Part 18

It was on that tramp that the great drought struck the country; forests that were green shrivelled to grey and then to brown, as the fiery blast from the white hot sun day after day crept over the sky as we tramped along. The wind blew like the hot blasts from some volcano; the swamps and creeks and pools soon became baked and cracked shallows, wherein the very frogs stuck in the dry ooze, died and stank. While we passed by, half dead ourselves, searching for water, overhead across the cloudless blue passed swarms of parrots. As my comrade and I staggered along we heard the dismal mutterings of those birds as they sped away overhead and faded away leaving a greater loneliness after they disappeared, tiny specks on the Southern skyline. To the south-west of us rose some hills, and at nightfall we came across a pool of water at the bottom of a deep gully. It was hot-fevered stuff, but we knelt side by side and drank it as on the scorched blue gums the carrion crows wept, and yet, with that same hope that springs eternally in the human breast, sharpened up their beaks with the forlorn hope that we might yet die and our rotting carcasses supply them with food. By the swamp we slept that night, and once more at daybreak started off. Over us on the eucalyptus trees the carrion crows had slept and over our heads they croaked and flapped lazily along, following us, and often they would stay by the trackless track to feed on the dead birds in the mulga-scrub, birds that had fallen from their perch during the night, dead through the want of water. For miles and miles the bush lay around us, nothing but a leafless, waterless drought-stricken ocean, and often as the migrating birds passed over, some would half fall from the blazing sky and settle on the tree-tops to die, just the same as swallows do far out at sea as the stragglers fly to the rigging of the lonely ship, and fall dead on the deck during the night through hunger.

My comrade was English, and was a splendid friend; he was three or four years older than I, and when we sat down together and shared out the food we had in our swag, we would almost quarrel because he would deny himself and give me the largest share. He was uneducated, but that did not matter. God had amply repaid him in the making for all that his education might lack when he was a man, and twelve months after, when I read in a newspaper that I had been drowned at sea on the schooner _Alice_ that was lost with all hands, I felt terribly upset. I had given him one of my “Very good” discharges so that he could secure a berth; he got the berth, and my name being on his discharge he had to sail under my name, and died bearing my name. Many beautiful things were said of me when my old acquaintances also read the account, and thought it was I who was drowned; but when the truth came out, and I appeared and was once more known to be living in common flesh, I became commonplace, and the beautiful things that only survive in the memory for those who are dead, faded and my sins once more awoke and peeped through my good reputation like the slit-mouths of those frogs that protrude among the pure white lilies of a crystal lake. But I must return to that tramp across those drought-stricken plains.

I think it was three weeks before we reached civilisation again, though we were not more than two hundred miles from Warrego. I sprained my ankle while crossing a gully, and found it a terrible job to get along, but Ned Shipley, my comrade, made me lean on his shoulder as he staggered along with the swag, which was nearly empty. We had thrown all the blankets away and kept just one small rug to wrap our little remaining food in. Several times I gave in and told him to go on and take care of himself, but he was not made that way and simply lifted me up and dragged me along. Just when we were both nearly roasted up to dried skin and bone and despairing, we came across a deep cleft in a gully, and in its shaded glooms we found dozens of juicy prickly pears growing on the huge boughs. I lay at full length on my back utterly exhausted as Ned knocked the prickles off the rind with his boots and placed the crimson fruit in my parched mouth. That night was the first night that we really slept soundly, and when we awoke the sun had already fired the eastern sky with blood-red streaks. As we lay on our backs under the tall dried-up blood-wood trees, we saw the flocks of cockatoos and migrating spoonbills pass in hurrying fleets across the sky. All was hushed on the slopes around us, excepting for the chanting noise of the locusts and the surviving tree-frogs. I remember well that particular morning; the long sleep had considerably refreshed us both, and my comrade even started to sing and I to dream of home and England. I lay by his side and I seemed to realise with a deeper intensity all that had happened. And as the scent of the parched sea-scrub blew in whiffs around my nostrils, and my chum stood up and gazed dreamily across the plains with his hand arched over his sky-blue eyes, I felt the atmosphere of wild romance come over me. Notwithstanding all the misery of that tramp and my helplessness, the spirit of adventure seemed to thrill me with a strange happiness. Even now after all the years I can still see the rolling plains around us, our homeless camp under the blood-wood trees, and the big bird that fluttered just overhead, with crimson underwings and one of its legs hanging down as though it was broken, as it gave a lonely wail and passed away. On we tramped that day and towards nightfall, by the side of a dried-up creek, we both stood and gazed on one of the saddest sights of loneliness and helplessness that I ever saw or may ever see again. There by a dead stunted palm on the desert lay the skeleton of a horse; the bones were bleached white and so was the relic of humanity beside it, and as we both gazed on that sad sight, we instinctively drew closer to each other.

The last lone ride I live it again, Lost, alone on the drought-swept plain, The grey-green gone from the scattered scrub; The frogs stink, dead in the dry creek mud; Away in the sky on southward flight, Far specking the waste of blinding light, The parrots are curling their glittering wings, Soft-croaking their dismal mutterings; By the small hot sun in fleets they pass Where the wide sky flames like molten glass, On crawls the horse o’er the trackless track, The rider scorched on its blistered back! A castaway on wide, waveless seas. Miles, miles away rise gaunt gum-trees, Like derelicts old, with sailless mast, Cast on the rocks by the drought’s hot blast The sun dies down—on the dim skyline Faint-twinkles once like a goblet of wine Held over that dead world’s hazy rim, And the lost man’s eyes far gaze aswim As the tide of dark rolls over him! There’s hope! for a tiny cloud doth rise, Toils slowly across the noiseless skies, Creeps down to a speck on the other side, To leave him alone on the desert wide; ’Tis night—overhead the bright stars creep. He lies with his one friend down to sleep:— And the months and the years have since rolled by, And the horse and the master still there lie; Where those sad eyes of hope peered thro’ The green shoot peeped—a bush flower blew, For we found them there, yes, side by side— Two skeletons white—just as they died. Our hearts were heavy as on we went, For his thin bone arm was softly bent— Curled round the neck of his big comrade There, telling us how two friends had laid Their tired heads under the drought-swept sky. And still out there the white bones lie.[9]

Footnote 9:

Reproduced from the author’s _Bush Songs and Oversea Voices_.

It was a long time before the first influence left on our minds by that sight passed away. As darkness crept over the cloudless skies and the bright Australian stars flashed out, we lay together behind some large boulders and dead scrubwood as nervous as two children, and often my heart leapt as the jewel-like eyes of the big lizards darted up the dead scrub and grass twigs by our heads, as they slipped and squeaked and scampered away. We were only about three or four hundred yards from that spot, and as night wore on and moonrise burst out over the trackless plains, the wind-blown shadows seemed to move to and fro by the steeps and gullies, as though the ghosts of dead men crept from their unknown graves and wailed while the hot night wind cried through the leafless gum clumps. I almost feared to see my tired-out chum’s face in repose, as he lay by me fast asleep, with his mouth open, breathing out God’s sad music of humanity as with each breath his chest heaved up and down, while the moonbeams on his unshaved thin face sea-sawed with his snores.

It was with intense relief that, when still staggering along three days after, we stumbled across a track and following it for some miles came to a homestead, and almost fell down by the verandah as we knocked at the door. The old Irishwoman almost wept over us and ran about with her pots muttering and saying, “Sure and begorra the poor bhoys have suffered.” The dear soul kept pushing broths from her stockpot down our throats with a long wooden spoon till at last I had to beg of her to desist, otherwise I am sure I should have brought the whole gift up again. Her husband was also very kind to us and they gave up their own bed for us to sleep in that night. In two days we were almost fit again. I had devoted all my spare time to bathing my ankle and the swelling soon went down, and when Riley rode off, bound in his shaky old bush cart for a place called Indrapilly, he took us with him, for though we were welcome to stay there at his homestead, we had had quite enough of the bush and both of us longed to get to the town again. Here I will end this short narrative of my experience with that true comrade of mine in the Australian bush and the lonely tramp across solitudes where many men in times gone by have gone and passed away for ever; for often the traveller comes across bleached bones in those wastes, and sometimes lonely graves, with the name cut in the bark of a tree just by or on some roughly extemporised cross.

In the never-never land they sleep, Where the parrots o’er them fly, Winged-flowers across some sombre steep And monumental sky. Fenced by stretched skylines far around Where thro’ the bushman creeps, Finds some lone long-forgotten mound Upon the nameless steeps; Ay, by its cross may dreaming stand Then, swag upon his back, Fade far across the scrub and sand Out on the lonely track.

For two or three months my chum and I stuck together and secured employment on the farm stations near Toowoomba and then tramped on again. With several pounds saved up we eventually arrived at Port Bowen and from there went by boat to Brisbane, and then I bade him good-bye, for he secured a berth on a ship bound for New Zealand and the next I heard of him was from a newspaper report that he was drowned, as I have previously told you. I stayed for about two months in Brisbane and made an attempt to get into the theatre orchestra again, but could not manage it; I secured several concert engagements, however, as I was then an expert violinist and could play by heart several of Spohr’s concertos and the tricky variations of Paganini’s “Carnaval de Venice.”

About this time the rumours of great gold finds were being discussed, believed and doubted in all of the Australian cities, and I got hold of a newspaper article which had evidently been written by some imaginative journalist. Had the account of the discoveries and immense fortunes that were picked up day by day been believed by the author of that story he would have been a terrible ass to have sat there writing articles for a provincial paper, wasting valuable time when fortunes were awaiting men who cared to take the trouble to get them by strolling through the bush north of Perth. Anyway I believed a good deal that he wrote, and got the gold fever, which was raving pretty strongly all over, like an echo of “the roaring fifties,” when gold was first discovered by Hargraves. The exiled convicts of those days in Sydney threw their shovels and crowbars down on to the Government land allotted to them, went across country, made fortunes and returned to Sydney and Melbourne prosperous men, elevated from the convicts’ chains to the peaks of fame, their pedigrees forgotten, the past swallowed up for ever. Their late enemies became their firmest friends, as it was, is now and ever shall be, world without end, to those who have plenty of gold; and so by one stroke of fortune men from the condemned cell who had grinned through prison bars attained to velvet comfort and applause, became notable officials, ay, and rose to be judges on the Bench, and so by the irony of fate often got their own back! But I must not digress and go so far back, as that time is now history and all happened long before I emigrated from my sleep in eternity into the realms of time to creep across the “Never-never land” on my futile search for gold to help me to keep comfortable and warm.

XXVIII

Off to the Gold Fields—The Great Rush—Digging for Gold—Various Characters—I find an Old Pair of Boots and am thankful

I WILL now tell you of my own experiences in that gold rush. I left Brisbane by boat and landed at Perth, West Australia, and found myself one of a wild crew of some hundreds bound for the newly discovered Eldorado. I had little money with me and so, with many fellows who were likewise in desperate financial circumstances, we went as far as we could by train and then tramped the remainder, bound for Coolgardie and Kalgoorlie. By Jove, they were a mixed lot those gold seekers, the children of Israel crossing the desert were nowhere in it. Some were old men, pushing wheelbarrows with their future homesteads in them, others rode bicycles, and the remainder, big unshaved men, scoundrels and angels side by side, all with swags on their backs, tramped along across those desert lands each surrounded by a small ring of flies, as our eyes blinked and we moved along in the blinding sun, ever onward, pulled by the magnet that draws the hearts of men towards desolation and gives extraordinary energy to weary blistering feet as it pulls them onward to fame and fortune or, very often, to a grave in the desert. For as we tramped along sweating, and cursing our swollen feet, we often discovered off the track the whitening bones of horses and camels and their long-dead riders as the remains lay stretched, half hidden in the mulga-scrub, the bush grass sprouting through the white ribs; men who had died in delirium, tearing their parched throats with maddened thirst under the blinding sun of those parched lands. Sometimes we discovered a tiny rough cross where the comrades had hurriedly buried the delicate youth who could not battle with the bush hardships, taken his last scribbled letter with them, and passed away; sometimes those letters were posted months, even years, afterwards in the cities, and often never posted at all, not intentionally but the trusted ones would lose them or die themselves.

One of my companions on that tramp was an old man with yellow teeth. I did not seek his company but he sought mine and fastened himself on me like some old man of the sea, borrowed my food, my tobacco, my matches, and water, which was terribly scarce. I do not think that old fellow had had a bath for many years; deep in the forest of his shaggy beard cracked the dirt and dry tobacco juice of other days, and often as an extra strong gust of wind blew the lower part back that hung over his chest, I saw his neck all marked like a zebra where the perspiration had rolled the dirt from his head downwards, and so you can imagine that I was not delighted to find that he had become so attached to me, all through my being, as he said, “the dead spit of his son who had died in a Melbourne lunatic asylum.” I was a bit soft-hearted and did not like to snub the old chap, and so I kept to the windward side of him and tramped along. I called him “dad” and made out that I was listening eagerly to all the yarns he told me. I do not remember much of what he said, as I was too much occupied with my own thoughts. I think he had been a bit of a bushranger in his time, for his conversation turned mostly that way as we camped and sat all together round the tent fire till the billy boiled and we ate food which would have made me sick under normal conditions, but when you are young and have tramped across twenty miles of red rock and stones on half-a-pint of swamp water and four ounces of stale bread, putrid tinned meat is a real godsend, and even that we borrowed from the men who were wealthy men compared to us. Men of all classes they were; some had aristocratic-looking noses, and refined faces under their scrubby short beards; some had pug noses and looked fierce and spoke with an underbred twang, while others spoke like polished university men, and many of them were too, as they sat with hungry eyes in the moonlight dreaming of the past and hoping about the future and the prizes Chance might give in the great school of Adversity wherein men learn so much.

It rained one night and never stopped for twenty-four hours. I awoke with many others soaked to the skin and shivering. The wind at night blew quite cold. Those who were fortunate enough to have tents stayed in them, and some of them were so crowded that feet and legs protruded in circles around them as the rain beat down the whole day. I managed to get my head and one shoulder into one of those shelters. When the rain ceased and we all packed up and moved on again I got a shivering fit on me and was nearly dead by the time I reached Kalgoorlie. An Irishman and his wife took me in and gave me a room over their shop near the end of Hannan Street; I lay in bed a week before I was well enough to walk out to get my fortune of gold as quickly as possible and clear off to Perth and go home to England.

For miles men were pegging out their claims and prospecting the country; the claim was usually named after some peculiarity of the spot where it was situated or through something peculiar about the man who owned it. The next claim to where I with others dug a hole twenty feet deep for no purpose whatever, excepting to make it soppy with our perspiration, was called “Apples’ Claim.” The miner who owned it was always taking oaths and saying “As sure as God made little apples.” And so it got its name. My old man of the sea’s claim was called “The Great Unwashed Neck Reef.” Some had poetical titles named after the anxious girl in some far-off land who waited the return of her lover with the great fortune, which generally arrived with a thousand kisses in a long letter and an earnest request for her to make a collection, send out the amount for a fare home by steerage passage, and a postscript imploring for no delay as death might end the suspense.

On my claim worked three others, a Scotch fellow named Burns, and “Smith” and “Birth Mark.” Smith and Burns were quiet plodding men, who breathed heavily with hope as they shovelled away. “Birth Mark” (which was only a nickname) was a kind of Don Quixote and swashbuckler mixture, and as he turned the windlass over our heads and drew the buckets of earth up as we toiled in the shaft below, he would talk to us for hours without stopping, telling us of his grand pedigree, how he was of Norman blood and the soul of honour; so honourable was he that he was only a poor man through scorning to be a party to a dishonourable action. It was wonderful to hear of the great opportunities that had come his way and how he had let them all go by through his conscience dwelling upon some tiny point bearing on the question as to whether it would be right and proper for him to take the fortune offered, or to toil as a poor man. He would blow his chest out and gaze upon us as though we were much beneath him. I put up with his vulgarity because he had lent me the ten shillings for my “Claim” licence and taken my violin as security.

He would sit by the camp fire by night and tell us all the details of his home life in England. He had left his wife in the old country and seemed terribly spiteful about it. “Middy,” he would say to me, “she was a real bitch, my wife was. What would you have done with a wife that wanted all the say and never got up till twelve o’clock in the day, and when you complained over the late breakfast struck you over the head with her boots?” I pitied him and told him so, and so did all the miners as he gabbled on, though we all envied that English woman comfortably tucked up in bed till midday in old cold England. A lot of the fellows looked shocked at such laziness and it would have done your hearts good to have seen the tremendous indignation on the faces of those miners when he told us that he crept home rather suddenly one day and caught the young lodger on the top attic examining the blue birth-mark under his wife’s knee. He told us of his rage and of his wife’s indignation over his rage, till the whole camp roared with laughter and from that night he was known as “Birth Mark” and was so thick-skinned and thick-headed that he answered to the rude sallies and that nickname with pride, firmly believing that they all sympathised with him over that story. I got to like him somewhat, for his mighty swagger was intensely amusing and harmless enough. He camped with me for a long time, helped us in digging the shafts, and also in the dry blowing, as we prospected for surface gold in the bush for miles around.

Many men struck rich on the Great Boulder, but no luck came our way. Day after day we toiled and I think we must have dug hundreds of shafts. I often fancied myself sailing home to England as a saloon passenger a millionaire!—and thrilled at the thought of my family’s delight as I pensioned each one off for life; but I soon had not boots to my feet and we sold the claims that we valued the week before at two thousand pounds for one pound each to new chums greener than ourselves, and in the end had to live on tick, and then Birth Mark suddenly one night disappeared taking with him my razor and all that he could lay his hands on, which included the little gold we had given him to mind. We never saw him again; he would have suffered from ill health for a long time if we had come across him, but he was of Norman blood and had too much respect for his aristocratic skin to expose it to our plebeian wrath.

I do not think we should have had such bad luck if we had worked completely on our own and not listened to the advice of men who knew everything and kept pegging out claims according to the rules of theory and found nothing, while often the new chum came on the “fields” and struck gold almost the first day. We got excited and went farther up country prospecting, camped out and endured all the hardships that follow the life of the unsuccessful gold seeker whose capital consists of his enthusiasm, his greenness and the one suit of shabby clothes that he lives and sleeps in.