the Outsiders grew hostile. Making no pretence of innocence, they threatened violence. They broke down the barricades, and attacked the Insiders with bare fists and even home-made pikes.

A crisis was reached early in May, when the company appealed for police aid from Creswick and Ballarat. Sub-Warden William Amos also rode up from Ballarat to make an official government report.

Few in Clunes these days know much about the drama that took place above and under McDonald’s sheep run, but the records can still be read in the Chief Secretary’s Archives down in Melbourne. There, in a dusty basement, are the despatches sent back in the sub-warden’s bold and angry hand.

McDonald had sent for help, Amos told the Chief Secretary. Miners had been threatened with violence. There had been talk of shooting or blowing them up with gunpowder. One drive had been discovered to run 220 feet inside the company’s lease. Two men in the first drive had been arrested for trespassing or threats to life. In the second another had been found with a loaded pistol in his pocket.

More police were sent for. When they rode into Clunes, they ordered sixteen men underground to give themselves up. They refused, preferring to stay there. After dark several miners’ wives tried to smuggle food down the shaft, so police decided to take action. They lowered lamps by rope to assess the position below. At once the lamps were smashed with stones. When five troopers attempted to go down, they found the winch ropes had been chained together. Booby traps had also been set with loaded buckets, so that the first touch would send them hurtling downwards, while the whim on top spun violently as anyone approached the shaft. Somehow the troopers reached the bottom, where they were met by men armed with iron spikes lashed to lengths of timber.

Finally the Outsiders’ leader was arrested. His name was William Morgan; a man with a police record. Some claimed he was an escaped convict.

Wild Morgan was also a resourceful miner- and ambitious. He had the kind of enterprising spirit that appealed to his contemporaries; and certainly to the Ballarat Star’s reporter who wrote that he was “good in a row, proficient in abuse, and tenacious of his rights, or supposed rights.” He had “some of those sterling qualities of which successful men are made; but none of the graces that sometimes adorn success.” His violent stand against the Port Phillip company and the law were explained as being “an attempt to redress a public wrong.”

At all events, the underground war he led troubled the Victorian Government for a considerable time.

Prompted by Henry Brand, the mining company at once asked for a Supreme Court injunction to stop the Outsiders from further mining activities. The Outsiders

countered by sending a deputation, led by Morgan, to Governor Sir Henry Barkly and Premier O’Shanassy, demanding a ban on company operations. It was an embarrassing situation, for the company had no legal right to mine gold on freehold land. Eventually the Chief Secretary was obliged to write to Brand, ordering him to cease work until parliament debated the issue or amended the law. In Clunes the letter was kept secret, though the general terms of it were soon known around the town.

          The Chief Secretary’s Archives still has Brand’s spirited reply on file. His company, he wrote, had a charter from Her Majesty to mine anywhere in Australia; besides, £10,000 worth of gold had already been filched away through illegal shafts and drives. The Government evaded the issue, and for more than a year did nothing, although mining went on.

          Then rumours gathered that the company planned to provoke a riot, a last resort to display the violence of the Outsiders’ mood. Whatever the truth of it, a riot certainly took place. More than two hundred men were involved in the renewed underground war. Once again these nineteenth-century sappers met beneath McDonald’s property, and fought hand to hand. The attacking Out­siders lit a fire underground, threw sulphur on it, tried to smoke out the defenders. Then the Insiders set their own fire going, until black smoke and fumes poured up to the surface. A surface attack developed on the company’s main shaft, where the whim and its housing were torn down. More Outsiders charged the shafthead of a second shaft, which was almost destroyed by the time police arrived. Many arrests were made, and the damage was assessed at £4,000.

          By the end of 1858 the Government had been forced to act. New legislation went through parliament enabling mining companies to operate on freehold land, but the bill was rejected by the upper house. On Victorian goldfields the issue was fiercely debated, and bitterness between the rival factions at Clunes took a long while to die. It did so only because of the rising prosperity as more and more payable reefs were found. Wild Morgan’s own syndicate eventually became a wealthy one, and the Star’s estimate of his gift for success proved true. It was no unusual story in the context of Australian pioneering: wealth and respectability are coevals in the end.

          It is odd to stand in this quiet paddock nowadays, where the mullock piles are overgrown, the shafts filled in, and the last poppet heads long ago dismantled. Somewhere beneath are the drives and tunnels where men fought savagely for the disputed rights to one another’s gold.

          Gold! It was the liberating force of nineteenth-century Australia; it demolished the drab regime of shepherds and old lags; created the wealth a huge, unknown continent required; brought out migrants of spirit and imagination by the millions; transformed the entire life patterns of a nation. And, when even wealthy mines like those at Clunes at last closed down their shafts, the new prosperity flowed into some other course. Here men returned to the land again.

          The old Clunes exists no more. No nuggets glitter these days on the counters of bars and banks. The new Clunes is smaller, less exuberant, yet far more stable than it was a century ago. It is a homely little community that the small-time farmer shows no desire to leave.

Down Eurunderee Creek

PIPECLAY

          “The predominant note of the scene was a painful sense of listening that never seemed to lose its tension,” Lawson wrote of his Golden Gully, “a listening as though for the sounds of digger life, sounds that had gone.”

          Today that sense of listening seems even more acute than when he lived there.

          Lawson’s country, amid the scrubby hills and neglected flats beyond Mudgee, is no more closely settled than when his parents tried to make some kind of living there. It was not the most attractive setting for a boy with his sensitivity to grow up in, even though it shaped his outlook and ideas, investing his tales with the kind of melancholy and wry humour that set him apart from the more facile writers of his time.

          On the road from Mudgee to Gulgong only a couple of fingerposts direct you to his old home. There is no home here any more. It was demolished, despite public protest and appeals to the Government, just after the second World War. Perhaps even then it was too late to preserve it, for white ants, dry rot, and vandals had reduced it to the typical shanty found in so many corners of mid-western New South Wales.

          And yet, as I remember it, the place did have some atmosphere. I photographed it shortly before they pulled it down. It stood beside a graveled road, only five miles out of Mudgee, overlooking the flats near Eurunderee Creek, untenanted and paintless, standing in a neglected garden that displayed more weeds than grass. A post and wire fence was in fair condition, although the small trees around it desperately needed water and bore no fruit. It had a shallow veranda with planks in disrepair, warped weatherboard for walls, and the usual galvanized iron roof. A large round tank, empty, stood by the kitchen door. Behind the little house rose one of those well timbered sidlings that Lawson so often wrote about.

          You could even identify that sidling, for there is more than one reference to it in his stories. Looking across at it, you could picture the young Lawson, like the boy in “A Day on a Selection,” “far up the sidling… vaguely indicated by half a dozen cows moving slowly- very slowly- down towards the cow yard,” or perhaps trailing after his silent, pipe-smoking father to learn how to strip stringybark or use the paintbrush that was to be a financial standby in later lean years in the city.

          A century ago this region, Pipeclay- or Eurunderee, as it was later known- was a prospering gold-bearing settlement. There is little to remind you of Lawson’s “roaring days” now, for men lived mainly in tents and shanties. The shafts have been filled in, only hummocks of brown earth remain, pitting the paddocks where a few cows and sheep continue grazing. Yet, substantially, the place has not changed. The scrub of those times has been almost cleared. There are neither shafts nor saplings in Sapling Gully. There is perhaps less feeling of isolation, for bullock drays, were long ago replaced by trucks and motor cars.

          Perhaps the locals would no longer believe in the reality of Cobb & Co. coaches, or the Jimmy Nowletts, and Joe Swallows who were once the cause of

A cloud of dust on the long, white road,

As the teams go creeping by.

A new building long ago displaced the Old Bark School where “as nearly every book dated back to Captain Cook, our geography was somewhat upside down.” But children still ride to school occasionally, as Lawson did; children still roam and play around the old diggings, as Lawson did, brooding over the ghosts of a past that was to provide him with many of his tales. Nor is his vision of Eurunderee any the less valid yet:

Still I see in my fancy the dark-green and blue

Of the box-covered hills where the five-corners grew;

And the rugged old sheoaks that sighed in the bend

O’er the lily-decked pools where the dark ridges end,

And the scrub-covered spurs running down from the Peak

To the deep grassy banks of Eurunderee Creek.

You could stand on the veranda of this cottage, as Lawson stood more than seventy years ago, and look across the Gulgong road at the Log Paddock, where his Peter McKenzie found his Golden Hole, and where long grasses have not yet hidden the mullock piles. And beyond it again, past the willows and sheoaks of leisurely Eurunderee Creek, is the farm selected by the Buckolts, whose son went to school with Lawson.

Behind the home that his father, Peter Larsen, built is the long dark ridge named Mount Buckaroo, which gave Lawson the title for his poem on grandfather’s selection, although Henry Albury’s property was actually beneath Lowe’s Peak, several miles farther up the road towards the ghost town of Home Rule.

The homestead itself was the scene of many stories, including “The Drover’s Wife,” “Wanted by the Police,” “An Old Mate of His Father’s,” and “A Day on a Selection.” I found it inexpressibly sad to find this place no more than a home for hornets and spiders, with little to preserve Lawson’s boast that his father had built it to last.

And over the side door, where Louisa Lawson had spent years training ivy on a pergola, there was only a mess of shriveled leaves.

You have to look elsewhere for the essential Lawson now. Along the green flats, down Sapling Gully, on Quartz Ridge, all of these names coming freshly to life in the casual language of those who now inhabit the same locality, however different it is in character. Even so, it is not hard to imagine that lonely, sensitive lad, friendless, not well understood, troubled by growing deafness and the jibes of local youth, as he wandered up that hill beyond the house, or leaned against that post and rail fence to hear the voices of his father’s friends describing a gayer life that used to be.

Pipeclay has more than its usual quota of ghosts.

It was Henry Lawson who preserved them. Stand there by the front gate and you can imagine the creaking of bullock drays as they wound along towards Granny Mathews’s Red Clay Inn, whose site was a few hundred yards farther on. Even when Lawson’s On the Track was first published, no trace of the pub was left. In fact, he wrote, “The nettles had been growing for over twenty years on the spot where Granny Mathews’s big bark kitchen stood.” But it provided him with a picturesque setting for “The Songs They Used to Sing” and other tales. A mile beyond the Red Clay Inn was another now vanished landmark:

Where the caravans of wool-teams climbed the ranges from the West,

On a spur among the mountains stood “The Bullock Drivers Rest”,

You could smoke and drink in quiet, yarn, or else soliloquize,

With a decent lot of fellows in the Shanty on the Rise.

Half a mile this side of the Shanty on the Rise is the turn-off that runs up Golden Gully to what used to be Old Joe Swallow’s place, now a poultry farm. Here, despite sheep and cows, it is possible to recognize the scene of Lawson’s first published story, “His Father's Mate”:

        It was Golden Gully still, but golden in name only, unless indeed the yellow mullock heaps or the bloom of the wattle trees on the hillside gave it a claim, to the title…The predominant note of the scene was a painful sense of listening…

          Here, perhaps, was the unusually acute vision of a young man already going deaf. Today’s farmers are doubtless unaware of that painful sense, which was also to be attributed to the tales he had heard in youth, the identities he remembered. All the same, it took genius for this melancholy bush lad to people once more the silent gully with the lively characters of an earlier generation; the diggers and fossickers; Joe Swallow musing on “the bullick-drivin’, cattle-drovin’, nigger, digger, roarin’, rovin’ days o’ long ago”; young Isley Mason alternately doing sums and winding the windlass for his father; and fearsome Mother Middleton of the Golden Graveyard whose “voice could be heard right across Golden Gully and Specimen Flat, whether raised in argument or in friendly greeting.”

          It has often been said of him that he invented little, that his genius lay in penetrating the marrow of the confined world he knew. Well, why not? This is a rare enough talent. A day’s drive around Mudgee will probably confirm such views, up to Gulgong, through the forgotten townships of Home Rule and Canadian, past Lahey’s Creek where Joe Wilson took up his selection and bought that double buggy, past Ross Farm and Wilbertree, the sluggish Cudgegong River and Havilah station and Budgee Budgee. A familiar world of fiction here takes on the flesh of reality. One day the characters he sketched from life will become as familiar to Australians as the types Dickens made so recognizable in Oliver Twist, Scrooge, and Uriah Heep.

          In this rough-hewn little pocket of the bush Lawson showed us vividly, with rare insight, the vital generation of men and women who, to use his own phrase, “made Australia.” They were pretty tough times, offered small success to those who had to live in such a time and climate. For many, their lives paralleled the story of Lawson’s father:

Twenty years, and from daylight till dark-

 twenty years it was split, fence and grub;

The reward was a tumbledown hut, 

and a bare dusty patch in the scrub.

Looking around Eurunderee, you realize how well the son also knew such a mode of life. Yet the characters with which he peopled the landscape were vital enough; the old gold-digging mates of his father, yarning of Ballarat and the Eureka Stockade and the “poor man’s rushes” of Gulgong and Pipeclay, of drovers and boundary riders, swaggies, shearers, jackeroos, squatters and roustabouts, selectors and union men, publicans, remittance men, and those who were “gentlemen once.” Here was all the raw material needed for Mitchell, the shearing philosopher, Sweeney and Joe Wilson, Tambaroora Jim, the Drover’s Wife, Andy Page who was Middleton’s roustabouts, Dave Regan and Nowlett and Big Ben Duggan, who raised the district to give Jack Denver a proper bush funeral.

Incidentally, his story “Roll up at Talbragar” is unquestionably the most detailed picture of the locality he drew.

Lawson’s poetic achievement appears all the more remarkable when you visit the place of his childhood, seeing at first hand the small world in which he grew up. Here, “where Eurunderee lies like a gem in the range,” Lawson the man draws closer to you than before, more human, better understood.

He was neither a great nor an original thinker, less a pioneer of literary ideas than a sensitive, impressionable fellow who responded quickly to the life around him, seizing upon the true and significant detail. He was a good listener, as he had always been from childhood, listening to the yarns of his father and friends, to the men of the diggings. He had unusual imagination, born of solitude as much as of memory. He could work up a casual anecdote to a compelling, simply designed story. In his poetry, rough as it was, he gave vigour and shape to the inarticulate feelings around him. In his prose, he sketched for the first time his Australian contemporaries as they really were.

And now there is only a small stone cairn to note where his youth was spent. And, beyond it, the half-filled shafts and weed-grown mullock piles stretching away towards the deep, grassy banks of Eurunderee Creek.

The Golden Mountain

HILL END

          My first visit to Hill End was an accidental one.

          Returning from Eurunderee to Mudgee, I had been reluctant to go back to Sydney direct by train. It is a dull journey, especially in wintertime when you have to change trains in the middle of the night at Wallerawang. Wallerawang…I remembered the dismal cry of a porter along the deserted, freezing platform. Then someone suggested cutting through to Bathurst by road mail and picking up the train there. It was only seventy miles on the first stretch to Hill End, he said. But others tried to warn me off.

“You want to keep away from that road,” someone said. “It’ll shake you to pieces, riding in Jack Bennett's truck.”

Fortunately, I ignored the advice. It was a fascinating journey, conjuring up an older, unfamiliar pattern of bush life; hardly related to modern Australia at all. Yet it began uneventfully enough. Bennett was a typical bush mailman, laconic, taking the country for granted, unimpressed by features that seemed to me unique. We ran for two or three hours through steep, green hills, with a scattering of farmsteads, orchards, and small selections. Here and there he pulled up to deliver newspapers, mail, bread, a package of meat. Once we met a party of rabbiters with a load of skins to send through to Bathurst; another time a farmer’s wife kept us yarning for ten minutes or so, while Jack Bennett jotted down a grocery order she wanted him to bring out next trip. It was like any other leisurely bush run.

Then, gradually, we left the region of fruit trees, split rail fences, and lucerne patches among neat little homesteads. We began to enter wilder country. The hills grew more rugged, smothered with boulders and bracken fem. There were few signs of human occupation. At last even these hills receded to a smoky blue backdrop for open country, with sparsely grassed flats and ragged trees. The road appeared to run alongside what resembled some forgotten battlefield, long abandoned. On either side were the remnants of old trenches, foxholes, craters that might have been made by mortar fire; or so it seemed.

Unexpectedly, we came to a town. Not much of a town. It was little more than a hamlet, set there at the centre of a wide and stony clearing.

It had one unpainted weatherboard store, with flimsy veranda posts and three rusty-looking bowsers, to give it a faintly modern air. Outside, on a wooden bench, a couple of old-timers sat stolidly in the sun, staring briefly at the dusty truck as we passed. Both had faces like withered apples, heavy moustaches, dungarees, and dinted, old felt hats. They might have been two characters displaced from a Lawson tale, somehow wandered away from their proper context. There was a second store, its paintless doors closed, and a faded red-brick post office where a saddle pony switched its tail beside a hitching post. The shadeless road snaked on again through piles of stone and rubble, climbed a low red hill and all that was left of the place was one abandoned shafthead, with slate-hued mullock piles glittering in the sun.

“What was that place?” I asked Jack Bennett.

“Hargraves.”

Hargraves! And we had raced through it in a minute or so, raised a dust cloud, passed by. The dust had been all that moved. He spoke the name so casually it seemed of no importance. Yet it was a name fresh from the history books; a key to this neglected countryside, the mullock heaps, the slit trenches forever flanking the road. Edward Hammond Hargraves. This was where he had wandered, with dollypot and prospector’s dish, more than a century ago. This was the region in which the whole course of the mid-nineteenth century had been changed. If it was not the first place where men had found the talisman of gold, it was pretty near to it; and they had honoured that sleepy hamlet with the first man’s name.

It had been Hargraves’s special country, for here he had ridden in search of cattle, battling to make a living in what later came to be regarded as Australia’s feudal times; the pre-gold age. The selection he took up in the 1830s as a hopeful English migrant had led him all over these flats and gullies. But it was not till, despairing of a livelihood, he joined the stream of gold-seekers crossing the Pacific to California that the future patterns of his own adopted land began to take shape. There, in the great rush of 1849, he was soon to discover likenesses with the mid-West of New South Wales. He was unsuccessful in California, but came home in thoughtful fashion, leaving Sydney for the mountains around Bathurst which, in absence, had stirred his imagination afresh.

Across the other side of the range we were now passing, Hargraves found his gold. It was at a place called Ophir, of which nothing now remains but a few weed-grown heaps of mullock, and an obelisk to commemorate those first joyous diggers whom Hargraves drew after him into the blue and lonely valleys. And then came the Turon field; richest of them all.

Hargraves, finding every square foot of the swift flowing Turon’s banks crowded with the shafts, tents, and shanties of the diggers, decided to work north- and so to Summerhill Creek, the township whose name has since been changed to his. As to who actually found the first nugget, opinion is divided. There were no official records of it at all. Some said it was the lucky strike of two discontented miners who had wandered up the Turon from down Sofala way. Another version was that two police troopers decided to make camp beside the creek and that their quick-eyed blacktracker, ordered to put up their tent, had struck the nugget at the moment he broke the ground for the tentpole. At all events, the ubiquitous Hargraves was soon there, thrusting his burly figure and choleric red face into the pages of history.

And why not? He had been with it from the beginning. “If this is gold country, Mr. Hargraves,” the Colonial Secretary had said to him down in Sydney when he reported gold at Ophir, “then it will stop the Home Government from sending us more convicts, and prevent emigration to California.”

It was a volte-face from earlier colonial policy, which had been to conceal all traces and rumours of gold, fearing the social upheaval that would follow, the challenge to squatters’ rule, the threat that common men would no longer recognize their proper place and station. Even in 1851- after Ophir and the Turon- the Sydney Morning Herald ponderously wrote:

Let us cling to the hope that the treasure does not exist in large quantities. Should our gold prove to be abundant in quantity, rich in quality, and easy of access, let the inhabitants of New South Wales and the neighbouring colonies stand prepared for calamities far more terrible than earthquakes and pestilences.

If the ghost of Hargraves still rides these tranquil flats, reining up in the half-forgotten township that carries his name, he could laugh off those town-bred fears in more than ghostly fashion. The rough, ruthless, sardonic, and often unkempt men among whom he had camped were those who transformed the sparse sheep-walks of the colony. Within a few years it became one of the most prosperous, creative, and exciting regions on the globe. To it came a new adventurous and independent breed of men, changing the whole economy, building up new wealth, building the cities even, and a new world of industry that left the old world of stringybark huts and sun-struck shepherds hopelessly behind. When Hargraves struck gold, there had been only four hundred thousand Europeans on the continent. Within ten years they numbered more than a million.

And then we came to Tambaroora.

Wattle was blossoming along the roadside; whole hedges of it, so that at first the pock-marked earth was almost obscured. There must have been big workings here, too, at one time. Shaded by wattle bush and dwarf, dry scrub, the trenches were deeper, continuous, scoured and sluiced to a miniature gorge. How many thousands of ounces had been washed and gouged out here?

Yet Tambaroora was almost nothing now, relapsing into the earth that had created it a century ago. A few shells of houses; wattle and daub, most of them, crumbling away, as dun-hued as the exhausted soils around them.

Beyond the creek were more crab-holed flats, more washed out gullies; a dead landscape reaching away to a horizon of marine blue hills. Out there, said Bennett at the wheel, Chinese had toiled by the hundreds, working over ground already pitted and sluiced by the less frugal Europeans impatient for quicker-won riches.

There had been a joss house here once. No sign of it now. There had been a sizeable mine, the Canton. And Canton had also been the town’s first name. Behind the ramshackle little Catholic church, Bennett said, you could find the remnants of a Chinese cemetery. There had been great funeral feasts staged there, celebrations that offended the Christian neighbours, with strange, discordant music, firecrackers, tinsel festooning on graves, and food offerings left to rot to appease the heathen gods.

Here at Tambaroora had been the first large-scale settlement of Chinese in Australia. They were not approved of, kept at a distance, ostracized on account of their queer habits, or, as Donald Friend has wryly put it, “Because of their opium-smoking, sodomy and gambling.” A more likely reason, he suggests, is because they were uncivilized enough to keep to themselves. At least they did no one else any harm; except for that one rare lawless man, San Poo. He was the only pigtailed bushranger in the records. His career was a short one. Angered by an arrogant white man’s world that enjoyed the goading and humiliation of his own people, he tried to terrorize the settlements strung out between Tambaroora and Mudgee. Surreptitiously, his own people gave him support. Then he made the error of shooting a policeman. He was hanged soon after at nearby Lambing Flat.

The first Chinese, coolies recruited from Canton, were only a small party arriving in 1853. Within the next year, when news of Australia’s riches reached Hong Kong, thousands began to make for Sydney. Nearly forty shiploads arrived by the end of 1854; sixty-one ships berthed the year after. They travelled direct to the mountains on foot, finding their way along the Turon and beyond without any but a few ill-pronounced English words.

But they worked as few Europeans were prepared to, subsisted on much smaller rations, and made a living on less alluvial gold a year than it took to carry the occidental digger through a single spree.

At one stage they shifted the entire course of Summerhill Creek no less than three times.

The mountains behind Bathurst soon spread their fame from Cornwall to Canton. To thousands of poor, expectant Chinese families back home, Australia took on the legendary name of Hsin-chin-shan. The New Golden Mountain.

Eventually, the richest and most enduring of these centres was Hill End, three miles farther along the once busy road. Seemingly enduring. Not much moves along its quiet byways any more, yet Hill End still has an air of vintage quality. You first become aware of it before any of its rooftops can be seen. The approach is most attractive as the road winds beneath a double line of handsome trees. Alderman Avenue is shaded from the hot summer sun by immense pines, planes, walnuts, and oaks, all of them the best part of eighty years old. They were planted by one of the two great men of the town, Alderman Beyers. It was his way of paying tribute to the fantastic wealth won from this country within a few decades. He was a rare man, this Beyers. A poor migrant, he arrived from Germany, with small hope of ever achieving riches, but he left the region a better place than when he came, and returned most of the money he won to his own community.

Holtermann, a fellow German, his partner in mining ventures and even more successful, was an altogether different type of man who thought first of his own fame and advantage and only by accident of his community, although his name will probably be remembered long after Beyers is overlooked by history. Today, at all events, you cannot move around Hill End without being conscious of what both men did.

A little way down Clarke Street is the modest cottage where Beyers spent most of his working life. It is a pleasant little place of weatherboard and flimsy veranda posts, overshadowed by the more spectacular decay of other timbered houses and abandoned stores. Many of these lack window panes, warped doors stand half open, while paint and plaster peel from neglected walls. Somewhere, you feel, you must come upon a stopped clock or a calendar fifty or so years out of date, but nothing seems to belong to the present at all. Even the shop signs glance backwards into time. There is, for instance, one evacuated, broken-windowed store that bravely advertises: “Specialist in Ladies Hairdressing. Attend at your Home if Required.” But there is no one inside; no chairs, no mirrors, nothing but dusty floorboards. Another, with boards nailed across the mullioned windows, declares: “Boxing Privately Taught. Fights 4.30 p.m. Lessons 9s.” It is still empty and silent when 4.30 comes around. A men’s hairdressing salon announces: “Union Prices. Hair Cut 1s. 6d.” But there are no such bargains any more. Elsewhere someone has chalked up on a timbered wall: “Not Home.” And another: “Gone to Gowings.” A more mysterious message had been cut into a wooden panel below the windows of a former drapery store. It reads simply: “DOSS.” What does it mean?

One of a few indestructible buildings is a little Anglican church. It has solid red brick walls, a steep roof of grey slate tiles, and one tapering spire. Here, too, is the remembrance of Alderman Beyers, for the furnishings and stained glass windows were gifts he made shortly before the local bank manager took him to the bankruptcy court. And yet the mild-mannered little German had always been a thrifty man. He gave away more money than he spent; mostly to local charities. His mistake had been in discouraging his daughter from a marriage with the bank manager, who found a most unchristian way of hitting back. They said that Beyers really had no serious debts. He happened to be a poor book-keeper, and left some of his bills unpaid too long. The official receiver subsequently found his assets to be worth thirty shillings in the pound, and all his debts were cleared.

Bernard Otto Holtermann was a very different character; grandiose, egocentric, given to strange whims and superstitions. He, too, left to posterity a kind of stained glass window. But it was his own achievements he tried to glorify.

This quaint memorial is in the Royal Hotel. The only one left of 52 pubs that once catered for the thirsts of 30,000 souls, the Royal still has a splendid atmosphere. This solid, foursquare building of red brick with overhanging balconies recalls a craftsmanship seldom seen today. Inside the large, shadowy bar is a finely carved bench of solid cedar. The bar counter, the heavy doors, and the staircase leading to the upper bedrooms are all made of cedar.

Also in this bar is Holtermann’s famous lithograph, framed in the rococo style of Victorian days. It exemplifies something he came to value more than all the gold he won from the eroded creek overlooked by this hotel. This was the much advertised Holtermann Life-Preserving Drops. The unknown artist has illustrated his message with the figure of the benefactor himself standing beside the celebrated Holtermann nugget. Strictly speaking, it should have had Beyers standing beside it as well, for the nugget was jointly found by both men early in their careers. Now, significantly, it has become Holtermann’s alone.

The nugget is a huge, broad-based boulder tapering to a peak on a level with the owner’s shoulder. Holtermann stares proudly out at the drinkers, his flowing black hair brushed out beyond his ears, his beard well combed, a heavy watch-chain looped across his double-breasted waistcoat; he wears a starched collar with winged bow tie, underscoring the self-satisfied smile of a provincial tycoon. How could anyone ignore the advice so wise a man was offering to the humble diggers in this bar? The artist has listed all the diseases and misfortunes these life-preserving drops can cure. Among them are: asthma, bronchitis, colds, diarrhea, dysentery, fever, headaches, spasmodic affections, sore throats, diphtheria, whooping cough, incipient consumption, sprains, bruises, and gout.

You feel that this astonishing nugget could not have fallen into more generous and deserving hands. Perhaps it is better not to trace the story of its finding in too great detail.

Holtermann, who was born in Hamburg, migrated to Australia at the age of nineteen. He was a restless young man who earned a living as best he could in the raffish atmosphere of Sydney in the early 1860s; as waiter, groom, ship’s steward, and photographer’s assistant. His luck turned when he waited at tables in a King Street hotel, named, oddly enough, the Hamburg Hotel. It was a pub where gold miners drank when they came to town, and he heard much talk of fortunes alleged to be won on the Turon River. It was there he met Beyers, who was already working on the field. The two young Germans went into partnership, washing, digging, prospecting between Sofala and Hill End- or Hawkins Hill, as it was then called. They had little luck. Holtermann was again obliged to turn to other trades, working as baker bartender, and butcher’s hand.

Then, in 1867, he and Beyers saved enough money to work a lease on Hawkins Hill.

Again they went broke. To settle their debts, they offered to sell either their horse and cart or the mine itself. The buyer, as it turned out, was foolish enough to prefer cart and horse. In despair, Holtermann disposed of his share in the mine to a noted character called Northumberland Jimmie. It was a common enough experience in 1861, when. it looked as if the fields were petering out.

        If James Brown, alias Northumberland Jimmy, had been a less careless individual, nothing more probably would have ever been heard of Bernard Otto. Brown was a gigantic man, hard working, but given to strange moods and dangerous in drink. An ex-convict who had struck it rich at Hill End, he once galloped his gold-shod horse through the streets. He also liked to ride across country to Bathurst with saddlebags filled with gold for the bank. But he, too, had grown careless of his wealth after buying Holtermann’s half-share, leaving Beyers to the hard toil of pick and shovel underground.

One day, a few weeks later, Holtermann happened to call on Mrs Beyers. She said she was worried about her husband, who had not come home as usual before dark. Perhaps he was in trouble down below. Perhaps a fall of rock had trapped him there. Holtermann offered to look for him.

When he climbed cautiously down the shaft, the candlelight revealed a fantastic scene. Beyers was crouching there as if he could not move. All around him were boulders, fragments of shattered rock and gold.

He crouched there amid a litter of golden nuggets.

Holtermann’s first action was to go in search of Northumberland Jimmie. He said nothing about the nuggets. All he said was he had changed his mind about selling that half-share.

It so happened that Jimmie was then broke. He was only too happy to take back his money.

There is no record of what he said when Beyers and Holtermann raised that tremendous nugget to the top. That was a later find; but not much later.

It happened in October, 1872. There had already been some phenomenal crushings on the field the year before. Beyers and Holtermann between them had won 2,341 ounces from twenty-two tons of ore. Two other miners, Hurley and Moore, had treated eighty-four tons for 1,145 ounces. Then, in the Holtermann- Beyers mine, recently renamed the Star of Hope, a shot was fired at the 130 foot level. The two men were almost blinded by what they saw.

They stared at a solid wall of gold. It was a single nugget, seven feet high. To gouge out this immense stone was a difficult job; to haul it to the surface even harder. A section of it broke off before it reached the shafthead. Even then it became the wonder of the district. It was 4 ft. 9 in. in height; 2 ft. 2 in. wide; and its average thickness was 4 ft. 6 in. It registered 630 lb. on the scales.

People came from all over the field to gaze at it. It was put on public show for a couple of days, then consigned to crushing in a local battery. The gold it contained brought £12,000 from a Bathurst bank.

It seems a pity that no one preserved this wondrous nugget which still holds the world’s record for weight and value. The money was more important, and it was reduced to dust. At least they made a cast of it, and a life-size model can still be seen in the Bathurst Museum. Holtermann had his photograph taken beside it as well. Copies of it later turned up in that life-preserving lithograph in the Royal Hotel; and also in a stained glass window he installed in his two-storey mansion overlooking the harbour at North Sydney- a place since acquired by a boarding school and still known as “Holtermann's Folly.”

From then on, Bernard Otto could do no wrong. He became king of a field that had now entered its second boom. The record crushings of earlier years were soon surpassed- in the year 1858, miners had produced more than 24,000 ounces of gold. By the end of 1872 there were 225 registered mining companies at Hill End. Their total capital amounted to £3,500,000- very big money in those days. It was now reef mining instead of alluvial. The population around Hawkins Hill alone was 30,000. No wonder Sir Hercules Robinson, the State Governor, spoke so enthusiastically about the town on his first visit in 1873. From the balcony of the Royal Hotel, he spoke of the growing reputation of the famous “Golden Mountain,” though he refrained from using that other well-known title, “Hsin-chin-shan.”

His Excellency praised “the large, well laid-out town, with straight streets and well-built stores and business premises, four churches and parsonages, three banks, two newspapers, a public school and a hospital, and, in short, an appearance on all sides of comfort and stability.”

It seemed as if it would all endure forever.

Stability there might have been. But not all these people were making good money. At least, not out of gold. A sizeable proportion of those mines were dubious affairs. Like the Trust and Try Company, for example. It was well named. The public trusted and subscribed £48,000 in capital. Later inquiries showed that only £2,000 of this went to developing the mine. The rest somehow found its way into the pockets of its directors. But no one could find the directors.

“Every shady means which such promoters could devise were used to trap the unsuspecting investor,” wrote M. E. Purser in his forthright pamphlet, Hawkins Hill, an Eldorado. “While the wave of interest in gold shares lasted, they reaped a fortune.”

By the end of 1873, a number of hopeful men had been ruined. New investors withheld their money or sent it elsewhere. It was doubly unfortunate, for the solid mines were then in the process of sinking deeper, requiring more capital, while the shows nearer the surface were nearly worked out. The peak year of production- 80,592 ounces- was reached in 1872. From then on, Hill End began to go downhill.

It was at this period that Holtermann began the only true crusading of his career. He decided to stand for parliament.

A new Goldfields electorate had been declared in 1871, and Bernard Otto made a major campaign against the bogus companies. Perhaps he was too sweeping in the remarks attributed to him by the Sydney Morning Herald, which he may have thought no one on the field would read. They did. Especially the promoters. Demonstrations were organized against him, he was denounced as a “traitor” by the Hill End and Tambaroora Times, and his effigy publicly burnt on Hawkins Hill.

He lost the election by five votes.

This didn’t worry him, for he had acquired a new passion. It had begun in 1872, when he met in Gulgong a brilliant, sensitive man by the name of Henry Beaufoy Merlin. To call him merely a photographer would not have done Merlin justice. He was, above all, an artist. With his emaciated cheeks, high coloration, and dark, deep-set eyes beneath a receding hairline, the Englishman looked a good deal older than his forty-one years. He was clearly a sick man. Somehow he infected Holtermann with his own single-minded enthusiasm for the camera. Or perhaps he touched an old chord, for Bernard Otto may well have remembered his photographic apprenticeship in Sydney.

At all events, the prosperous German saw a better way of immortalizing himself than by voting in the parliamentary lobbies of Macquarie Street, Sydney. He decided to commission Merlin to make a complete record of life on the goldfields, beginning with Hill End.

Merlin was a man well ahead of his time. Using the clumsy and painfully slow wet-plate method of the times, he set about creating a marvelous gallery of portraits and scenes. He caught the picturesque, raffish, ponderous, and pioneering spirit of the period in remarkable fashion. And he did so just as the character and enthusiasm of the golden age were beginning to vanish. There are fascinating groups of miners; crowded streets; bullock and horse drays toiling through potholes, dust, and mud; tradesmen at work; families before their wattle and daub cottages; mining machinery; travelling bishops and salesmen and company promoters. He ranged over the life of Hill End and Tambaroora and Sofala, of Gulgong and Home Rule. He left us the most exciting period collection Australia has yet seen. It appears as if Merlin set up his tripod wherever there was a chance of taking a picture and seldom, if ever, made a faulty one.

Yet to give Merlin the full credit is hardly fair. When he died of tuberculosis at the age of forty-three, his assistant, Charles Bayliss, carried on the work. Today it is difficult to tell their work apart.

It was Bayliss, for instance, who performed some of the most difficult jobs of all. When Holtermann built his splendid mansion on the north shore of Sydney Harbour, he added a tower with a single square-walled room at the top. It was a kind of camera obscura. Windows looked out in all directions. From them, Bayliss was instructed to take photographs that would, when joined together, provide a complete panorama of Sydney.

Although he had worked with enormous plates of heavy glass, which he had to treat and develop almost instantaneously, the results he achieved were amazing. Some of those plates measured 5 ft. 3 in. by 3 ft. 2 in.

The range and vividness of these photographs astonished Holtermann’s contemporaries. As he expressed it, “They included the whole of the city of Sydney and suburbs, the harbour and surroundings up to a distance of four miles, and more accurately than can be seen with the naked eye. Signboards three miles away can be read with ease on the prints, where it is quite impossible to see even the house with the naked eye.”

When the hero of Hill End showed his great panorama at a number of international exhibitions in Europe in 1877, he must have felt he was adding another wonder to the world. It helped him to achieve greater fame in the country of his birth than even his new-found wealth could do. From Hamburg he travelled to Paris, London, and New York, returning proudly for the Inter-Colonial Exhibition in Sydney during 1879.

Then, at some unspecified stage, he must have tired of all this, for he stored several thousand glass negatives away in boxes at his home. They remained there for more than half a century, forgotten. They were not rediscovered until 1951, when one of his grandsons opened the boxes and asked Kodak whether they were of any value.

They were.

As Keast Burke, editor of the Australasian Photo Review, wrote when new sets of these photographs were displayed:

        Australia can never repay Merlin for the perfection of his recording and portrayal of the lives of our goldfields pioneers. We feel that here are real people- men and women whom we can still come to know, whose lives we can share. Over the years so much has been forgotten, so much has changed.

Holtermann’s ultimate achievement was something far larger than that monstrous nugget he whisked away from the luckless hands of Northumberland Jimmie.

Yet this nugget was the symbol of his life. Its image was always before him. He exploited it not only for his magical formula against the vapours and disease, not only to perpetuate his portly figure in the Bathurst Museum. He had another stained glass window fashioned and set it in the Holtermann’s Folly on Sydney’s North Shore.

Nor did it do those angry men on Hawkins Hill much good to burn him in effigy. He bought the Post Office Hotel in Sydney’s York Street, imported the first lager beer from Germany, and acquired fresh mining interests in various parts of New South Wales. His visits to Hill End became rare, confined to occasional business trips. His loyalties were transferred to Sydney. In 1882, he stood for the St Leonard's seat in the State Parliament, was elected, and spent a single, undistinguished term there as a back bencher. There is no record of his having added anything to the arguments of the time. He died in 1885.

Because his life had been so spectacular, it was hard to realize that he was only forty-seven at his death.

Beyers continued to live in much less public fashion. He was more cautious with his money, although he seems to have been pretty casual about keeping track of it. It was he who left Hill End its most enduring memorial of all. Among the many charitable acts he made, including the donation of stained glass windows and furniture to his local church, was the planting of a magnificent avenue of trees. He spent considerable sums of money in importing seedlings from Germany, and has left behind him one of the most handsome approaches to a town to be seen anywhere in Australia.

Today, one hardly thinks of Hill End in terms of gold at all, even if one company did go briefly into production after the second World War. It has made its impression on the modern age in quite another way, as an artists’ town.

A number of contemporary painters have been attracted to the place, notably Russell Drysdale and Donald Friend. Hill End, neighbouring Sofala, and the Turon diggings have provided subjects for some of the finest paintings in the post-war age. It happened to be a period when artists and writers were rediscovering the Australian scene. And it would be hard to find anything more individual and picturesque than these old diggings. Donald Friend read a story I had written about the town after my first visit, persuaded Drysdale to drive up one week-end, and soon afterwards bought a pleasant, old-world cottage there. Before long a number of other artists came to stay- Margaret Olley, Paul Haefliger, Jean Bellette- and Hill End became the most painted region since Streeton and his friends settled at Warrandyte a generation before.

Hill End now belongs to the present as much as to the past. It has been recreated in a fashion rare among ghost towns. It has been given the final recognition through the eyes of those most deeply involved in the national ethos- the Australian artists.

The Combo’s Retreat

BORROLOOLA

          Borroloola is still curiously inaccessible to the outer world. For three generations of bushmen it has been a legend; a place where you can evade the creeping civilization of the modern Territory; the refuge of hermits and misogynists. Of the hundreds of unattached men dreaming of settling there, few ever arrive.

Yet, it is not hard to reach. The track down through the rocky ranges north of the Barkly Tableland is not as rough as it was; one boat a month struggles at least half-way up the tidal McArthur River; and there is even an airstrip. But aircraft hardly disturb the mental peace of the few remaining inhabitants, for only one a fortnight touches down, taking off again after refueling. Anyone who wants to leave the plane here must wait a couple of weeks for the next one; and there is little enough to persuade any stranger to stay.

The difficulty of reaching the ‘Loo, is largely psychological. You must have achieved a certain frame of mind to make the decision. The McArthur is the ancient Greeks’ Nepenthe. Once here you must resolve never to return; or merely make no resolutions at all.

How else could those few old men, bearded like Old Testament prophets, supporting themselves on bush staves, hobbling and teetering around the local mob of goats, feeding bower birds, or living as the late Roger Jose did in an upturned rainwater tank; how else could such men have reconciled themselves to the trance-like life of fakirs.

This is essentially an old man’s paradise.

When I was last there, its population of four boasted an average age of seventy. The 'Loo, Albert Morcom assured me, had the lowest birthrate in Australia. Apart from the aborigines, who did not count, it had stood at exactly 0 for years. Which did not at all mean that these youthful veterans were entirely celibate.

The Combo's Retreat, Bill Harney once termed it.

The overland route to Borroloola goes over the Barkly stock route, past Brunette, Anthony's Lagoon, and Walhallow till the mirages on the Mitchell grass plains give way to purple, boulder-strewn hills, jump-ups, and rough ravines that are savage on motor tyres. Beyond the hidden valley of Malapunyah, which raised a great family of stockmen, male and female, you come to a chain of beautiful lagoons. There are fine stands of paperbark here, magnificent gums, thickets of tea-tree, and all manner of wild life on the silver waters; magpie geese, cranes, spoonbills, brolga. As a rule, these lagoons are bright with water-lilies and lotus flowers.

The lotus should be the emblem of the 'Loo.

It is not much of a town, in the accepted sense. You could drive right through it before realizing it was there. The first sight is of the great, sloping iron roof of the old post office, rising out of dense mangoes and gum trees. Its courtyard is denoted by some rotting timber posts and the abandoned, rusting chassis of a pre-war car. It is still possible to post a letter here, if you have plenty of time, for this is now the “residence” of Jack Mulholland, a recluse with two black gins perennially squatting beside him on the broad, stone-flagged veranda.

Even on windless days, some loose iron sheet in a wall creaks mysteriously from the gloom within.

The main street is now the aerodrome. Nothing is left of the original town these days. There is only a windsock drooping from an iron mast where the last hotel stood. There was a big to-do when the pub was delicensed some years ago, to be knocked down at the orders of Civil Aviation. After all, what did the locals care if it stood at the intersection of north-south and crosswind runways. This was an hotel that had stood at more important crossroads; the historic stock routes of the North.

The 'Loo took root at the spot where Ludwig Leichhardt crossed the McArthur River, making his incredible journey on foot to Port Essington in 1845. The first cattlemen to overland their stock across the Territory came this way; D'Arcy Uhr, Bluey Buchanan, Tom Cahill, the Duracks, and the MacDonalds. Long before sub‑artesian bores were sunk across the Barkly, drovers and overlanders travelled their great mobs around by the Gulf road, through Normanton and Burketown, then on to the Roper River and across the Overland Telegraph line to the Victoria.

The McArthur was a good place for a camp, and so the first pub grew.

When the telegraph line was built, supplies and materials were shipped around to the Gulf, landed at Borroloola, and carted overland to the top end of the Territory. Stores for the Barkly stations were unloaded here, taken up through the ranges by horse teams and bullocks. It was a hot climate, and men of this stamp acquired inhuman thirsts. As Alfred Searcy expressed it in those days, “The heat here was so intense it made the eyebrows crawl.”

There were several pubs by the turn of the century. And a police station, of course. The steamy, mud-walled lock-up behind it had a concrete floor, with a heavy iron ring to secure the neck chains of native prisoners. There was a big, cavernous store, where men spent the long days yarning as much as they did in the pubs. It was frequented by stockmen as well as beachcombers, by bagmen and assorted travellers, bullockies, teamsters, ships' crews, and the occasional hawker who travelled a thousands miles to the 'Loo and back with trade goods for sale; coloured shirts, horseshoes, pain-killer, riding boots, razors, as well as trinkets, dresses, and beads for men to buy for their “black boys.”

The phrase was a Borroloola euphemism. They wore men's breeches and shirts, mustered cattle, and lived in the camps. They were often better horsemen than their brothers. They made good and faithful mates, the old gin shepherds used to say, and their girlish laughter could often be heard around the men's campfires in the paperbarks by night. It was from Bill Harney I heard the Combo's Anthem; and Bill was an old hand who lived many years in the 'Loo.

They are comely and dark, and the glint of their eyes

Are as dewdrops that gleam on a wintry sunrise,

And the firm rounded breasts that seductively tease

Are like seedpods that sway from squat baobab trees.

It is a song that has not often been sung since the last hotel was pulled down. Yet, only a dozen years ago, Borroloola made nation-wide news with a double wedding in the town. It then had five inhabitants. The two brides were granddaughters of those early “black boys.” It was said that these were no shotgun weddings. It just so happened that a government patrol officer had come to the district, and a new ordinance relating to aboriginal women was then being enforced.

The bearded old patriarch of the 'Loo, where beards anyhow were unremarkable, was also noted for his devotion to the women of the land. He married two of them. Roger Jose had taken his first wife from the Adelaide River in 1927, shocked Darwin by marrying her in the registry office there, then lived with her in the 'Loo for thirty years. When she died, he married her sister. He was then sixty-three.

I am glad to have met old Roger before his death in 1962. He was the type of old Territorian we shall see no more. He had a good mind, though he was given to withdrawals and long silences. The. hermit's life had given him a gentle contempt for material things. Money and possessions he referred to as “garbage.”

“Man's true wealth,” he said, “is the fewness of his needs.”

He lived like Diogenes in his upturned water tank. It was a modestly spacious home, giving him all the shelter he required. It was rather bigger than Diogenes' famous barrel, for it had originally been a 5,000 gallon tank used for storing rainwater.

Jose had hardly left the 'Loo since his arrival there by packhorse mail from Camooweal in 1916. Believed to have been born in Sydney, he went bush as a young man, then spent three years hoofing it across from Cunnamulla. To his old mates he claimed to be a nephew of Arthur Jose, the Australian historian. With his forthright views on missionaries, he must have been an embarrassment to his family, for his father had been a former dean of Adelaide.

No one could ever make converts of the aborigines, he declared. They had too strong a culture of their own; a profound attachment to nature that transcended the white man's materialistic creed.

“The black man is not a Christian,” he would say indignantly. “He's a rice Christian, that's all. Give him a bag of rice, or tobacco, and beef- too right, he'll sing your whitefellow hymns. So would I.”

Yet the old man knew and respected his Bible. He read it, as he did the classics, as literature. The first time he saw the modern language version, he denounced the Anglican Church for destroying its fine language.

When a pressman visiting the 'Loo asked for his opinion of it, he grew impatient with the normal techniques of interviewing.

“I'll dictate it,” he said abruptly. “Print this: Like many of his kind, this salty, uninhibited, utterly hopeless old recluse is a dyed-in-the-wool paranoiac. His current obsession is the cremation while still alive of those reptiles who would fain interfere with The Book.”

Even his denunciation was in the Old Testament manner.

The Sydney newspaper which once described him as a “philosopher” was being a little romantic. Philosophy is a sustained intellectual discipline, not musing under a banyan tree amid a scrabble of goats. But he was extremely well read. Like Harney, he learnt to enjoy Plutarch's Lives, the travels of Marco Polo and Magellan, Shakespeare's tragedies, the great poets of the eighteenth and nineteenth century as well as Homer, Herodotus, and Karl Marx.

Bill Harney once confessed that he had read Horace on the dunny behind the Borroloola pub.

The city-bred may find it absurd that “broken-down bushwhackers” should read such literature in a “dump” like the 'Loo. There are two good reasons why they did.

As Harney once told me, you could not afford to read anything else in the bush. You had to live with your books up North. If you read trash, you would throw it away after one reading. Good books became old friends; you sought them out in the long idle days; read them again and again. The other reason was the Carnegie Library.

This was the most celebrated building in the 'Loo. This, too, has vanished now. Demolished by white ants, as so many of the books were too in the end.

The older hands remember a notice nailed to the library door. It announced that the collection had been started by Corporal Power, of the South Australian police, who had applied for a Carnegie Grant. The story goes that the trooper, bored by this lonely outpost, had written to the Carnegie Trust in New York, asking for something to read. The trustees may have lacked a map of Australia; or else they were impressed by such an imposing name. Perhaps they ranked it with Melbourne or Sydney. They made a rich grant, and the books eventually arrived by an old tub of a coastal steamer up the McArthur. The effect on these lotus-eaters was remarkable.

Harney, for instance, had hardly read a book in his life before. The library helped to shape his astonishing agility of mind, turned him in to one of Australia's best story-tellers, whose tales might otherwise have been dissipated into the empty air of the North. Now there is nothing left of that library. Bushmen borrowed many of those books, and never returned them. The rest were devoured, even more effectively, by the termites that ate most of the town away.

A few years ago Albert Morcom, another whose grave has been recently dug outside the 'Loo, showed me the last remaining Carnegie book. He was then preserving it in his own tin shanty near the river. The book was a rare copy of C. W. Russell's seventy-year-old Reminiscences of Early Queensland, which had a good deal to say on the events that helped to open up this country.

Bill Harney actually read those books the hard way. He was having an enforced stay in Borroloola at the time. He was in jail. After some years of fishing for trepang around the coast, he took up a cattle run near Wollorgorang with a partner. It was not easy to make a living on Seven Emus and, for some unexplained reason, they became involved in a cattle-duffing charge. Harney was arrested, brought back to the 'Loo, found guilty, and jailed. Naturally he appealed.

The papers were sent off on the packhorse mail to Katherine. It was the Wet season, and communications were slow. Someone sent his appeal on to Darwin, where the court was probably not sitting. It was five months before news returned to the McArthur- that his appeal had been upheld. Which meant, he said afterwards, that he had spent five months in jail for nothing.

He used the time profitably. Most of it was spent reading books borrowed from Corporal Power's library.

It is doubtful if Bill had ever thought of writing in those days, but Albert Morcom recalled an enlightening remark before Harney left Borroloola. “The black man has been living off our backs a long while,” he told Albert. “From now on, I'm going to live off his.”

He did so effectively in later life, telling us much that would have been otherwise forgotten.

Borroloola life must have been unique. It was almost completely reduced to a tribal level. Money was of no account. Living was at no higher than subsistence level. Since there were no wages, no floating money, men had to exchange what goods they had. The baker supplied bread to the butcher and received meat in return. The storekeeper exchanged tea and flour for paw paws, or local fish. When someone opened an account, the things he bought were charged against whatever he could offer in return. The only form of book-keeping was a system of debits and credits totaled up at the end of the year. If he could not settle up, he just had to leave the town.

The blacks, too, were adept at this kind of trading. There were plenty of fish in the river; huge barramundi, cod, and bream. They sold them for sticks of tobacco, flour, or tea.

There is one nice story of such trading that happened in the post-war years. An old-time resident received a bill from a Darwin store, asking him to settle immediately. He did so, posting off a cheque which had been drawn by someone else several years previously. As the signer had left the Territory a longtime ago, the bank disallowed the cheque. The demand for a new one shocked the entire town. What was wrong with that cheque, anyway? It had been passed around the 'Loo for years, accepted as legal tender as any bank note was.

All told, money was something to be regarded with suspicion on the banks of the McArthur.

There was the case of Roger Jose less than a decade ago.

From time to time he was not averse to working. He took pride in his skill in making roads. At least, in grading existing tracks. One year the Department of Works commissioned him to repair a stretch of dirt road leading towards Anthony's Lagoon. He was supplied with a tractor, to which he attached a heavy log, and smoothed out the corrugations. His report was written in the careful handwriting of a scholar:

“I have the honour to report, that I have completed my work on the road to Anthony's Lagoon. While the Roman engineers who built so well for Julius Caesar would perhaps not regard it as a first-class highway, I feel confident that, were they able to make an inspection, I would be allowed to keep my head.”

After many signatures and initialing in Darwin, the document was passed on to the Sub-Treasury. Back came a cheque for £300. Jose was appalled. Such an amount would at once involve him in all manner of difficulties.

He would have to pay income tax.

Refusing to accept the cheque, he wrote to Darwin asking them to reduce it to £102, the utmost he could be paid without having Caesar's tax-gatherers descend on the 'Loo. But this disrupted the government machinery, too. Once money had been passed for payment, it could not be rescinded. The whole issue threatened to end on the Auditor-General's desk. Interdepartmental­ discussions went on for many months before it was finally decided to cancel the original draft, replacing it with a cheque for £102.

The affair was reminiscent of a remark Bill Harney made to me many years ago, while camping at another of his beachcomber's retreats; at Two Fella Creek, near Darwin. “The secret of living is not to make money,” he said. “It is to live without money.”

Albert Morcom was another who had lived by this principle.

In younger days he had run the famous pub at Newcastle Waters. He sold it to live a nomad's life with an Afghan hawker, travelling all over the Territory; up the Murranji and down the Daly; across to the Kimberleys and, finally, to the McArthur. The great bamboo clumps, weighted mango trees, waterholes jumping with fish, and the lily lagoons impressed him greatly, and he carried around a dream of it for many years. In 1947 he gave up another secure job in the Alice to settle here, where he stayed.

Yet, when I met him, he was talking of an even more Utopian place. Vanderlin Island. Not far out from the river mouth, this uninhabited island had even more to offer, he said. Fish from the deep sea, fat Cape Barren geese, turtles dragging themselves up the beach for the pot.

“Queer thing,” he said, rocking himself in a chair on his ant bed floor. “When I had my health, I never went down to that island. Now I've lost it I feel I'd like to go. Well, that's how life is…”

With his lined, leathery face, grey shock of hair, and long beard streaked with white, old Albert was really as reconciled to the 'Loo as the rest. Why not, when he lived almost without any effort at all.

I admired the large vegetable garden at the back of his shack, screened from the river by huge bamboos. It was well watered, and even had bamboo irrigation pipes.

“Ah, yes,” he said. “The blacks from the mission look after that for me.”

Later he said I had better stay for dinner. He had a big barramundi one of the lubras would cook for him. Where did he catch his fish, I asked him.

“I leave that to the blacks,” he said. “They're good with a spear. Been doing it for centuries. Why should a new chum kill himself? Besides they never want much for them down here. Two bob's all I ever pay.”

“For a twelve-pound barramundi?”

“Too right. Mind you, a man expects them skinned and cleaned for that.”

Besides, he added, it was not advisable to take too many risks with the waterholes around this town. The McArthur was famous for the size and ferocity of its crocodiles. There was no one here with the time or energy to shoot them. This was one of the problems of encouraging the aborigines to come to town, for most of them lived at a mission across on the other bank.

He told me of four mission kids who had wanted to cross a little while before. They had been well trained over there, so they knelt and prayed to be allowed to swim the wide river in safety. When they dived in, the rest of their people hollered and yakkai-ed as the boys churned up the water in a panic to reach the other side. Next day a stranger shot a twelve-foot crocodile just upstream of that crossing.

I asked Albert if he thought the yakkai-ing had done more good than the praying.

“Too right,” he said. “They're a practical people.”

Albert knew more of the folklore of these parts than anyone other than Harney. He talked of the early days when Bennett the hawker used to camp with his wagon and horses outside the big store, selling his wares, as fast as he could uncrate them, to blacks and whites alike. Of the annual race meetings, when the judge supported himself in the doorway of the store, rum glass in hand, often unable to see the winner as the race swept down the dusty street. Of the smoke signals sent up down-river when the long-awaited boat arrived with beer kegs and whisky. Of the big teamsters' camps just outside the town, halted there for months in the Wet till the outback roads dried out.

There was his famous tale of Henry Sayers, local storekeeper and J.P., nicknamed King Stealem because of the hard bargains he drove. No one was known to get the better of him, not even one local deadbeat arrested on a drunkenness charge.

“Guilty,” Sayers declared in the stifling courtroom. “Fined two pound ten for being drunk. And the four pound ten you owe me. That makes seven quid.”

Now there is no court house; no pub or general store. There is not even a police station these days, for the last mounted trooper was transferred some years ago. The old lock-up is still there, where Bill Harney learnt to read the classics. He was greatly amused when I sent him one of the few telegraphs to be handled by that ramshackle post office in recent years. He was then the Keeper of Ayers Rock, half a continent away. My wire said I had just visited an historic shrine, and hoped he had not forgotten the lessons he had learnt behind those iron bars. Poor old Bill. He has gone now, too.

The last links with the old beachcombing days of Borroloola have almost vanished. They will have gone completely, in another year or two. Mount Isa Mines have found rich silver-lead a few miles out. An all-weather road is already on its way through from Daly Waters.

The old-timers would not have approved of so much traffic raising dust in a street that once led to nowhere.

Redcoats and Macassarmen

PORT ESSINGTON

          How many lonely shores are there to this immense and sparsely peopled land?

          It is something you cannot help asking as you sail or fly around the continent, especially on its tropic coasts. From Cape York, a thousand miles along the Gulf of Carpentaria, are nothing but bleached sands receding into the heat haze, mangroves, swamplands. Hardly a sail or habitation anywhere. For five hundred more, only the rough and desolate shores of Arnhem Land. Then, at the end of it, a lost peninsula; more empty beaches, cliffs, jungle scrub; forever emptiness.

          Coburg Peninsula occupies a small place on the map, yet here too the shoreline seems endless; the scrublands behind it unoccupied, losing their smoky greens in the distance. I have regretted not landing there. Few people have done so; at least for generations. These days there is hardly an aboriginal there either.

          To look down on it, from a low-flying aircraft, as we did crossing the peninsula from Darwin to Croker Island, you feel that it must be unfit for human occupation. Why else has it been abandoned?

          And yet, almost a century and a half ago, Europeans sailed into this jade green bay and settled here. There was then no other settlement at all throughout the tropic zone. Brisbane did not exist; nor Perth. The nearest centre of life to Port Essington was Sydney Town, more than three thousand miles away by sea. As for an overland route, no one had considered it possible when most of the interior was still unknown.

          Our ambulance plane flew at just over a thousand feet. Immediately below were a few small, rounded hills, the endless spread of dark-green foliage, reddish cliffs, and almost emerald shallows. A wide bay was stippled with silver under the clear sun.

          I hoped it might have been possible to see some trace of that forgotten settlement. There was nothing. No clearing amid the scrub; no hint of barracks or fort; no fallen stones even to suggest the housing of convicts and redcoat officers. In Darwin a geologist had told me there were a few foundations left. A land survey party had come across stone blocks and an anchor chain smothered in undergrowth.

          The tropic jungle has no regard for human energies and it soon smothers again.

          After all, Port Essington was finally closed down in 1849.

          “The capital of the North,” those early optimists had called it. Why not? There was no other. They named it, in the grand fashion of the day, Victoria. They talked of making it the great British trading post for Asia, more vital than Singapore. “Port Essington,” Capt. Phillip Parker King, R.N., reported to the British Government after surveying it in 1818, would “at no very distant period become a place of great trade.”

          Within six years Captain J. J. G. Bremer had landed a naval party here, raised the Union Jack, and echoed Whitehall's vision of trading with Java, Macassar, the Celebes, and China.

          There was really nothing new about such visions. Trade, of a kind, had been going on with these places for centuries through the aborigines. At the beginning of every Wet season, proas from what we now call Indonesia had drifted down on the north-west trade winds, skirted Bathurst and Melville Islands, landing on the peninsula at Trepang Bay, which they called Limbabunang, Tunang, and Port Essington, or Limba Caraj'a, then trading right along the coast of Arnhem Land and around the Gulf of Carpentaria. They fished for trepang, turtle, and pearl shell, set up small boiling down works ashore, then waited for the end of the Wet, when the south-east trades would blow them home.

First man to see these fleets of Malay proas had been Matthew Flinders in what he called the Malay Road, among the English Company's Islands at the eastern tip of Arnhem Land. That was in 1803. The trade with the aborigines was continued until the end of the century, when it was stopped by federal government action, with the imposing of heavy duties. Much of the subsequent hostility of the Arnhem Land tribes was said to have been due to this interference, which cut off their supplies of tobacco and strong island liquor. This exchange of goods through Port Essington and other places had been established for so many hundreds of years that it had just as much sanction as our own preferential trade with Britain of a later day.

In the early nineteenth. century the British were shrewd enough to see its possibilities, and in 1839 Sir John Barrow, F.R.S., read a paper to the Royal Geographical Society in London, discussing a report by Captain Bremer, R.N., on progress made at Port Essington. He spoke of shipping trepang through Singapore for sale to wealthy gourmets in China, a trade that had been worth millions to the Malay fleets from Macassar and the Celebes.

Furthermore, he said, “it must be obvious that a coast so situated in relation to the Dutch Archipelago and to the shores of India ought not to be left open to any European or Asiatic power that might find it convenient to avail themselves of our absence, and establish a settlement that in a little time might prove another Singapore.”

Such was the thinking in Britain which led to the founding of a comic opera colony around the blue muds of this far-off, tropic bay. Port Essington and Singapore were born within a year of one another, but the little redcoat settlement never blossomed as did Singapore. Its unreal atmosphere was just not suited to either power politics or world trade.

Also, between 1818 and 1839, local feelings about this tropic paradise had somewhat changed. Maybe English soldiers were not of the right temperament for paradise anyhow.

I looked down at the hot dry scrublands that had buried it all, wondering how they could possibly have lived there under the conditions of the time. To have paraded down there in their stifling uniforms, hot red tunics buttoned tightly to the neck, serge trousers, and crippling boots. Sunstroke toppled quite a few of them, as they marched up and down the forgotten clearing, or stood at sentry duty around a flimsy fort. Scurvy struck down others, or mysterious fevers, and dysentery. Officers in resplendent shakos trailed their swords through jungle and mangrove swamp, where the only threat to security was the brown snake and the alligator.

Of course, there were the aborigines. In the back country they carried some pretty nasty implements; stone-headed war clubs and long, multi-barbed spears. But the ones who camped around the bay seemed tame enough and supplied their new masters with fish and oysters and turtle-meat.

Yet that first hopeful settlement lasted only three days. In 1824 Captain Sir J. J. Gordon Bremer marched fifty soldiers of the 3rd Regiment and forty-five convicts ashore, set up camp while searching for water, found none, and ordered them aboard again.

On the fourth day they sailed for Melville Island, anchored off Mermaid Shoal, where to the disappointment of the ship's company no mermaids were sighted, and founded Fort Dundas. After hauling ashore some brass cannon for a royal salute, scaring the white cockatoos and a few gaping tribesmen with a salvo in honour of Trafalgar Day, the red-coated captain found the island equally unattractive and three years later moved on to Raffles Bay, forty miles east of Port Essington. For the next nine years an ever-shifting settlement struggled on here, but the Macassarmen ceased to come, no trade developed, the soldiery grew restless and sick, kept the small hospital perpetually filled, and by 1838 they were all back on Port Essington again.

It was a game of snakes and ladders in a stifling, humid setting, where monsoonal storms broke in thunder above the jungle and the subsequent long Dry season haunted the inactive regiment with its loneliness and boredom.

Now began the splendid days of Captain J. McArthur, Commandant. He found good water, sank several wells, had a neat row of timber cottages built for his men, ran up a store, hospital, and the inevitable fort with a moat surrounding it as protection against desperate siege.

Commenting on it several decades after the place was finally abandoned, Alfred Searcy, sub-collector- of customs at Port Darwin, commented wryly, "If the niggers then went in for night-work, the moat must have afforded them excellent cover to crawl upon the unfortunate sentries, several of whom, it was said, were speared. The question arose how many spears a nigger could throw while a soldier was loading and fixing up his old musket. Those who could have answered are all dead.

“Even the chance of being speared must have become monotonous,” said Alfred Searcy in Australian Tropics.

From his little whitewashed cottage Commandant McArthur sent self-important despatches back to Whitehall, forecasting the trading boom with the East that was still to come. The Macassarmen came, it is true. They anchored their picturesque craft in what, two decades earlier, Captain Bremer had called “the most beautiful and noble of harbours.” They hauled the black, blubber like trepang from the sea-bed, boiled them in the glow of furnaces along the beaches, exchanged tobacco among the blacks for dugong, turtle shell, and beeswax, and then sailed home again. It never seemed to occur to them that they could have opened trade discussions with the eager Englishmen in the red tunics and starched white stocks.

Perhaps they merely wondered what such exotic characters were doing on the beach at all.

Then came Captain J. L. Stokes in H.M.S. Beagle, predicting in 1839 that “Victoria must one day be the centre of a vast system of commerce, the emporium, in fact, where will take place the exchange of products of the Indian, Archipelago for those of the vast plains of Australia.”

It was unfair then of Thomas Huxley, arriving nine years later in H.M.S. Rattlesnake, to comment that Port Essington was “about the most useless, miserable, ill managed hole in Her Majesty's dominions.”

Meanwhile the Commandant continued to send home his despatches. Each one was headed, as was every personal letter he wrote:

“Government House, Victoria, North Australia.”

Whitehall was doubtless unaware they were signed and blotted in a humble, whitewashed cottage behind the driftwood on an arid beach.

Yet, in the end, they must have become aware of this. At the very time that Commandant McArthur was urging the outlay of £25,000 to create a worthy “capital city of the North,” the Secretary for the Colonies was decreeing that this unproductive little waste land be abolished. Its death sentence came in 1849.

By the time John Lewis reached the place after a fantastic ride up the Overland Telegraph, across the East and South Alligator Rivers, and around the edge of Arnhem Land, there was hardly a trace of it left. That was in 1873, when he arrived to form a cattle station in virgin country he had never seen.

In his book, Fought and Won, he wrote:

“We struck the bay about a hundred and fifty yards below the old camp. The first thing we noticed was an old broken 400 gallon iron tank. Travelling for about a hundreds yards to the north of the tank, we came across the ruins of the old place and the stone jetty. We, discovered some fruit in the garden adjoining the settlement, which was unknown to myself or the members of my party. We also saw a number of pineapples, a few bananas, jack fruit and guavas; and we discovered a few graves. One was that of the wife of Captain Lambrick, the natives told us. On our way across the Peninsula we saw a little mob of English cattle.

We had found natives at the camp on our arrival, among them one who spoke exceptionally good English, and rejoiced in the name of Flash Poll. She informed me that she had been a servant of Captain Lambrick, and that she could repeat the Lord’s Prayer. I gave her a stick of tobacco, portion of which was immediately cut up very finely and rolled in. a cabbage leaf palm. Flash Poll called it a caleroo. She took three long draws, inhaled the smoke, and knocked the ash. off the point of the cigarette and swallowed it.”

All of this did not seem very much to show for twenty-five years of English colonizing, especially swallowing hot ash.

Later John Lewis discovered that, in addition to reciting the Lord's Prayer, Flash Poll could sing a psalm and use appalling swear words.

Lewis stayed long enough to found the Coburg Cattle Company, mustering some of the water buffalo which Bremer had brought from Timor for transport and meat, and which had subsequently gone wild. Then he left a manager in charge and rode home to Adelaide. John Lewis was a tough-fibred, enterprising man. Son of the English seaman who looked after the bullock drays on Sturt's last expedition, he became a major figure in the South Australian Government and fathered the most influential man in the twentieth century's industrial life- Essington Lewis.

The future chairman of the B.H.P. was named, of course, after Bremer's vanished Port Essington.

When Alfred Searcy sailed into Port Essington to levy duties on the Malay traders in 1883, he found Lewis's manager, E. O. Robinson, to be the only white man living on the entire peninsula. Cattleman, buffalo-shooter, hunter of trepang, Robinson was as colourful a figure as Searcy himself. He did the schooner the unusual honour of putting on some clothes, including his chief article of dress- a revolver in its holster.

“Robinson always kept his word with a nigger,” Searcy records. “If he said he would give one a stick of tobacco, he would do so; and if he said he would break a man's head, he would carry out his threat. I've seen him do it.”

Territorians in those days were forthright men.

Searcy enjoyed himself hugely sailing these coasts and islands, matching shots with dangerous blacks, shooting crocodiles, running down Malay smugglers and Chinese opium-dealers in Port Darwin., roistering around the dismal ports of the Gulf. He happened also to be an acute observer of contemporary life. His descriptions of the great fleets of proas from the Indies are the most vivid anyone has left us.

There was one memorable scene at his mainland revenue collecting station opposite Croker Island; the Malays called it Oojountambalnoonoo.

“What a chance that would have been for a marine artist. The twelve canoes, which were almost in line, had their immense mat sails hoisted on the triangular mast, and were gliding through the rippling water; on either side of the straits were the glistening sandy beaches backed by forest trees and jungle, while just beyond the canoes were four proas at anchor, close to the beach, on which the Malay camp was formed. The masters were soon on board, all in gorgeous array, and produced their papers.”

These proas, which ranged from ten to thirteen tons, were very clumsy craft, Searcy thought. They could only sail before the wind, which was why the Macassarmen had to depend on the trades to bring them down to Australian waters and home again. They had wooden hulls, matting sails, ropes and hawsers made of plaited cane, and decks, roofs, and yards of bamboo. Two rudders were used to steer them, one on each side of the stern. The wood or bamboo masts had two stays, resembling a long trident, with wooden steps fitted between masts and stays where the seamen stood to hoist the sails, which were unrolled rather in the fashion of a window blind. The high sterns resembled nothing so much as gigantic dovecots, with small rooms or holes where the crew lived. Galleys were nothing more than large iron pans with fires set underneath.

On shore at Oojountambanoonoo on that occasion, Searcy wrote, were four great smoke-houses, built of palm leaves and bamboo. At least a hundred Malays were working around them. Some wore little more than loin cloths, others had gay-coloured sarongs, and all wound gaudy handkerchiefs around their heads.

It was then that Searcy also explained why those Utopian English officers had been unable to achieve an export trade at Port Essington:

“The natives who procured the shell saved it all for the Malays, because they could always get spirits in payment. These proas had between them one hundred and thirty men, and nineteen large canoes engaged in dredging for trepang, so some idea can be formed of how thoroughly the coast was cleaned up when large numbers of proas were worked, as they did, night and day. They also employed a great number of natives.”

Other observers reported having seen as many as a thousand Macassarmen fishing for trepang in the one place.

The pilot of our small plane flew low over the jungle spreading from Port Essington to the head of Port Bremer, and then to Raffles Bay. We flew down the miraculously green waters of Bowen Strait toward the Methodist mission on Croker Island. It was the afternoon the government doctor from Darwin held his monthly clinic for mothers and babies. The world has changed somewhat since those proas sailed through the strait with matting sail, making for the coast of Arnhem Land and their rich harvests of trepang and turtle shell.

The point of land once called Oojountambanoonoo passed under the starboard wing. There was a glitter of white sand, emerald shallows, and amber-hued coral beneath the shagreen surface of Mountnorris Bay. Then we were throttling back for the descent to the mission airstrip.

Too much to expect these days the gay sarongs and bandanas of the sleek-skinned Macassarmen upon the shore. We were met by a clergyman in broadcloth suit, two lay sisters, and a set of part-aboriginal children unsmiling in their white-feller Sunday best.

Red tunics must have been an uncomfortable mode of dress in this tropic land, but modern times could often do with something that is a little more quaintly picturesque.

Gold Dust and Spinifex

HALL'S CREEK

          Travelling from Darwin to Hall’s Creek you might almost believe the massive rock walls of East Kimberley were fashioned to keep men out.

          Yet they were coming through here in large numbers eighty years ago, on foot as well as by horse, when there was hardly a homestead, only a few huge, half-stocked cattle runs west of Wave Hill. The Hall's Creek rush broke out within a few years of Alexander Forrest's long packhorse expedition from the De Grey River, near Port Hedland, in 1879. Anyone who read his report at that time would have kept well away from the Kimberleys as a walking proposition.

          But men with the mirage of gold before their eyes are notoriously poor readers.

          To appreciate what they went through, you have only to look at those landscapes from the air. They are fantastically steep and eroded, rich in colour after the dun hued, flat, featureless plains east of the Territory border. They are arid and waterless, too. Beyond the sprawling flood plains of the Negri and Ord, you come at once to these stark mountains. They are not very high, but furrowed by ravines and gorges, weathered to strange peaks, buttes, and saw-toothed ranges. Nearing Hall's Creek, you seldom see an acre of level ground. Reddish, stony hills ebb away into the heat haze, like the waves of a petrified sea. These are the Bay of Biscay Hills. They have a certain beauty from the comfort of a plane.

          I doubt if those first diggers saw much beauty in them. Nor in the straw-pale grasses, the old gold of spinifex, the ragged ghost gums screening the clear white sands of dry creek beds. There was even less beauty to the bare little town they built, when those lucky enough to find a little gold tried to make themselves at home amid these harsh landscapes.

          The good days of Hall's Creek were remarkably brief; perhaps ten years at most. Its flowering had been a swift one, dating back to the time when Charlie Hall rode across from Roebourne and discovered gold in 1885 on the creek that now bears his name. Two months later, with one companion, Jack Slattery, he returned to the coast with 200 fine ounces of gold. Then another prospector struck more gold, a 22 ounce nugget, at Mary Creek, and the rush was on.

          Within a year three thousand men were combing the spinifex-covered hillsides and stony gullies around Hall's Creek. They came from all over Australia and beyond. Now that East Kimberley is comparatively civilized, it is hard to realize how so many people could have struggled through those hundreds of miles of unknown, waterless landscapes, enduring fierce heat, resentful blacks, fever, thirst, starvation, and the bitter loneliness of what was often little more than desert. They came by horse and buggy and wagon, by camel or on foot; they carried their swags and they carried water, and their possessions were seldom more than could be put upon a man's back or a spare horse. Sailing vessels, luggers, and schooners put in at the embryo ports of Derby and Wyndham. But far more of the hopeful diggers crossed a thousand and more miles of trackless wastes, coming across from Queensland and the Northern Territory.

          For such people. the original township, however bare and lacking in comfort, could only have a homely air.

          I am not talking of New Hall's Creek now.

          The new township is only ten years old. It is a better place in many ways, more efficiently laid out, with solidly-built houses and stores, and a plentiful water supply which the old town certainly did not have.

          The original Hall's Creek had a different character. It seemed to have risen out of the aged rocks that hemmed it into a narrow gully. Already it has reverted to those rocks; its stone buildings crumbling; rammed earth walls returning to the earth; the old iron, abandoned gardens, and all the refuse of long settlement scattered about as though a flood had swept down the shallow creek bed alongside that disused road.

          To reconstruct the life some sixty-odd people lived there so recently is already growing difficult. Take the roof off an abandoned house, and in no time its walls start disintegrating. Remove windows and doors, and dust drifts over once solid floors.

          The old Kimberley Hotel will not last much longer, despite those solid-seeming walls which were cool to lean against in the hottest weather. You climbed a stony slope from the single empty street, walked up three worn steps made of river stones, ducked under the iron frame of a long forgotten oil lamp, and entered the liveliest bar in the Kimberleys.

          From that cramped, narrow-gutted room, with its whitewashed walls, the linoleum stained with generations of spilt beer, you looked out at the kind of street you would not normally cross half a continent to see. All you saw were stones littering a dusty roadway, heaps of old tins, the stripped chassis of a Model T Ford someone had abandoned years ago, and, across the dry creek bed, the iron and bag humpies of the few aborigines still clinging to the desolate life of the town. Yet the traveller could live moderately well in the Kimberley Hotel. Plain food was served inside the small, fly-screened dining-room; the sleeping quarters were hot and faced, through raised wooden shutters, a grassless garden. Yet somehow Bob Moody and his wife managed to keep a few things growing there; a few hardy flowers under the hibiscus bushes and paw paw trees.

          Thirty yards up the street was a building that must have impressed strangers in the early days. It had been the court house, but when I knew it the post office had moved into one end, and the Moodys lived in the other. Then a survey company took it over, hoping to revive the exhausted mineral field. Now the court house, too, is falling down; despite its magnificently paved floor and thick mud-brick walls.

          At the far end of the town was the finest home I have seen anywhere in North Australia. It was the police station, built in Spanish mission style. On two or three visits I called on the sergeant-in-charge, had tea with his wife on a lawn in the central courtyard, unaware of the heat outside. The walls of this large, four-square house were two feet thick, with cool, high-ceilinged rooms opening on to this inner courtyard; it was a kind of patio. The grassy square was flanked by palms, hibiscus, and jasmine bushes, with an open sky above, a fresh breeze always blowing through one of the archways, and aboriginal girls moving lazily about with brooms.

          But it was the Kimberley Hotel that really brought the town to life. You met everyone there. A police trooper back from his pack mule patrol over the King Leopold Range; oil prospectors or geologists mapping the still unknown territory out by the King Albert and Drysdale Rivers; or Tom Quilty yarning of more primitive days on near-by Springvale; or ringers in from half a dozen stations; or a drover just back from the Canning stock route, unable to drown the memory of those grim, eighty foot sand-ridges until the keg ran out. I remember Norman Crowther and his wife talking of the time they won £8,500 from a “dead” mine and took a trip around Australia that landed them back in Hall's Creek broke as before. There was old George Kinivan, champion stock rider and horse breaker, seventy-one years old and still working outback as a tank-sinker. “The last of the straight backs,” they called him in town, because of the way he rode, in long stirrups, straight as a sapling.

          His father was then still alive in western Queensland, he told me, at the age of ninety-nine. It was twenty years since George had written him a letter, but the old man had said, “Send me a wire when I hit the century.”

          I remember talking to drover Jack Huddleston one night about the lone ride his father had once made from Normanton, leading a packhorse from the Gulf waters to Roper Bar, then down to Katherine, up north to Wyndham, and on again.

          A fair quantity of gold was won in the early years; some alluvial to start with, although in the main it was a matter of leaders and pipes that quickly petered out. Sometimes deep holes were sunk that lasted a year or two. A few prospects turned out rich, like the Lady Margaret, the jubilee, and Mount Dockrill which yielded £25,000 in seven months. Farther out, other strikes were made; in the Grant's Creek field, for instance, near the present Alice Downs station. There the discovery of the famous Kimberley Star drew two thousand men out along the Wyndham road. Another thousand were attracted to the neighbourhood of the Brockman and Ruby Queen, where seven or eight hotels- or rather shanties- did good business in those thirsty landscapes.

          Today those mines are only caved-in holes, devoid of machinery or even winches, the mullock piles overgrown with spinifex. The main trouble was always water. But the whole of the Kimberley area was abandoned when the Coolgardie and Pilbara rushes broke out, in the early nineties, and few men returned to prospect seriously again.

          The finality of that retreat was made clear by Bob Moody, when I met him for the first time behind his crowded bar. He and his wife, both veterans of a more recent Edie Creek rush in New Guinea, had once tried to open up some old workings a little way out of town.

          “In the early days,” Moody said, “there were two thousand people working around that show of mine. There's not a sign of all that life today; just an old hole in the ground. First time I drove out to look at it, we found nothing but an iron bucket with a hole in it, and an Irishman's grave.

          “The going was rough, too, I can tell you. The old track had been completely obliterated. It took us eight hours in my Land-Rover to cover twenty-two miles.”

          Yet there have been one or two men making some sort of a living out of gold in recent years. Within the last decade the Willy Willy is said to have produced £20,000 worth, while Norman Crowther once told me he had won £8,000 in a matter of months. He showed me some of his specimens in the hotel; they were small, but solid enough nuggets.

          The display prompted Moody to recall the old days when prospectors paid for their drinks in gold over the bar, taking their change in real money.

          “If you know how, you can still make a bit of a living,” one old fossicker told me in his camp on the outskirts of the town. He lived in a hessian and iron shanty, supporting himself on a pension and living in hopes of some great strike he never knew when he might make. Most of his life was spent poking around the spinifex with prospecting dish and pick.

          “Mind you,” he went on, “it's no use expecting banquets or motor cars. But there's gold all through this country- in patches. Trouble is, there's whips of Kimberley with it, too. Here and there you'll come across a pipe or a leader. The big job's to work it back and find out where the gold came from. It's no good looking in the gullies. They've all been picked over by the blacks. But the hill-sides are washing away all the time, and when the rains come they carry down a few pennyweights; fine stuff mostly.

          “But best of all is working up the rivulets, amid the slaty outcrops. Loaming, -we call it.” He pronounced it looming. “Maybe it'll turn out to be only a pipe and a few inches long. But that'll bring you in 10 or 11 ounces, and that's worth something today.”

          He recalled one lucky find he had made some time before when, poking about an old shaft with his pick, a long streak of gold had been uncovered 40 pounds worth for a few minutes' work.

          “But when all's said and done,” he ended regretfully, “there's a sight more dinner times than dinners.”

          No one has ever been able to estimate the amount of gold the Hall's Creek region produced. The only records were of gold disposed of through Perth. It was believed that, to avoid State tax, a great deal more went east across the Northern Territory border.

          During the present century Hall's Creek depended for its existence on the cattle stations round about, an essential depot and staging camp for stockmen and drovers. There is some good grazing country and runs like Tom Quilty's Springvale, Alice Downs, Flora Valley, and Ruby Plains have done pretty well in recent years, even if they have been hampered by the lack of a good, profitable outlet. The only alternative to sales at the Wyndham meatworks, is to drove cattle a thousand miles to Queensland, and even the best cattle can only arrive there as forward stores.

          Nowadays, perhaps, Hall's Creek only comes to full life during the annual race meeting, still one of the noted events of its kind throughout the North. But there are many who remember livelier times; the days when shin plasters were normal currency and big cheques were knocked down on the bar; the days of epic droving feats in the face of a dry spell, of noted riders and horsebreakers- like George Kinivan, for instance, whose bush ballads were quoted up and down the country; of the men who cut a track down through the Sandy Desert, the Canning stock route which forty years ago was to give Kimberley pastoralists a direct route to southern markets, but which has been passable only in exceptionally good years.

          Again, Moody was the man to talk of the Canning route, for he went down there as a lad, with Canning himself., an apprentice surveyor who witnessed the death of Mick Tobin near one of the native wells.

          “We were within half a mile of that well,” he told me over the bar, “when a desert myall appeared in the spinifex. There were high sand‑ridges all around us. The black was carrying four or five spears and a woomera. He must have caught Tobin with the first spear through the brim of his hat. Mick pulled it out. He started to ride after his attacker across a claypan. The myall crouched under some tea-tree as he came up. Then Mick dismounted and walked towards him. I saw the black slip another spear- a long hardwood one-and I shouted a warning. But it was too late. We buried Tobin beside that claypan next day.”

          Bob Moody had been closely identified with the Kimberleys most of his life, even though he moved away after the first World War, taking up a plantation in New Guinea. When the Depression sent copra prices tumbling, he joined the early gold-seekers at Edie Creek, where he did very well indeed. Then he was on the Sepik River when the Japanese attacked, being one of the last Europeans to escape. With fourteen others he put to sea in a schooner, and sneaked through the Trobriands to make his landfall off Mourilyan, where he was reprimanded for entering port without a pilot. He saw the war out in small ships, returned to the Kimberleys, and, when gold proved disappointing, took up the management of the old hotel.

          When I last saw him, shortly before he died, he was settling in to the new township, ten miles away. He had acquired a large, roomy building built some years earlier as a mess for Civil Aviation workers, when the Hall's Creek aerodrome was being enlarged. The Australian Inland Mission had also moved into fine new quarters, with a well-equipped little hospital. I was impressed, too, by the new government school, with its free use of glass louvres, cross-ventilation and wide, shaded verandas. These two modern buildings are matched by a third, designed in similar style as a hostel where the schoolchildren live when they are away from their homes which are in the back country.

          The building of this hostel, by the A.I.M., is one of the outstanding features of Kimberley life today.

          Schooling has always been a major problem in this region of huge distances and sparse habitation. Teaching by correspondence is a fine idea, but it has its limitations, chief among them the continued loneliness it enforces upon children. Now the sons and daughters of cattlemen many hundreds of miles away come into Hall's Creek by air, live at the hostel for ten months, and return home again for the other two. At the present time there are twenty-five children boarding there, under the care of Matron Lois Hurse, a woman who works very hard to make them happy in their strange surroundings.

          “I regard this hostel as a great experiment,” Mrs Hurse said. “Our children come in from an area 650 miles from east to West, and 450 miles north and south.

        We don't make any distinctions between them, and we've got all kinds here- aborigines, half-castes, and whites. There's just no colour line either of our making or theirs.

“To my mind it's going to help us bring to an end those racial prejudices that in the past have held up normal development in the Kimberleys. I never cease to be amazed by the way my twenty-five children, some of them as young as seven, so quickly settle into their new surroundings, adapting themselves to a new life, new people, and new experiences.”

When I visited the hostel near by the children were away. They had flown off to Darwin for a seaside holiday. Only two of them remained behind, both the sons of old Kimberley residents. One of them was young Geoff Hargreaves, whose father managed Carlton station; the other was Roy Langridge, son of the Turkey Creek telegraph linesman. They were completely occupied with a game which appeared to absorb much of their leisure hours. It was very much a reflection of Kimberley life.

In the quarter-acre paddock behind the hostel, which they used for a playground, were a number of miniature cattle stations.

The boys had driven wooden pegs into the ground for fences. They had set up small-scale bronco yards, horse paddocks, homesteads and outstations, ground tanks scooped out of the soil, and tiny windmills. There were even airstrips, roads, and stock routes made of ant bed. Roy Langridge had a toy aeroplane which followed the north-west air route from one station to another. Geoff was more absorbed in the movement of cattle. Some of these were the usual lead cows to be bought in toy shops, but larger mobs were represented by stones.

“The spayed cows are marked with red or yellow paint,” he told me. “We muster our bullocks and bring them into bronco yards and brand them. Then we take them into the meatworks. There's Wyndham meatworks, see?” He pointed away towards the back of the hotel, some fifty yards away. “We kill there every Saturday.”

He described how the killing took place. Roy was the meatworks manager; he crushed up the stones and canned them in old sardine tins so they could not be used again. Geoff was lucky, for his cattle station was close to the meatworks and did not have to pay out much in drover's fees. But Roy was not doing so well. He had to pay for the cattle brought in, stuff which cost the growers nothing since stones were plentiful. He paid out in labels off chewing gum packets, worth £5 or £10 according to their colour.

All the same, Geoff had decided there was more money in droving than raising cattle, for he had been obliged to pay his drover £1 a head for the last fifteen bullocks he sent down to Wyndham, plus a fiver to the horse tailer. As Roy would not pay him more than £20, he made only five on the trip.

“You want to look out in the Wet season, too,” he said, pointing to a deep natural gutter between two cattle stations and spanned by a miniature bridge. “When the rain comes down you'll get washed out, lose all your fences and cattle.”

When he had finished showing me round this Kimberley in microcosm, he drew several stones out of his pockets. They were marked with yellow paint. “Just couldn't help it, you know, with the other boys away,” he said. “I lifted a few clean skins as I took you round.”

I asked him where his own station was now.

“Oh,” he said in his dry, off-hand fashion, “I had a bit of a spread some time back. But it was out in the myal1 country and now I'm working for another fellow.”

That was all Kimberley for you.

But these children were also being drawn much closer to the outside world, thanks to the frequency of aircraft passing through Hall's Creek. Their schooling was giving them a closer response to modern life, something evident in the painting and modeling I was shown in their classrooms.

I wondered how much this rising generation would remember of the old town ten miles away; a town about to crumble into nothingness on a road that led to nowhere. There were many things worth remembering; among them the old cemetery only fifty yards over a rise from the derelict buildings.

There, amid the spinifex, in the spare shade of a few ghost gums, I found a scattering of headstones. The inscriptions on several were worth reading, for they reached back to an earlier time. One of them, not untypical of this land, commemorated a man named John Brown “who perished from thirst near Tanami in 1909.” It was erected, says the inscription, by his Kimberley mates. Another recalled a woman of whom no one in Hall's Creek could tell me anything at all.

“Here sleeps Sarah Harriet Berard, who died on 3^rd July 1890, in her 37^th  year. A good woman.”

Was that so unusual in these parts?

Most of the graves were unmarked, but there was one stone, half buried in spinifex, in memory of James Darcy who died in 1917. Naturally there was nothing on the headstone to indicate the circumstances of his death, although it received considerable publicity at the time. The tragedy was one that centered a great deal of publicity on the remoteness of the Kimberleys, later helping to shape a new medical service for the inland.

Darcy was thrown from a horse while mustering cattle near Hall's Creek, and was severely injured. There was no doctor anywhere in the North-West. The local postmaster, Tuckett, used his telegraph transmitter to contact a friend, Dr Holland, more than two thousand miles away in Perth. The doctor wired back instructions on how to operate. It was a hazardous job as the only instrument available was Tuckett's pocket knife.

The P.M.G.'s department kept all lines open, while questions and instructions were telegraphed half-way round a continent. Miraculously, Tuckett's operation was successful. Then Dr Holland decided to make the long trip north to make sure of Darcy's recovery. It took him three weeks to reach Hall's Creek. He arrived to find that the stockman, much weakened by all he had gone through, had died from an attack of malaria.

Some years later, when campaigning for nation-wide support for a Flying Doctor Service, John Flynn used this case as an outstanding example of just why such an organization was needed. Within ten years this revolutionary idea, which few people believed could ever become a reality, was brought into existence.

How many people, I wondered, would have looked at this headstone and known who Darcy was? How many would have recognized the significance of this lonely grave?

The Stones Remain

PORT ARTHUR

          If Australia has one place where ghosts should walk it is Port Arthur. There are ruins enough here; an atmosphere of violence and decay; almost too many remembrances of human suffering.

Perhaps only the sensitive are aware of it. For the rest, there are always the conducted tours, the guide gently shepherding; the scones and tea. It is even possible these days to be charmed by the romantic overtones of this rustic Tasmanian setting, after the tourist bus has pulled in under the English trees. It could even become the antipodean answer to the relics of medieval Europe; ancient castles along the Rhine, the crumbled keeps and watchtowers on Welsh or Scottish borders.

There are dungeons, too.

Dungeon was never quite the word in the Tasmanian setting. The founders of Port Arthur had others more explicit; cell blocks, the chain gang, solitary confinement. The huge grey stone facade of the Penitentiary, for instance, is now described as a fine example of early nineteenth-century architecture. The Model Prison is said to have many charming features; including a “magnificent room” on the second floor where six hundred double doomed convicts used to dine.

Yet south-eastern Tasmania has a setting of some beauty.

There are few journeys more beautiful than the fifty mile drive from Hobart, past Pitt Water, through Sorell and the fishing village of Dunalley, and then to the wild seas by Eaglehawk Neck, with its grim echoes of Marcus Clarke. The Tasman Peninsula is still surprisingly remote. Though not in the intimidating way it was a century and more ago.

As those then condemned to live there knew, it was a peninsula beyond a peninsula. One neck of land beyond the other was guarded against escape. Eaglehawk Neck, the first rung in the ladder towards freedom, had armed sentries on the narrow spit of land; and underfed bulldogs chained within six inches of each other's muzzles. If any desperate absconder succeeded in passing there, and few did, there was another narrow neck at the north end of Forestier Peninsula. More armed guards; more dogs.

Probably no one would ever have heard of Martin Cash, that folk hero of Tasmanian bushranging, had he not been the only man courageous, or desperate enough to elude that double net.

The rest of those who tried are unknown ghosts.

There are some who believe Port Arthur is haunted still. Especially its ruined church. One of these once made a special visit to settle things one way or the other. He spent a night among its roofless walls, watched the moon rise and set. He saw nothing. Yet in the morning he seemed a nervous man.

It is not a pleasant atmosphere.

I have been there after dark, standing alone in that wide nave, watched a pale light filter through tall windows where once there was stained glass, looked through the door less archways at the moonlit trees and grass, held my breath there, waited. The trees outside glimmered in a pale light. A wind moved the foliage.

Fallen leaves scattered. Then all was still again. The night was full of half-heard sounds.

Haunted? Why should it be; why not?

At least two murders are known to have been committed here.

One convict killed his comrade, for no known reason, among the half-made foundations. Later, another was hurled from the roof beams to a stone-flagged floor. According to legend, the church was never consecrated, because of such acts. More prosaic reasons are given now. The church was to be used for various denominations, and therefore was debarred from special ceremonies.

By day the place has a very different air; a tranquil charm. It reminds you of some English abbey. All around it are English trees; the stone walls are ivy-covered. There was even, in its earlier days, a long walk flanked by English oaks, but these were destroyed by fire. An emphatically Australian bushfire. Then the tall, tapering steeple was blown down by an Antarctic gale. The clock tower and grand peal of bells were removed to the parish church at New Norfolk, and all the interior woodwork was burnt out by another bushfire in the 1880s.

What remain today are only the four-square tower, a series of finely moulded stone pinnacles, and the external walls. These give it a touch of nobility, a mellowness it lacked in the early nineteenth century. It has now acquired the timeless quality of a ruined abbey.

Yet, as long as this was a living settlement- Port Arthur died in 1878- there appears to have been no lack of preachers. Nor was there any lack of sin to preach about. Convicts were a captive audience. And, most probably, a willing one. To sit in church, legs for the time being free of irons, was the one relaxed hour in an eternity of hard labour, pain, and brutalities. It must have been a desperate parade, these long files of sallow, half-crippled men in black and yellow cloth, with the mark of the broad arrow on them, under the generous oaks. For the quality, there were at least sober pleasures, and reserved pews before the altar. Fashions may have been a little behind the times in colonial Tasmania, but they had the chance to display some elegance. The Commandant and his lady walked silkily along the nave. There were officers in red coats and epaulettes; frockcoats and polished tall hats for the officials; and armed prison guards standing as if nonchalantly in the rear. As for the colony's wives, they smothered their weekday pride in poke bonnets and bustles, pining for “Home” again.

“Home!”

It was not easy to recreate in such a climate.

For these people Australia was not the grandeur of the bush, the overlanders' campfires, the excitement and gamble of a gold rush. They inhabited a world closed to the brilliant Australian sun, saw no beauty in the splendid gum trees, nor in the clear blue waters of an unspoilt bay. This was a world of bread and water; cat-o'nine-tails; and remorse. No wonder Tasmanians have remained touchy about their past. Or rather, their island's past. For it had nothing really to do with them. To expiate the Old World's sins has never been their problem.

History in Port Arthur has been truthfully an alien theme.

“Don't you feel embarrassed by your convict past?” asked the traditional English visitor of a Hobart man.

“Yes,” was the reply. “And by the England that sent them here.”

The luckier convicts went to Sydney Town or Hobart, where those with good conduct reports eventually achieved a state of comparative freedom. The tougher ones, and those convicted of further crimes in Australia, were sentenced to Norfolk Island or Tasmania's Macquarie Harbour. When the Tasmanian “hell upon earth” closed down in 1830, because of its inaccessibility, Port Arthur replaced it.

“What lovely bays! What noble anchorage!” wrote a visitor in 1842, sailing up past the spectacular organ pipes of Cape Raoul, past the green slopes of Arthur's Peak to the wharf on Port Arthur. “Guilt and its attendant punishment seemed at utter variance with scenes and climes sufficient of themselves to excite gratitude and joy.”

This gentleman, David Burn Esq., of Rotherwood, Ouse, had the advantage of surveying these charming landscapes from the deck of the Governor's yacht.

He spoke with equal enthusiasm of the welcome given him by “the greatest of Commandants,” who lived in a handsome mansion there, surrounded by elms, oaks, and plane trees. The much-feared Captain Charles O'Hara Booth, 21^st Fusiliers, was to his taste a man who had run the settlement “with skill and integrity of purpose that cannot sufficiently be commended.”

Among his achievements, wrote David Burn Esq., were the grim, somewhat misnamed Model Prison, the Convict Railway in which humans replaced horses, and the system of flogging offenders with cat-o'-nine-tails before the eyes of the entire settlement.

The Model Prison lies in ruins now. Some of its most memorable features, however, have been preserved. It was to this place that convicts sentenced for local crimes were sent, kept incommunicado, and forbidden to speak to or even look at another living soul. Matting was placed on the stone corridor floors, so that no sound could be heard anywhere. Stone walls of double thickness prevented the prisoner hearing any sound. If he caused further trouble, he was given even more vigorous treatment "in one of the “dumb cells."

You can still see these places flanking the narrow, internal exercise yard. They have four heavy doors, placed at right angles to one another. When these close neither light nor sound can penetrate. The only food supplied was one pound of dry bread each twenty-four hours, with unlimited water. This was passed in through a kind of trapdoor, so that the man “doing solitary” did not even see the warder.

It is unpleasant enough to stand in such a cell, with doors closed, feeling the utter darkness and silence. To have been locked in there was said to be one of Port Arthur's terrors. Now and then a man died in there. Or went mad.

One desperate convict, on his release, savagely refused to come out. “You shoved me in here of your free will,” he shouted. “I'll come out at mine.” And slammed the door himself.

Next time, they came for him, he was dead.

Under the terror of this regime, since equaled only by German Nazidom, there was only the finest distinction between murder and suicide. There was the case of one youthful convict who, while working on the chain gang, unexpectedly shattered his mate's head with a pickaxe. His only explanation was, “I'm tired of it all, I just want to be hanged and finish off my sentence.”

In such an atmosphere, not even Marcus Clarke can be written off as melodrama.

The skilful Commandant also invented a device to keep men separate even during normal hours of Christian union. Within the Model Prison you can find his “model chapel” with two sets of stalls for the congregation. Each man, before leaving his cell, had to put on a large, grey headpiece which covered his entire face, leaving three holes for his eyes and nose. He was then marched, solo, by armed guards to the chapel and locked into his own numbered pew. Each pew was a small box, so that he could see only the preacher and the armed, watchful guards. Like a blinkered horse, he was unable to see the man in the pew next door.

Thus was he able to absorb the Sunday message of earthly charity unimpaired.

Yet, even here, there were compensations. After a week of enforced silence, the convicts were permitted to join in the hymns. Never in a Christian community has such lusty singing been heard. It was the only time they were allowed to use their voices.

As for the Convict Railway, the Commandant was widely praised for solving the settlement's transport problems. No oxen or draught horses were allowed south of Eaglehawk Neck. Hence every burden had to be carried on the backs of humans. Even large tree trunks were brought down the mountain-sides by teams of convicts. Marcus Clarke has again left us a description of these exhausted, sweating human draught teams; sometimes fifty or sixty of them stumbling under a whole tree.

The railway was devised to shorten the normal road from Norfolk to Long Bay, to which passengers and freight were delivered at the outskirts of Port Arthur. It was a five‑mile run that climbed a steep, scrub-covered hill. Sections of the wooden rails can still be seen, half buried in earth and bracken fern. In the absence of horses, convicts were used to haul the heavy carriages up the steep hill-side. As they careered downhill on the farther side, the “horses” were expected to leap aboard, then act as human brakes at the appropriate time.

The downhill speed was estimated to be about thirty five miles an hour.

However, as David Burn Esq. explained it, “it jars harshly against the feelings to behold man, as it were, lowered to the standard of the brute, to mark the unhappy, guilty creatures toiling and struggling along, their muscular powers exerted to the utmost, and the perspiration bursting profusely from every pore… Yet a little calm reflection will find hundreds of free British labourers whose drudgery is fully equal to that on this tramway.”

Other times, other fashions.

It is in the stones remaining about this tormented settlement that we can now read the agony and brute despair that peopled the tranquil landscapes for nearly fifty years.

Beside the crumbling stone wharf rises the gaunt shell of the great Penitentiary, five stories high. If ever Hilton decides on a grand hotel at Port Arthur, he might consider restoring this impressive building of huge, hand-hewn sandstone blocks. It had secure accommodation for 657 men in separate cells and dormitories. It had its own bakehouse, washrooms, and cooking facilities, and even lifts to the upper corridors for what would be called, in modern hotel parlance, room service- at least for those confined to their cells.

Another notable structure, much admired today, was the military barracks which overlooked the Penitentiary in case of trouble. It has magnificent flagstones and embrasured walls. Above it rises the round, crenellated tower of the powder magazine. The stout walls of this magazine could also be used for solitary confinement, in case of large-scale riots.

Today this has all the appearance of some medieval castle, crumbling elegantly into ruin.

Other fashions… This place was recently exploited for a costume displayed in an Australian fashion magazine. Accompanying two photographs of imported models posing were these words:

“Great sophistication, based on traditional homespun wools of centuries ago. The new wools look fresh off a hand-loom…amid Port Arthur's old courthouse ruins, with the early 19^th century Model Prison in background… One-piece dresses beside the garrison’s first Powder Magazine…”

The first inhabitants also wore one-piece clothes; with broader arrows. One can imagine the riots if such skimpily dressed mannequins had arrived among the bustled ladies of the time. Unquestionably, the lack of females must have been a torture greater than even Captain Booth could ever have devised.

One has only to row across the bay to Point Puer to understand the terrible isolation of it all. Here eight hundred and more boys were confined to a narrow spit of arid land, caged in stone barracks by night, half starved and flogged, and sometimes taught a trade. Current reports described them as thieves and malcontents of Britain's underworld. They would have been the bodgies and rockers of today. In their own time there were no social psychologists to explain their delinquency, although historians have since done so; in the context of the poverty and unemployment following the industrial revolution. A few records from the Comptroller General of Convicts have been preserved. They give a tragic picture of teenage boys transported to a world far more brutal than the one they left.

One case is sufficient here: John …, No. 1782, aged 12. Seven years for larceny. At Port Arthur, Van Diemen's Land., thirty-eight offences were listed against his name. Between October 1839 and November 25, he was sentenced to solitary confinement, the cat-o'nine-tails, or the chain gang for the following:

Absconding, falsehood, insolence, disorderly conduct on the chain, breaking up the flooring of his silent compartment, losing his Government blanket, improperly possessing a knife, assault, and larceny.

A notable fact of his and other cases was that behaviour appeared to grow progressively worse with each charge.

Clearly the penal system was not helping him to reform; perhaps it was not designed to do so. Among the official notes of one departmental officer attached to Point Puer was later found this comment:

“Point Puer as a reformatory for boys was broken up about the year 1857. Its. results were not considered satisfactory, and it was considered also to be too closely situated to the Port Arthur Penal Settlement.”

Other evidence might have been found in the notorious White Rocks near by, a steep cliff over which many boys hurled themselves in desperation; again preferring suicide to life in chains.

I wonder who was the unknown school teacher, himself a former convict, who wrote several poems about this youthful prison. Even more poignant were his verses on the neighbouring Island of the Dead, a small tree-shaded rock in the centre of the harbour, where many roughly carved tomb-stones recall the transported and the free who died here.

Isle of the fetter'd dead!

Oft pity, weeping, stood,

To hear the clash of Penal chains,

To, see their years of blood:

But now, within the silent grave,

Their earthly bondage o'er,

The clanking chain, the writhing lash,

Are heard and felt no more!

        The Age of Tourism has tried to dress things up a little by calling this island Ile des Morts. Perhaps it sounds less unromantic in French. To the convicts of the time it was always, more bluntly, Dead Island.

        But at least no effort has been made to underplay the harsh outlines of Port Arthur in other directions. Behind the vast shadow of the Penitentiary is a little museum, where the treasures of the past are on display. There is a rare collection of leg-irons, ball and chain, distinct types of lashes for males and females, and other instruments of socially sanctioned torture.

        Perhaps this museum is the keeper of our national conscience, too.

        Port Arthur must surely have its ghosts. The many thousands of unhappy souls who passed through here, the thousands who never returned to freedom, have deeply impressed their age of suffering upon a large, still undismantled town that knows little or no life today. Few people live here. Few want to.

        It is the ultimate in ghost towns. It represents nothing of the progress achieved elsewhere on the continent; the exuberance of miners, the great discoveries, the families and dynasties and wide industrial enterprises founded upon the pioneering skills and initiative of the few. There was no pointer here for future national achievement or prosperity. Port Arthur looks only to the past. Yet it is a past we may well reflect upon.

        This place, too, was on the frontiers of Australian life. We have learnt more of human dignities and freedom since that shadowed time.

George Farwell 1965