Hammond Innes - Golden Soak

Ferdie Kadek

Mcllroy’s Monster! I savoured the sound of it, speaking it aloud, my eyes closed against the slatted glare from the shutters. The word Monster conjured visions of a gigantic deposit, a mountain of ore. I remembered Mt Whaleback, huge in the dawn, sprawled dark against the sunrise, and this was copper, not iron. McIlroy was an Irishman presumably. A gambler, Kadek had said. A crook, Ed Garrety had called him, and dead for over thirty years. Yet this Monster still lived, the subject of bar talk in Nullagine. Had he invented the whole thing?

I was thinking then about the country between the Great Sandy and the Gibson deserts, the miles of emptiness, the blinding red heat of it. Christ! it was hot enough here in this darkened room. Nobody in his senses, however desperate, would go out into that, chasing a will o’ the wisp of his own invention.

So the Monster was real. At least to him. Real enough for him to risk his life to find it, and he had died in the attempt. A fly crawled at the comer of my nostrils. I flicked it off, pulling the sheet up over my head, and then I was dozing, picturing that Irishman dying of thirst by the edge of a salt lake and babbling to himself of a mountain of copper somewhere to the east. It sounded incredible that it could remain unexplored all these years. But anything was possible … anything at all in this extraordinary country.

I woke shortly after six to the sound of horses. It was cooler now, a slight breeze reaching me from the shutters. And my mind was made up. Somehow I had to get myself to Nullagine. The decision was a subconscious one, made while I had slept.

I got up, had a quick wash, and when I was dressed, I went out through the French windows to find Tom and two other blacks unsaddling their mounts, the camel watching them and the galahs flocked in the trees above. The horses were thin and very tired, their heads drooped, their bodies covered in sweat and dust. They were turned loose and I followed them as they moved dejectedly to join the others up among the ghost gums.

From this higher ground I looked down at Jarra Jarra, the house and outbuildings golden in the slanting rays of the evening sun, and sitting there among the white boles of the gum trees, with the horses browsing near on the hard, dry vegetation. I realized how much effort had gone into the building of this settlement deep in the bush. Now the eagles kept voracious watch; I could see three of them circling slowly on stiff-spread wings, and everywhere I looked, from the hills behind me to the long brown plain with the track winding through it, it was all brown, an arid, burned-up, waterless brown.

I sat there for a long time, nothing moving, only the wedge-tailed eagles in the sky and no sound except the horses behind me. The sense of solitude was immense. It was difficult to picture it in the old days with the bunkhouses full and the distant boundaries of the property a week’s ride away. The sun set, the sky flared, a flame of fire slowly darkening to the colour of blood, and the land reflecting the sky’s violence. A shiver ran through me. I was gazing eastward, the endless vista of the dried-up land turning to purple, the purple and the red divided by a hard line where land met sky. I was thinking of McIlroy again. A gambler. I was a gambler, too — both of us desperate. Somewhere out there, beyond the sharp line of the horizon, his bones lay white in the emptiness of the desert. And beyond his bones, still deeper into the emptiness. … I was thinking of the Monster, seeing in my mind’s eye the curved back of a hill shimmering on the edge of visibility.

I got suddenly to my feet. I must be mad even to think of it. I was a stranger in a strange land, alone, with no money and nobody to help me. The Monster was just a dream.

I went quickly down the slope, back to the house, knowing it was crazy, yet still under the spell of its fascination. Mt Isa, the biggest copper mine in Australia, way over on the other side of the country — somebody must have discovered it. And if there was a mountain of copper in the trackless wastes of northern Queensland, why shouldn’t there be one in the empty quarter between Great Sandy and the Gibson?

Janet met me, her pale frock glimmering in the dusk as I came between the sheds to the little patio. ‘I was getting worried about you. Tom said you’d gone up on to the Windbreaks.’

‘I went up to see the sunset.’

‘I suppose you thought it beautiful.’ Her voice sounded flat and weary. ‘But you’ll get used to it. It’s like that night after night here in the dry. In the end you’ll feel as I do — you’ll hate it.’ She turned and went inside. ‘Would you like a beer while we’re waiting for Daddy? He’s listening in on the radio. Port Hedland. It’s the evening schedule. Soon as he’s finished we’ll have dinner.’

The cool house was cosy now, the light on and a generator humming in the distance. There was a white damask cloth on the table, silver candlesticks and wine glasses of cut crystal. ‘Do you always dine like this?’ I asked.

She laughed. ‘No, of course not. We’re usually going to bed about now. Saves running the generator, and anyway this last month we’ve all been away by first light.’

‘You shouldn’t have altered your routine for me.’

‘Why not?’ her eyes were bright, a glow of excitement. ‘Besides, it’s New Year’s Eve. I do believe you had forgotten.’ She gave a little sigh. ‘We might have forgotten it, too. We haven’t much to celebrate, have we? But you’ve given us an excuse. And we’ve earned it. Oh, my goodness we have.’

Sitting there, drinking ice-cold beer and seeing that girl, so young and gay — it was hard to realize that they and the station, the whole world her grandfather had created, was on the brink of final disaster. ‘What exactly did McIlroy do?’ I asked.

But she didn’t seem to know. ‘I could never get Daddy to talk about that. Y’see the world he grew up in was so different to the world he inherited after the war. Before the crash, Jarra Jarra was the centre of the social life of the Pilbara — they had race days here and balls, a way of life that is quite unbelievable now.’

‘And you don’t know anything about Mcllroy’s Monster?’

She shook her head. ‘I’d never even heard of it until you mentioned it today.’ She was staring at me, her eyes wide in the harsh glare of the naked light bulb. ‘Why? You’re not taking it seriously, are you?’

I slid away from that, asking her instead about the Journal. But apparently the Journal she had typed didn’t refer to it. ‘It doesn’t mention McIlroy either. There’s a reference to closing the mine, but only because it was running at a loss. The mine was closed long before the crash, about a year I think. And there’s no mention of financial difficulties. It stops before then, y’see.’

‘So it’s not complete?’

‘Oh no. It goes up to October 1938. Then it stops. The last entry is about a trip he made out of Port Hedland in a pearling lugger. He was very interested in pearling and the coastal fisheries and owned a number of boats operating out of Port Hedland and Broome. The last words are: Picked up the news about Munich on the wireless as we were coming into Pan Hedland — and that’s all. It just ends there, abruptly.’ She bent to light the candles and I was suddenly conscious of her femininity. ‘I’ll show you after dinner. A lot of it isn’t really interesting at all, not to you at any rate — about the family and the people round, life generally. But it does give a picture of what it was like living here on one of the biggest stations in Australia, and there are bits that are really quite graphic, particularly the early pages. How he discovered Golden Soak, for instance. I thought at one time of sending it to a publisher. But that’d mean Sydney, and though he was a great figure here in the Pilbara, I doubt whether anybody’s ever heard of Big Bill Garrety over in the East.’