Arthur Upfield: Batchelors of Broken Hill

The Place of Youth

LONG, LONG ago the aborigines came and called it Wilya-Wilya-Yong. It was a dark, barren hill formed like a scimitar, its back broken, its slopes serrated and pitted and scarred, naked, sunburned, and wind-seared. One day a white man talked with a black man and learned that Wilya-Wilya-Yong meant the Place of Youth.

White men brought their sheep and a poor German named Charles Rasp was employed to herd them. Rasp gazed at the Place of Youth, climbed the slopes, and found what he found. He knew nothing of precious metals, and so travelled to the nearest city and purchased a copy ofThe Prospector’s Guide. On his return he broke off a piece of the Place of Youth-it didn’t matter where-and experts declared it to be loaded with silver-lead.

The fame of it sped across the surrounding sea-flat plains to the distant coasts of new-found Australia, and men came on horseback and on foot, in wagons and Buffalo Bill coaches, and they sank holes and rigged machinery. Others came and built a mining camp about the Place of Youth, which they called the Broken Hill. The camp became a shanty town named Broken Hill. Paupers became rich overnight, and rich men became paupers in a matter of minutes. Champagne was a flood; water but a trickle.

Rasp and his partners faded out. Men were buried hastily in shallow graves: those who were lucky. Yet more men came to Broken Hill, lingered, departed-generations of them-and the shanty town became the third city in the state of New South Wales. Famous men came-engineers, scientists, industrialists; and eventually, in their turn, there came Jimmy the Screwsman and Napoleon Bonaparte, DI, CIB Queensland.

Broken Hill wasn’t Jimmy’s objective when he left Sydney on completion of a burglary, the planning of which had called for mental concentration over a period of three weeks, and Jimmy had looked forward with keen expectancy to a long holiday. He had arranged with a transport driver engaged in black-marketing to convey him to Melbourne-trains and aircraft being out owing to expected rigid police inspection at the state border. Then when the transport was nearing Albury and the driver stopped to converse with another of his gang bound in the opposite direction, he learned that, because of the escape of the Great Scarsby, all road transport between the capitals was being checked.

On the outskirts of Albury three utilities had met the transport, and into them went part of the cargo. With it went Jimmy the Screwsman, who eventually found himself at the inland town of Balranald.

In Balranald a newspaper informed Jimmy that the Great Scarsby was still at large, and police of three states were looking for him. He had been incarcerated during the Governor’s pleasure in a criminal lunatic asylum, following trial for abduction in 1940, and as he had been a world-famed magician, hope of recapturing him was not high-in the view of the newspaper. Melbourne was now ‘hot’, even for Jimmy the Screwsman, and Jimmy decided to go west and take his vacation with a married sister in distant and far-away Broken Hill.

He arrived at Broken Hill on 2nd October, entering the city on the mail car from Wilcannia, and there, sick of big cities and tired by his mental activities, he proceeded to relax.

There is nothing parochial or bucolic about Broken Hill. There is no city in all Australia remotely like it excepting perhaps the golden city of Kalgoorlie. There is nothing of thesnobocracy of Melbourne, or the dog-eat-dog taint of Sydney, in the community of Broken Hill, and there is no thoroughfare in Australia quite like Argent Street, Broken Hill’s main shopping centre.

Argent Street is unique. Besides being a street of shops it is the universal place of rendezvous. ‘Meet you down Argent Street’ is the phrase employed by husband to wife, by friend to friend. You may pause before a building erected in mid-nineteenth century; proceed and gaze at a section of a mining camp of the 1870s; stay at a hotel the exact replica of those from which emerged the American Deadwood Dicks; eat at ultra cafes run by smart Greeks and Italians; hire a gleaming automobile and shop at lush emporiums.

Down Argent Street, Mr Samuel Goldspink had begun business in the clothing trade when Queen Victoria found little at which to be amused. He had prospered less because of his own acumen than by the growth and the wealth of the city he had watched mature. He was an ingratiating little man, having an infectious chuckle and a store of jokes against himself, so that his customers found it pleasant to be overcharged.

Mr Goldspink was fifty-nine and a bachelor, seemingly hale and hearty, yet he collapsed and died inelegantly right in front of his own haberdashery counter. The doctor was dissatisfied with the manner of his passing, and the post-mortem revealed that the cause of death was cyanide poisoning; and, as it was quickly established that Goldspink had been in no mood to commit suicide, the effect was not dissimilar to that of a stick thrust into a bull ant’s nest-Detective Sergeant Bill Crome being the chief bull ant.

Crome hadn’t had a murder for three years, and to the unexpectedness of this one could be attributed his failure to net the poisoner.

On facts being winnowed from confusion they formed the vertebra of a common enough background.

The time of the tragedy was three-twenty, or thereabouts, on a Friday afternoon, the busiest time of the week. The shop was crowded, and the eleven assistants were all hard at it, the most experienced serving two customers at the one time. Goldspink seldom served behind the counters. He was his own shopwalker, receiving his customers as his friends, talking volubly, escorting them to the departments they needed, and seeing to their comfort if they had to wait to be served.

From three o’clock every afternoon all the assistants in turn were given the opportunity to slip away to a rear fitting-room for a cup of tea and a sandwich served by Mr Goldspink’s housekeeper. Like the farmer who believes that a well-fed horse will work harder, Mr Goldspink believed in looking after his assistants, but in addition he had long proved himself a kindly man.

On her return to the shop, one or other of the assistants would carry a cup of tea and a biscuit to Mr Goldspink, and sometimes he would invite a valued customer to join him.

Mr Goldspink this Friday afternoon was chatting with a woman choosing handkerchiefs, and he told the girl to put the tea cup on the counter as he was himself displaying handkerchiefs to the hesitant buyer, adding his persuasive powers to that of the girl actually serving.

The assistant said that the customer was seated at the counter and that her employer was standing beside the customer. She could not describe the customer save that she was elderly and a stranger. She remembered this because Mr Goldspink put several artful questions to the customer in an effort to elicit her address. Eventually the customer chose her handkerchiefs, paid cash for the purchase, and departed without the receipted docket. Mr Goldspink then had taken up the cup of lukewarm tea and drunk it. Whereupon he had turned half round to the main floor of his shop, staggered, arched his back, slumped, and collapsed.

Mrs Robinov, the housekeeper, then had taken charge. She cleared the shop, locked the street doors, and called for the doctor who had been attending Mr Goldspink for some time. The body was taken into the fitting-room and placed on the dressmakers’ table. The doctor, being aware of the condition of Mr Goldspink’s heart, had not arrived until a full hour had passed.

The cup and saucer had been washed with the other utensils.

No cyanide was found in the shop or anywhere on the premises. As Mrs Robinov was her late employer’s sole beneficiary, she reopened business the day following the funeral.