Читать книгу A Backblocker's Pleasure Trip - Edward S Sorenson - Страница 4

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Coaching through the lonely back country is not exhilarating. You travel all day, all night, all next day, all that night, and all the following day, by which time you are feeling rather tired of it. You are also feeling drowsy. You stop only for meals—which are sometimes 18 hours apart, to change horses, and at the sandhills.

Our first halt was at Warratta, a wayside pub, where we washed down some of the dust we had collected in climbing up and down many stony, saltbush hills; and our next the little town of Milparinka, which after more substantial refreshments and a ramble, we left at dusk.

Like Tibooburra, our starting point, Mount Browne, Warratta and Milparinka were all goldfields that had known better days in the long past, and still supported a good number of puddlers, dryblowers, fossickers and others.

A queer lot of human derelicts one meets on some of the old alluvial diggings. What answers to the description of good fossicking ground is the last haven of the inveterate digger when old age creeps upon him. Down the long river of life he has known many vicissitudes; like a coracle he has drifted through the rushes and whirls of the golden course, tearing wildly over rapids and tumbling over falls; buffeted among the rocks, and stranded awhile in the shallows to float again into calm waters, through little eddies and ripples, and at last to drift out of the running stream into a by-wash and a dead end. That is the fossicking ground as the old men know it, where all the excitement of a rushing digger's life is gone and done with. There remains only the necessity of scratching around for an existence, with the faint hope, which really never entirely dies in any digger, of striking a stray nugget or a rich pocket.

Some of them have handled fortunes in their time; in stirring days when life was young, and money was not valued, and was parted with as quickly as it came. In the neighbourhood of Mount Browne was one who was known as Bendigo. He was very nearly a centenarian; bent, wrinkled, and toothless, but still with energy and independence enough to potter about with pick and shovel. He got his nickname from the fact that his conversation usually bristled with references to the big Victorian field. He made his first pile on Bendigo, and he made many a good rise afterwards, at one time being possessed of £12,000.

When I first saw him he stood at the corner of the street, carefully searching the pockets of his patched clothes, and wearing a deeply thoughtful expression, as if he were trying to recollect what he had done with his last sixpence. The pockets turning out all duffers, he shuffled resignedly back to his camp, which happened then to be a hessian hut, the home of a man who worked at anything in the district, and did a bit of mining when there was nothing else to do. Bendigo had no abiding place that he could call his own. There were several men who had small dwellings on the field, and who were much of the year working away from it, at shearing sheds and elsewhere. There were others, too, who could not work their claims during the long, dry spells for want of water. They were not content, like the old chaps, to get a couple of pennyweights a week until rain came, and they left home to seek other employment.

As one of these went out, Bendigo walked in, taking possession of the hut and utensils, and sometimes any tools that were there. Bendigo did not always possess a working kit. He couldn't obtain necessaries on trust; and when hard up he had to sell his kit or leave it as security. He had no mining claim either. He wandered about, working wherever he could find shelter, and especially where there chanced to be a deserted soakage. When the owner of the hut returned and temporarily inconvenienced him by turning him out, he looked for some reward for having acted as caretaker.

In the same locality was a hatter, who was popularly known as Dirty Peter. He was a dryblower, and no local evidence was adducible that he had ever washed either himself or his clothes. His name certainly suited his appearance. I often noticed his humpy, for it was one that had some eye arresting peculiarities about it. It was partly a dugout, with a patchwork roof like a Chinaman's hovel, and a chimney some yards in the rear composed of a pile of rough stones, topped with a broken drainpipe. He descended into the dungeon by means of an arrangement that was partly a ladder and partly a staircase. A wall of stones and bushes enclosed the premises on three sides; the front was open, and the ground thickly pitted right up to the door with old shafts. A little track, a couple of feet wide, zigzagged among the gaping holes to the entrance of Pete's happy home. The shafts had been there since the days of the rush, and it was believed that Peter left them unfilled as a deterrent to evening visitors. He was a hard worker. Early and late he was at it, picking, shovelling, and blowing the dry soil on the flat, always about the same place, year after year, and every day's end he was seen zigzagging home with a log of wood on his shoulder. What he made nobody knew. He never hung about town, even at race time or election time. There was one thing about Peter that made him talked about among the old brigade—he always had money, but he always looked and pretended to be hard up.

Then there was "Old Ned," an old age pensioner. He had a neat little hut, kept scrupulously clean, the path to which was also hemmed with shafts. He, too, was something of a recluse. All day he kept to his hut, for he had given up mining, and at night he emerged to prowl about the vicinage. He liked to keep a fire burning, where he sat and smoked, or absorbed any interesting literature he chanced to pick up; and as it was a long way to the mulga ridges, he visited the unguarded woodheaps at the back of the business places. If he heard anyone approaching from the opposite direction while making home with the fuel, he dropped it down a shaft, and returned for it later. His path was a short cut from town across the flat, and sometimes he had several interruptions in getting a log home. One night a digger came almost on to him as he was busy hauling a heavy piece out of a hole. Ned let it slip back quickly, and commenced to feel along the path with his hands. "Hulloa, there!" said the digger, "what's up." "I've lost my pipe," said Ned, continuing the search. The digger produced a box of matches, and was about to strike one to help, when Ned hurriedly interrupted: "It's all right, I've got it!" and straightening up, he thrust a short, knobby stick between his teeth, and made a pretence of drawing through it.

Another curious character was Windyne, who was commonly known as Windy the Fossicker, and to some as Cranky Windy. He dwelt alone in a little slab hut that he had built in the centre of a square plot of ground, containing about five acres. He earned his nickname from the fact that he spent all his days fossicking about that selection. It was broken up from side to side and from end to end, hardly a vestige anywhere being left untouched. It had never panned out a colour, but that didn't discourage Windy. When he wasn't digging, or measuring with a tape, he was seen mooching about with a pick and shovel in one hand and a tattered map in the other. How many years he had been thus unprofitably employed nobody could recollect.

He was a very old man when I knew him, bald-headed, wrinkled, and watery eyed. He lived on a small remittance, which he said, would be paid to him by his loving relatives as long as he stayed away from them. I took refuge under his humble roof one rainy day, and whilst we sat over the fire he told me his story.

He and a mate had been digging together, and being on a good run of dribbling gold, which kept them going comfortably, they invested some of their spare cash in a Tattersall's sweep, and drew a winner. The sum was about £10,000, according to Windy. The storekeeper collected the money, and handed it over to Windy's mate, who stowed it away in their tent. That night, Windy, celebrating his elevation to fortune, was treating everybody he met in town, and wound up by assaulting the constable. Ordinarily Windy was the most peaceful of citizens. His lapse cost him a month in the local lockup. He had been cooling his heels there about three weeks when he heard that his mate had been found dead in the tent. The only money that could be found was a couple of one pound notes in his pocket and some loose cash in a chamois bag under his pillow.

"He must have known he was dyin'," said Windy, "for he left me a rough chart—this old map 'ere that I've studied for ages and ages. There's one word underneath—'Buried'—with the last letter only half formed, as if he had a spasm or something just there, an' never went back to finish what he'd meant to write.

"After I got out I spent six months searchin' and diggin' in vain for the buried money. Then—for fear somebody else might start prospectin' in the locality—I took up this homestead selection. It's no good for anything, an' my good neighbors are convinced that I'm stark starin' mad for selectin' such a plot; but the map says the gold's hidden inside its boundaries. Lord knows, I've done a power o' diggin', but I haven't struck the colour of it yet. Sometimes I think I've put the house on it. If that's the case the house will have to shift. But there's a few little virgin spots on the estate I must try first. Likely enough it's in one of them; if it's not it's under the house; and if it's not under the house—well, then, I must have put the fence up wrong, an' left the fortune out in the bush. . . . It must be somewhere, that's sure. Blast old Bill; he couldn't take it with him, could he? It's not my way to say anything against the dead, but old Bill was always a fool of a feller with money. An' to snuff out like that without finishin' the d—— map, that's what gets over me! . . . Anyhow"—concluding with a gleam of cheerful philosophy—"if I don't soon find it I won't want it."