Hammond Innes - Golden Soak

23rd Dec: Left 7 dead, stoning again at sundown. The sky a dying furnace, the sun a monstrous flaming ball. Could almost pray for a cyclone. But no cloud. Just burnished sky, and the cattle so weak they ‘re sinking in their tracks. Thank God we ‘re riding camels, not horses. Have called a brief halt having pushed the animals hard and made 8 miles. Good flat going, but too much spinifex, too little pasture. I’ll have to complete the change-over to sheep. I’m about the only station up here that still runs cattle. But I hate sheep — they eat out everything, ring bark the trees in a drought. Another twenty years and I reckon the Sandy will have moved into this country…. Hurrah! We made it and there’s water — not much and brackish, but it’s water. Trust the blackman — the sacred soaks never seem to run dry. Reckon that’s why they ‘re sacred. You don’t make a gash in your John Thomas and scatter blood around for nothing! But looks like we ‘II have to go the long way round by Coondewanna. 24th Dec: Below Coondewanna now and just before sundown took a stroll up a gorge between Coondewanna and Padtherung to see whether the blackmen have made any of their funny drawings here like on the rocks behind the homestead. Found several, very faint, in a little ravine. Red country this, red like it is all to the west of JJ, but only a thin layer of iron rock. Where storms have eroded it I can see quartz, or maybe it’s jasperite like at Marble Bar — it’s coloured a sort of dirty grey and right under the overhang, where they’ve painted a rather odd-shaped roo, there’s patches of it that glitter faintly. And at the bottom of the gully, there’s another soak, carefully shielded by a slab of thin quartz stuff. The ground very moist underneath it and the dirt around it marked by roos urgent for water. Odd country this — very wild, [broke off a bit of the quartz and stuffed it — in my pocket, more for curiosity than anything else. I think it’s Pyrites, or maybe a form of mica, but even now in the firelight, waiting for the billy to boil, I can see the specks glittering. This was the beginning of Golden Soak and all my troubles. (Note: This last sentence was obviously added much later. Instead of an indelible pencil, it is written in ink with a fountain pen, probably in 1944. J.G.) ‘That was the year my Grandmother Eliza died.’ I hadn’t even noticed she’d come back into the room. ‘He was alone then. Daddy was the only one and still a prisoner of the Japs. I suppose the old boy had nothing better to do but to relive his life through his Journal.’ She was leaning over my shoulder again, her voice gentle. ‘The handwriting is very shaky, so I imagine he had already taken to the bottle. There are quite a few comments like that, all added about two years before he died, including four or five pages on the mining techniques and problems peculiar to Golden Soak. They might interest you.’ She refilled my coffee cup and began turning the pages. ‘You’ll probably have difficulty in following the sequence. I certainly did.’ She found what she was looking for. ‘There. I’ll leave you to browse through it. I’ve got to go and see to the chickens.’

It was towards the end of the typescript, a semi-technical account that constantly referred to the high cost of treatment due to the presence of antimony and the inconsistencies of the reef. Faulting had apparently been a major problem. On page 324 he gave the date of closure — November 21, 1937. But on the following page he referred to the final blow — a cave-in and the mine flooded at the lower level. No indication of when this had happened. The writing here was very vague, mostly an angry diatribe against the absence of any increase in the price if gold and the collapse of the Australian gold share market. It concluded abruptly with these words: The end of all my hopes — the effort of half a lifetime wasted. I wish I had never discovered that Soak. And then, without a pause, he went on to deal with the problems of maintaining the wool clip in country that was deteriorating year by year. This, too, seemed to have been written at a later date, but it was much less vague, probably because he knew more about the land than he did about mining, had in fact a strange affection for it; and unlike other graziers around him he realized what the effect of overstocking must be:

I remember when I first came to JJ. It was so beautiful at times it took your breath away — saltbush, bluebush, a whole world of native shrubs and grasses, all tough enough to exist in the harsh arid heat of this outback country, and the mallee and the ghost gums shimmering their leaves in the wind, shading the ground from the sun. But now — my God! when I look at what I’ve done to keep that bloody mine going and those blasted miners in booze and women. The land is desert. It’s shagged out. Maurie and Pete, they both say I should burn off like they do to encourage new growth in the spring. They don’t see that that’s the last straw in this poor unhappy land. I’ve tried it, seen the young growth come, and then there are more lambs, more hungry sheep-jaws champing, and before you can say knife the green that should have grown lush and big in the wet, the seedlings, that might have been trees — they ‘re all gone. It never has a chance to seed. And you burn again and it burns the seeds in the ground. Pete’s mentally retarded, a grown child, not caring. But Maurie ought to be able to see it. Betty does, I know, but he’s a pig-headed bastard. Eighteen years I’ve been running sheep here, more and more every year. Quantity to offset the steady decline in quality, and now I look at the place and I can’t recognize it. Even the mulgas are dying with no vegetation to shade their roots in the heat, and this year in the dry those damned sheep were stripping the bark they were so famished for food. And Ed — what will Ed make of it when he comes home? Thank God he ‘II never know what this country was like when I first came to it. There’s nothing left to show him by comparison what I grabbed and what he ‘II inherit. But my heart bleeds for him. One thing he must do is get rid of the blasted sheep, get back to cattle — a small herd, and give the land a rest, a chance to recover if it can. I turned back to the early part, reading entries here and there, oblivious for the moment of anything but the world Big Bill Garrety had lived in. There was a lot about Golden Soak in the entries for 1905 and 1906 — the first tentative shaft, the establishment of a mining camp, and then the adit driven into the side of Mt Coondewanna, the sinking of the main shaft to 200 feet, the difficulties of getting machinery to the site, the problem of supplies. The first cross-cut from the shaft into the quartz completed on April 4, 1907, and on April 6: This day we brought up the first bucketful of ore from the 200-foot level — the booze-up went on all night, the men singing by the camp fires, four sheep roasted whole and the camels scared to death. There was a lot about the camels after that — camel trains took the ore to Nullagine, coming back with the crushing machinery, all in pieces, and sleds for the heavier parts. Money pouring in, and all of it ploughed back into the development of the mine. And then, suddenly, the entries became shorter, more widely spaced — Perth, a troopship, Gallipoli, finally the trenches and the mud of Passchendaele, all told with stark simplicity, just the facts, nothing more. Even the period in hospital, when he’d lost an eye after a sniper’s bullet had grazed his head, only rated three short entries — the last dated June 9, 1918: Invalided home. Arrived Fremantle feeling quite fit after voyage though ship very crowded. Can’t wait to get back to JJ.

‘You’ve let your coffee get cold.’