Australia Felix

H >> Henry Handel Richardson (1870 1946) >> Australia Felix

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PROEM

In a shaft on the Gravel Pits, a man had been buried alive. At work in a
deep wet hole, he had recklessly omitted to slab the walls of a drive;
uprights and tailors yielded under the lateral pressure, and the rotten
earth collapsed, bringing down the roof in its train. The digger fell
forward on his face, his ribs jammed across his pick, his arms pinned to
his sides, nose and mouth pressed into the sticky mud as into a mask;
and over his defenceless body, with a roar that burst his ear-drums,
broke stupendous masses of earth.

His mates at the windlass went staggering back from the belch of
violently discharged air: it tore the wind-sail to strips, sent stones
and gravel flying, loosened planks and props. Their shouts drawing no
response, the younger and nimbler of the two--he was a mere boy, for
all his amazing growth of beard--put his foot in the bucket and went
down on the rope, kicking off the sides of the shaft with his free foot.
A group of diggers, gathering round the pit-head, waited for the tug at
the rope. It was quick in coming; and the lad was hauled to the surface.
No hope: both drives had fallen in; the bottom of the shaft was blocked.
The crowd melted with a "Poor Bill--God rest his soul!" or with a
silent shrug. Such accidents were not infrequent; each man might thank
his stars it was not he who lay cooling down below. And so, since no
more washdirt would be raised from this hole, the party that worked it
made off for the nearest grog-shop, to wet their throats to the memory
of the dead, and to discuss future plans.

All but one: a lean and haggard-looking man of some five and forty, who
was known to his comrades as Long Jim. On hearing his mate's report he
had sunk heavily down on a log, and there he sat, a pannikin of raw
spirit in his hand, the tears coursing ruts down cheeks scabby with
yellow mud, his eyes glassy as marbles with those that had still to
fall.

He wept, not for the dead man, but for himself. This accident was the
last link in a chain of ill-luck that had been forging ever since he
first followed the diggings. He only needed to put his hand to a thing,
and luck deserted it. In all the sinkings he had been connected with, he
had not once caught his pick in a nugget or got the run of the gutter;
the "bottoms" had always proved barren, drives been exhausted without
his raising the colour. At the present claim he and his mates had toiled
for months, overcoming one difficulty after another. The slabbing, for
instance, had cost them infinite trouble; it was roughly done, too, and,
even after the pins were in, great flakes of earth would come tumbling
down from between the joints, on one occasion nearly knocking silly the
man who was below. Then, before they had slabbed a depth of three times
nine, they had got into water, and in this they worked for the next
sixty feet. They were barely rid of it, when the two adjoining claims
were abandoned, and in came the flood again--this time they had to fly
for their lives before it, so rapid was its rise. Not the strongest man
could stand in this ice-cold water for more than three days on end--the
bark slabs stank in it, too, like the skins in a tanner's yard--and
they had been forced to quit work till it subsided. He and another man
had gone to the hills, to hew trees for more slabs; the rest to the
grog-shop. From there, when it was feasible to make a fresh start, they
had to be dragged, some blind drunk, the rest blind stupid from their
booze. That had been the hardest job of any: keeping the party together.
They had only been eight in all--a hand-to-mouth number for a deep wet
hole. Then, one had died of dysentery, contracted from working
constantly in water up to his middle; another had been nabbed in a
manhunt and clapped into the "logs." And finally, but a day or two back,
the three men who completed the nightshift had deserted for a new "rush"
to the Avoca. Now, his pal had gone, too. There was nothing left for
him, Long Jim, to do, but to take his dish and turn fossicker; or even
to aim no higher than washing over the tailings rejected by the
fossicker.

At the thought his tears flowed anew. He cursed the day on which he had
first set foot on Ballarat.

"It's 'ell for white men--'ell, that's what it is!"

"'Ere, 'ave another drink, matey, and fergit yer bloody troubles."

His re-filled pannikin drained, he grew warmer round the heart; and sang
the praises of his former life. He had been a lamplighter in the old
country, and for many years had known no more arduous task than that of
tramping round certain streets three times daily, ladder on shoulder,
bitch at heel, to attend the little flames that helped to dispel the
London dark. And he might have jogged on at this up to three score years
and ten, had he never lent an ear to the tales that were being told of a
wonderful country, where, for the mere act of stooping, and with your
naked hand, you could pick up a fortune from the ground. Might the
rogues who had spread these lies be damned to all eternity! Then, he had
swallowed them only too willingly; and, leaving the old woman wringing
her hands, had taken every farthing of his savings and set sail for
Australia. That was close on three years ago. For all he knew, his wife
might be dead and buried by this time; or sitting in the almshouse. She
could not write, and only in the early days had an occasional newspaper
reached him, on which, alongside the Queen's head, she had put the mark
they had agreed on, to show that she was still alive. He would probably
never see her again, but would end his days where he was. Well, they
wouldn't be many; this was not a place that made old bones. And, as he
sat, worked on by grief and liquor, he was seized by a desperate
homesickness for the old country. Why had he ever been fool enough to
leave it? He shut his eyes, and all the well-known sights and sounds of
the familiar streets came back to him. He saw himself on his rounds of a
winter's afternoon, when each lamp had a halo in the foggy air; heard
the pit-pat of his four-footer behind him, the bump of the ladder
against the prong of the lamp-post. His friend the policeman's glazed
stovepipe shone out at the corner; from the distance came the tinkle of
the muffin-man's bell, the cries of the buy-a-brooms. He remembered the
glowing charcoal in the stoves of the chestnut and potato sellers; the
appetising smell of the cooked-fish shops; the fragrant steam of the
hot, dark coffee at the twopenny stall, when he had turned shivering out
of bed; he sighed for the lights and jollity of the "Hare and Hounds" on
a Saturday night. He would never see anything of the kind again. No;
here, under bare blue skies, out of which the sun frizzled you alive;
here, where it couldn't rain without at once being a flood; where the
very winds blew contrarily, hot from the north and bitter-chill from the
south; where, no matter how great the heat by day, the night would as
likely as not be nipping cold: here he was doomed to end his life, and
to end it, for all the yellow sunshine, more hopelessly knotted and
gnarled with rheumatism than if, dawn after dawn, he had gone out in a
cutting north-easter, or groped his way through the grey fog-mists sent
up by grey Thames.

Thus he sat and brooded, all the hatred of the unwilling exile for the
land that gives him house-room burning in his breast.

Who the man was, who now lay deep in a grave that fitted him as a glove
fits the hand, careless of the pass to which he had brought his mate;
who this really was, Long Jim knew no more than the rest. Young Bill had
never spoken out. They had chummed together on the seventy-odd-mile
tramp from Melbourne; had boiled a common billy and slept side by side
in rain-soaked blankets, under the scanty hair of a she-oak. That was in
the days of the first great stampede to the goldfields, when the embryo
seaports were as empty as though they were plague-ridden, and every man
who had the use of his legs was on the wide bush-track, bound for the
north. It was better to be two than one in this medley of bullock-teams,
lorries, carts and pack-horses, of dog-teams, wheelbarrows and swagmen,
where the air rang with oaths, shouts and hammering hoofs, with
whip-cracking and bullock-prodding; in this hurly-burly of thieves,
bushrangers and foreigners, of drunken convicts and deserting sailors,
of slit-eyed Chinese and apt-handed Lascars, of expirees and
ticket-of-leave men, of Jews, Turks and other infidels. Long Jim, himself
stunned by it all: by the pother of landing and of finding a roof to cover
him; by the ruinous price of bare necessaries; by the length of this
unheard-of walk that lay before his town-bred feet: Long Jim had gladly
accepted the young man's company on the road. Originally, for no more than
this; at heart he distrusted Young Bill, because of his fine-gentleman
airs, and intended shaking the lad off as soon as they reached the
diggings. There, a man must, for safety's sake, be alone, when he stooped
to pick up his fortune. But at first sight of the strange, wild scene that
met his eyes he hastily changed his mind. And so the two of them had stuck
together; and he had never had cause to regret it. For all his lily-white
hands and finical speech Young Bill had worked like a nigger,
standing by his mate through the latter's disasters; had worked till the
ladyish hands were horny with warts and corns, and this, though he was
doubled up with dysentery in the hot season, and racked by winter
cramps. But the life had proved too hard for him, all the same. During
the previous summer he had begun to drink--steadily, with the dogged
persistence that was in him--and since then his work had gone downhill.
His sudden death had only been a hastening-on of the inevitable.
Staggering home to the tent after nightfall he would have been sure,
sooner or later, to fall into a dry shicer and break his neck, or into a
wet one and be drowned.

On the surface of the Gravel Pit his fate was already forgotten. The
rude activity of a gold-diggings in full swing had closed over the
incident, swallowed it up.

Under a sky so pure and luminous that it seemed like a thinly drawn veil
of blueness, which ought to have been transparent, stretched what, from
a short way off, resembled a desert of pale clay. No patch of green
offered rest to the eye; not a tree, hardly a stunted bush had been left
standing, either on the bottom of the vast shallow basin itself, or on
the several hillocks that dotted it and formed its sides. Even the most
prominent of these, the Black Hill, which jutted out on the Flat like a
gigantic tumulus, had been stripped of its dense timber, feverishly
disembowelled, and was now become a bald protuberance strewn with gravel
and clay. The whole scene had that strange, repellent ugliness that goes
with breaking up and throwing into disorder what has been sanctified as
final, and belongs, in particular, to the wanton disturbing of earth's
gracious, green-spread crust. In the pre-golden era this wide valley,
lying open to sun and wind, had been a lovely grassland, ringed by a
circlet of wooded hills; beyond these, by a belt of virgin forest. A
limpid river and more than one creek had meandered across its face;
water was to be found there even in the driest summer. She-oaks and
peppermint had given shade to the flocks of the early settlers; wattles
had bloomed their brief delirious yellow passion against the grey-green
foliage of the gums. Now, all that was left of the original "pleasant
resting-place" and its pristine beauty were the ancient volcanic cones
of Warrenheip and Buninyong. These, too far off to supply wood for
firing or slabbing, still stood green and timbered, and looked down upon
the havoc that had been made of the fair, pastoral lands.

Seen nearer at hand, the dun-coloured desert resolved itself into
uncountable pimpling clay and mud-heaps, of divers shade and varying
sizes: some consisted of but a few bucketfuls of mullock, others were
taller than the tallest man. There were also hundreds of rain-soaked,
mud-bespattered tents, sheds and awnings; wind-sails, which fell,
funnel-like, from a kind of gallows into the shafts they ventilated;
flags fluttering on high posts in front of stores. The many human
figures that went to and fro were hardly to be distinguished from the
ground they trod. They were coated with earth, clay-clad in ochre and
gamboge. Their faces were daubed with clauber; it matted great beards,
and entangled the coarse hairs on chests and brawny arms. Where, here
and there, a blue jumper had kept a tinge of blueness, it was so
besmeared with yellow that it might have been expected to turn green.
The gauze neck-veils that hung from the brims of wide-awakes or
cabbage-trees were become stiff little lattices of caked clay.

There was water everywhere. From the spurs and gullies round about, the
autumn rains had poured freely down on the Flat; river and creeks had
been over their banks; and such narrow ground-space as remained between
the thick-sown tents, the myriads of holes that abutted one on another,
jealous of every inch of space, had become a trough of mud. Water
meandered over this mud, or carved its soft way in channels; it lay
about in puddles, thick and dark as coffee-grounds; it filled abandoned
shallow holes to the brim.

From this scene rose a blurred hum of sound; rose and as it were
remained stationary above it--like a smoke-cloud, which no wind comes
to drive away. Gradually, though, the ear made out, in the conglomerate
of noise, a host of separate noises infinitely multiplied: the sharp
tick-tick of surface-picks, the dull thud of shovels, their muffled
echoes from the depths below. There was also the continuous squeak and
groan of windlasses; the bump of the mullock emptied from the bucket;
the trundle of wheelbarrows, pushed along a plank from the shaft's mouth
to the nearest pool; the dump of the dart on the heap for washing. Along
the banks of a creek, hundreds of cradles rattled and grated; the noise
of the spades, chopping the gravel into the puddling-tubs or the Long
Toms, was like the scrunch of shingle under waves. The fierce yelping of
the dogs chained to the flag-posts of stores, mongrels which yapped at
friend and foe alike, supplied a note of earsplitting discord.

But except for this it was a wholly mechanical din. Human brains
directed operations, human hands carried them out, but the sound of the
human voice was, for the most part, lacking. The diggers were a sombre,
preoccupied race, little given to lip-work. Even the "shepherds," who,
in waiting to see if their neighbours struck the lead, beguiled the time
with euchre and "lambskinnet," played moodily, their mouths glued to
their pipe-stems; they were tail-on-end to fling down the cards for pick
and shovel. The great majority, ant-like in their indefatigable
busyness, neither turned a head nor looked up: backs were bent, eyes
fixed, in a hard scrutiny of cradle or tin-dish: it was the earth that
held them, the familiar, homely earth, whose common fate it is to be
trodden heedlessly underfoot. Here, it was the loadstone that drew all
men's thoughts. And it took toll of their bodies in odd, exhausting
forms of labour, which were swift to weed out the unfit.

The men at the windlasses spat into their horny palms and bent to the
crank: they paused only to pass the back of a hand over a sweaty
forehead, or to drain a nose between two fingers. The barrow-drivers
shoved their loads, the bones of their forearms standing out like ribs.
Beside the pools, the puddlers chopped with their shovels; some even
stood in the tubs, and worked the earth with their feet, as wine-pressers
trample grapes. The cradlers, eternally rocking with one hand,
held a long stick in the other with which to break up any clods a
careless puddler might have deposited in the hopper. Behind these came
the great army of fossickers, washers of surface-dirt, equipped with
knives and tin-dishes, and content if they could wash out
half-a-pennyweight to the dish. At their heels still others, who treated
the tailings they threw away. And among these last was a sprinkling of
women, more than one with an infant sucking at her breast. Withdrawn
into a group for themselves worked a body of Chinese, in loose blue
blouses, flappy blue leg-bags and huge conical straw hats. They, too,
fossicked and re-washed, using extravagant quantities of water.

Thus the pale-eyed multitude worried the surface, and, at the risk and
cost of their lives, probed the depths. Now that deep sinking was in
vogue, gold-digging no longer served as a play-game for the gentleman
and the amateur; the greater number of those who toiled at it were
work-tried, seasoned men. And yet, although it had now sunk to the level
of any other arduous and uncertain occupation, and the magic prizes of the
early days were seldom found, something of the old, romantic glamour
still clung to this most famous gold-field, dazzling the eyes and
confounding the judgment. Elsewhere, the horse was in use at the
puddling-trough, and machines for crushing quartz were under discussion.
But the Ballarat digger resisted the introduction of machinery, fearing
the capitalist machinery would bring in its train. He remained the
dreamer, the jealous individualist; he hovered for ever on the brink of
a stupendous discovery.

This dream it was, of vast wealth got without exertion, which had
decoyed the strange, motley crowd, in which peers and churchmen rubbed
shoulders with the scum of Norfolk Island, to exile in this outlandish
region. And the intention of all alike had been: to snatch a golden
fortune from the earth and then, hey, presto! for the old world again.
But they were reckoning without their host: only too many of those who
entered the country went out no more. They became prisoners to the soil.
The fabulous riches of which they had heard tell amounted, at best, to a
few thousands of pounds: what folly to depart with so little, when
mother earth still teemed! Those who drew blanks nursed an unquenchable
hope, and laboured all their days like navvies, for a navvy's wage.
Others again, broken in health or disheartened, could only turn to an
easier handiwork. There were also men who, as soon as fortune smiled on
them, dropped their tools and ran to squander the work of months in a
wild debauch; and they invariably returned, tail down, to prove their
luck anew. And, yet again, there were those who, having once seen the
metal in the raw: in dust, fine as that brushed from a butterfly's wing;
in heavy, chubby nuggets; or, more exquisite still, as the daffodil-yellow
veining of bluish-white quartz: these were gripped in the
subtlest way of all. A passion for the gold itself awoke in them an
almost sensual craving to touch and possess; and the glitter of a few
specks at the bottom of pan or cradle came, in time, to mean more to
them than "home," or wife, or child.

Such were the fates of those who succumbed to the "unholy hunger." It
was like a form of revenge taken on them, for their loveless schemes of
robbing and fleeing; a revenge contrived by the ancient, barbaric
country they had so lightly invaded. Now, she held them captive--without
chains; ensorcelled--without witchcraft; and, lying stretched
like some primeval monster in the sun, her breasts freely bared, she
watched, with a malignant eye, the efforts made by these puny mortals to
tear their lips away.

Part I

Chapter I

On the summit of one of the clay heaps, a woman shot into silhouette
against the sky. An odd figure, clad in a skimpy green petticoat, with a
scarlet shawl held about her shoulders, wisps of frowsy red hair
standing out round her head, she balanced herself on the slippery earth,
spinning her arm like the vane of a windmill, and crying at the top of
her voice: "Joe, boys!--Joe, Joe, Joey!"

It was as if, with these words, she had dropped a live shell in the
diggers' midst. A general stampede ensued; in which the cry was caught
up, echoed and re-echoed, till the whole Flat rang with the name of
"Joe." Tools were dropped, cradles and tubs abandoned, windlasses left
to kick their cranks backwards. Many of the workers took to their heels;
others, in affright, scuttled aimlessly hither and thither, like
barnyard fowls in a panic. Summoned by shouts of: "Up with you,
boys!--the traps are here!" numbers ascended from below to see the fun,
while as many went hurriedly down to hiding in drive or chamber. Even
those diggers who could pat the pocket in which their licence lay ceased
work, and stood about with sullen faces to view the course of events. Only
the group of Chinamen washing tail-heaps remained unmoved. One of them, to
whom the warning woman belonged, raised his head and called a Chinese
word at her; she obeyed it instantly, vanished into thin air; the rest
went impassively on with their fossicking. They were not such fools as
to try to cheat the Government of its righteous dues. None but had his
licence safely folded in his nosecloth, and thrust inside the bosom of
his blouse.

Through the labyrinth of tents and mounds, a gold-laced cap could be
seen approaching; then a gold-tressed jacket came into view, the white
star on the forehead of a mare. Behind the Commissioner, who rode down
thus from the Camp, came the members of his staff; these again were
followed by a body of mounted troopers. They drew rein on the slope, and
simultaneously a line of foot police, backed by a detachment of light
infantry, shot out like an arm, and walled in the Flat to the south.

On the appearance of the enemy the babel redoubled. There were groans
and cat-calls. Along with the derisive "Joeys!" the rebel diggers hurled
any term of abuse that came to their lips.

"The dolly mops! The skunks! The bushrangers!--Oh, damn 'em, damn 'em!
. . . damn their bloody eyes!"

"It's Rooshia--that's what it is!" said an oldish man darkly.

The Commissioner, a horse-faced, solemn man with brown side whiskers,
let the reins droop on his mare's neck and sat unwinking in the tumult.
His mien was copied by his staff. Only one of them, a very young boy who
was new to the colony and his post, changed colour under his gaudy cap,
went from white to pink and from pink to white again; while at each
fresh insult he gave a perceptible start, and gazed dumbfounded at his
chief's insensitive back.

The "bloodhounds" had begun to track their prey. Rounding up, with a
skill born of long practice, they drove the diggers before them towards
the centre of the Flat. Here they passed from group to group and from
hole to hole, calling for the production of licences with an insolence
that made its object see red. They were nice of scent, too, and, nine
times in ten, pounced on just those unfortunates who, through
carelessness, or lack of means, or on political grounds, had failed to
take out the month's licence to dig for gold. Every few minutes one or
another was marched off between two constables to the Government Camp,
for fine or imprisonment.

Now it was that it suddenly entered Long Jim's head to cut and run. Up
till now he had stood declaring himself a free-born Briton, who might be
drawn and quartered if he ever again paid the blasted tax. But, as the
police came closer, a spear of fright pierced his befuddled brain, and
inside a breath he was off and away. Had the abruptness of his start not
given him a slight advantage, he would have been caught at once. As it
was, the chase would not be a long one; the clumsy, stiff-jointed man
slithered here and stuck fast there, dodging obstacles with an
awkwardness that was painful to see. He could be heard sobbing and
cursing as he ran.

At this point the Commissioner, half turning, signed to the troopers in
his rear. Six or seven of them shook up their bridles and rode off,
their scabbards clinking, to prevent the fugitive's escape.

A howl of contempt went up from the crowd. The pink and white subaltern
made what was almost a movement of the arm to intercept his superior's
command.

It was too much for Long Jim's last mate, the youthful blackbeard who
had pluckily descended the shaft after the accident. He had been
standing on a mound with a posse of others, following the man-hunt. At
his partner's crack-brained dash for the open, his snorts of indignation
found words. "Gaw-blimy! . . . is the old fool gone dotty?" Then he drew
a whistling breath. "No, it's more than flesh and blood . . . . Stand
back, boys!" And though he was as little burdened with a licence as the
man under pursuit, he shouted: "Help, help! . . . for God's sake, don't
let 'em have me!" shot down the slope, and was off like the wind.

His foxly object was attained. The attention of the hunters was
diverted. Long Jim, seizing the moment, vanished underground.

The younger man ran with the lightness of a hare. He had also the hare's
address in doubling and turning. His pursuers never knew, did he pass
from sight behind a covert of tents and mounds, where he would bob up
next. He avoided shafts and pools as if by a miracle; ran along greasy
planks without a slip; and, where these had been removed to balk the
police, he jumped the holes, taking risks that were not for a sane man.
Once he fell, but, enslimed from head to foot, wringing wet and hatless,
was up again in a twinkling. His enemies were less sure-footed than he,
and times without number measured their length on the oily ground.
Still, one of them was gaining rapidly on him, a giant of a fellow with
long thin legs; and soon the constable's foot filled the prints left by
the young man's, while these were still warm. It was a fine run. The
diggers trooped after in a body; the Flat rang with cheers and plaudits.
Even the Commissioner and his retinue trotted in the same direction.
Eventually the runaway must land in the arms of the mounted police.

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