Hammond Innes - Golden Soak

‘And Kennie?’ She was looking at her son, not apprehensively, but her face looked sad and the loneliness showed. ‘He’s going with you, isn’t he? That’s why you’re here.’ And I realized that she had been bottling this up, consciously keeping herself in check all through the meal.

Kennie laughed, that quick nervous laugh I remembered so well. ‘Alec hasn’t asked me yet, Mum.’ His eyes were on me, a pleading look.

‘Okay,’ I said. ‘I’m asking you now. I’d like you with me if you can manage it.’ I was watching his mother and I saw the blank look in her eyes.

But she said at once, ‘I think you should go, Kennie.’ And then she turned to me again. ‘But don’t take any chances, please. Chris always said the Gibson was about the worst. And you ought to have two vehicles.’

‘We will have two,’ I said. And I told her about the Land-Rover waiting for us at the Kurrajong Soak, Ed Garrety’s old Land-Rover. All it needed was a new fuel line and carburettor union.

‘And when will you be in the desert, so’s I know?’ Her voice was low, the nervousness well under control.

‘The middle of June I would think.’ The pegging ban was being lifted at noon on June 5. The new regulations would be published in the Government Gazette that day and we might have to start from Marble Bar in order to get the full details from the Mining Registrar’s office. Even if they were broadcast over the radio, we would still have to go to Marble Bar to register the Coondewanna claim.

Edith Culpin didn’t say much after that. She had accepted that Kennie would go with me, but she needed time to get used to the idea. And Kennie, now it was settled, was full of questions, plans, the things we would need. He had the sense not to ask me about the location, but I showed him the battered wallet that had belonged to McIlroy. ‘It was in here was it — the location?’ He was turning it over in his hand. And then he opened it and peered inside. There were a few old Australian pounds there, that was all, and he looked at me, his eyes questioning.

‘I destroyed it,’ I said. ‘It’s all in here now.’ And I tapped my head.

He smiled. ‘Safest place, I reck’n.’ He passed the wallet to his mother, who held it for a moment in her hands, gingerly, as though it were a tiger snake. ‘Won’t bite you, Mum,’ he said, laughing.

She looked at him, and then down at the wallet again. ‘So this was Pat McIlroy’s — his actual wallet.’ She turned it over in her dry, neat hands that were almost as worn as the leather. ‘Well I never — all these years. You know, Chris would have given his eyes to get hold of this. Once those rumours started, he could hardly think of anything else.’

‘You tell him to lay off, Mum. That don’t belong to him. that belongs to Janet Garrety now her father’s dead.’

She nodded. ‘I expect you’re right, but Chris wouldn’t see it that way and no good telling your father what he ought to do.’ She handed it back to me carefully, as though it were a museum piece. ‘That’s two men it’s killed,’ she said, so quietly that I hardly heard her. ‘Don’t let you be the third.’

I put it back in my pocket, thinking of only Ed Garrety and his young hopes for Jarra Jarra, and three days later we left for the Pilbara, just the two of us in my new Land-Rover.

* * * *

Before leaving we checked that ABC would be broadcasting details of the new pegging requirements, and at noon on June 5 we were back on the shoulder of Mt Coondewanna with our portable radio tuned into the Kalgoorlie station. We had reached Golden Soak just before seven the previous evening and in the dusk the scene around the old mineworkings in the entrance to the gully had been appalling, the flyblown carcases of dead cattle everywhere and those that were alive so gaunt, so bone-staringly thin as to be resemble nothing less than a horrible cartoon of famine. Water they now had — not much of it, but enough. It welled out of the ground in the hollows of the caved-in costeans. But cattle can’t survive on water alone and now all the flat land below the mine buildings was a desert, the arid vegetation eaten out, the mulgas stripped of bark, even the spinifex gnawed to its roots. Many of the beasts were too weak to move, lying thick in the gully so that it was only possible to get the Land-Rover through by the horrible process of terrifying them with shouts and the blaring of our horn so they were forced to their feet.

This gully had now become the graveyard of Jarra Jarra and all Ed Garrety’s hopes. God knows how many head were starving to death there. The sick reek of it hung in the air and one wretched cow, still just alive and lying with its starved udder draped like a pancake over a boulder, blocked our way so completely that I had to get out and shoot it and then drive over it. I switched on my headlights in the gloom of the gully, and lying sleepless for a long time that night under the stars I could still see its eyes, enormous in the bony skull and crawling with flies, a sad patience in their expression as it waited motionless for the end.

We had seen nobody on the drive down to Golden Soak and when we reached the shoulder of Coondewanna the hollow was deserted, the little piles of dust samples still there around the hole Duhamel’s rig had drilled. And now, as we waited for the broadcast with our portable standing on the tailboard of the Land-Rover, I was thankful that Culpin had not returned to re-peg his claim. Presumably the Bamboo Springs prospect had proved more promising. The newscaster’s voice, tinny and unnatural in that wild, remote setting, began reading the details from the Government Gazette as they were phoned through from Perth. The new regulations called for corner pegs 5-foot high and 6-foot trenches in addition to the substantial 3-foot comer posts Culpin had erected and the 4-foot angled trenches he had dug. And further pegs or cairns 3-foot high set in 4-foot long trenches were required at 15-chain intervals. The ABC announcer had read slowly enough for us to take it all down, and when he had finished, we read it through and then checked our stock of timber. Even allowing for the use of Culpin’s posts, we hadn’t enough to fill in along the sides of the claim every 330 yards.

‘We could peg at the corners, register the claim and fix the intermediary pegs later,’ Kennie suggested. But I shook my head. I wasn’t taking any chances this time. ‘Okay. Then we need some more timber.’ He was looking at me and I knew what he was thinking, what we were both thinking, that there would be fence posts available at the Garrety homestead.

‘You going, or shall I?’

‘You,’ I said. I didn’t want to face Janet, not yet — not until I’d got this claim pegged and had been into the Gibson again.

He nodded. ‘You start on the trenches then. I’ll be back in time to give you a hand with the corner pegs. At least we’ll get those in before dark.’ He was already offloading the timber, and then as he started to get behind the wheel, he paused. ‘Any message?’

I shook my head. What the hell message could I send her? And as I stood watching him drive off the shoulder into die gully, I was thinking that it hurt that she hadn’t written, hadn’t even bothered to answer my letters.

He was back just as I hammered the last corner peg and was starting on the intermediary trenches. ‘No fence posts,’ he said. ‘But I got some shed timbers.’

‘You saw her, did you?’

He nodded, staring at me rather strangely.

‘Is she all right?’

‘Yes, she’s all right.’ But he didn’t sound very sure.

‘You told her what we were doing?’

‘Yes. She said we could do what the hell we liked. It didn’t make any difference and she didn’t care now.’