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.
Often out on those lonely tracks my comrades and I passed deserted
shafts and heaps of empty meat tins with the weeds already covering up
the remains of recent mushroom civilisation and the blasted hopes of
mining men. We too drifted into the hopeless stage, built a tent by the
deserted camps and rested before we started off back to the towns again.
One of the men, an old sailor, who had left a ship at Perth and had come
up country, thinking to make his fortune and surprise his Polly Beck of
London Town by arriving home a wealthy man, had a gun with him, was an
excellent shot, and early in the morning he would shoot the green
parrots that fluttered and stirred the grass on the hills by thousands.
On these birds some of them lived. My friend Smith and I gave up gold
seeking utterly and sat down and slept in the sun by day and strolled
over the bush to break the monotony. The country struck me as very
desolate-looking, but it was considerably relieved by the beautiful
everlasting bush flowers that grew on the hills, with all the colours of
the rainbow sparkling in them. In those parts also grew the lovely green
Kurrajong trees, and the sombre blue and white gums. At night, we heard
the melancholy note of the mopoke in the bush and wailing things that I
never caught sight of.
I well remember the tramp back to Kalgoorlie with my friend Smith by my
side. He too was despondent, for we had both dreamed of making vast
fortunes, and smacked each other on the back as we chuckled over our
prodigal return to England as wealthy men. I was delighted before
nightfall of that day as we tramped back to leave the gold fields for
ever, for I found a pair of old boots by a deserted shaft, and they
fitted me just a treat, and the comfort to my bleeding, blistered feet
that had been prodded with nails that stuck through my old ones made me
feel quite happy.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
XXIX
Playing the Violin to the Gold Miners—My Friend the Late Missionary—The
Great Concert in Coolgardie, under the Direction of “Carl Rosa De
Bonne”—Farewell
I STILL had my violin when we arrived back in Kalgoorlie, and after a
deal of trouble I got some strings and started playing to the miners,
for Smith and I were desperate for money and decent clothes. In an old
shanty place on the skirts of the town I played the violin and a sailor
played the banjo as Smith took his hat round collecting and in two hours
we had more money in our pockets than we could have earned on the gold
fields in twelve months. My accompanist, the sailor, was a splendid
vamper, and I played all those melodies which I knew would touch the
hearts of those miners; old English songs, sea songs, and finished up
with the “Ah che La Morte” from _Il Trovatore_. They were delighted as
we finished each selection. Smith’s face beamed with satisfaction and so
did mine, as he repeatedly came up to me, while I played on, and emptied
the coins into my pocket; the sailor played away as though he was going
mad with delight, nudged me in the ribs and kept whispering into my ear
“Shares, mate, mind you shares.”
From far and near they came to hear the grand concert. Some sang solos,
and we accompanied, others called for dance music. Hard by was a
drinking saloon, and I can still see those rough-bearded men with their
eyes shining with delight as “All went merry as a marriage bell” and
they drank deeper and became from “Half-seas over to dead drunk over.”
And then a strange thing happened. A tall, stooping, broad-shouldered
man came towards us, and gazed steadily in my face for a moment. I too
gazed at him. We had met before! For the moment I could not think who he
was, and then in a flash, just as he was turning his face aside as
though to let the past go by, I remembered. It was the “Reverend” whom I
had seen in the South Seas, the very man whom Hornecastle had chaffed
when he visited our shanty by the beach in Samoa. Staying my
violin-playing for a moment, I lifted the bow and saluted him to let him
know quickly that I remembered him, notwithstanding that he was growing
a beard and was dressed in a red-striped shirt and shabby miner’s pants.
“Well, I’m blessed, Middleton,” he said, as he at once came forward and
took hold of my hand. “What on earth brought you this way?”
“Gold hunting like the rest of them,” I answered, and then I turned and
said, “What about you? What are you this way for?”
“Never mind that,” he answered quickly, and I also quickly saw that his
business and retirement from the missionary profession was nothing
whatever to do with me, and minded my tongue. He turned out to be a
splendid friend to me, and in his rôle of gold seeker and common miner
he was a man every inch of him. He had heard of the gold finds in West
Australia out there in the Islands and had taken the first opportunity
to clear out. He was quite frank with me about everything and told me
that he had done well, much better work and pay than the old missionary
humbugging tour, he said to me as he told me how he had bought a claim
for a few shillings from a young fellow and it turned out rich and he
eventually sold it for three thousand pounds.