2 Black Sheep Mildura

[Zareen Zapata]

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

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

His re-filled pannikin drained, he grew warmer round the heart; andsang the praises of his former life. He had been a lamplighter in theold country, and for many years had known no more arduous task thanthat of tramping round certain streets three times daily, ladder onshoulder, bitch at heel, to attend the little flames that helped todispel the London dark. And he might have jogged on at this up to threescore years and ten, had he never lent an ear to the tales that werebeing 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 oldwoman wringing her hands, had taken every farthing of his savings andset sail for Australia. That was close on three years ago. For all heknew, his wife might be dead and buried by this time; or sitting in thealmshouse. She could not write, and only in the early days had anoccasional newspaper reached him, on which, alongside the Queen's head,she had put the mark they had agreed on, to show that she was stillalive. He would probably never see her again, but would end his dayswhere he was. Well, they wouldn't be many; this was not a place thatmade old bones. And, as he sat, worked on by grief and liquor, he wasseized by a desperate homesickness for the old country. Why had he everbeen fool enough to leave it? He shut his eyes, and all the well-knownsights and sounds of the familiar streets came back to him. He sawhimself on his rounds of a winter's afternoon, when each lamp had ahalo 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 friendthe policeman's glazed stovepipe shone out at the corner; from thedistance came the tinkle of the muffin-man's bell, the cries of thebuy-a-brooms. He remembered the glowing charcoal in the stoves of thechestnut and potato sellers; the appetising smell of the cooked-fishshops; the fragrant steam of the hot, dark coffee at the twopennystall, when he had turned shivering out of bed; he sighed for thelights and jollity of the "Hare and Hounds" on a Saturday night. Hewould never see anything of the kind again. No; here, under bare blueskies, out of which the sun frizzled you alive; here, where it couldn'train without at once being a flood; where the very winds blewcontrarily, 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 notbe nipping cold: here he was doomed to end his life, and to end it, forall the yellow sunshine, more hopelessly knotted and gnarled withrheumatism than if, dawn after dawn, he had gone out in a cuttingnorth-easter, or groped his way through the grey fog-mists sent up bygrey Thames.

Under a sky so pure and luminous that it seemed like a thinly drawnveil of blueness, which ought to have been transparent, stretched what,from a short way off, resembled a desert of pale clay. No patch ofgreen offered rest to the eye; not a tree, hardly a stunted bush hadbeen left standing, either on the bottom of the vast shallow basinitself, or on the several hillocks that dotted it and formed its sides.Even the most prominent of these, the Black Hill, which jutted out onthe Flat like a gigantic tumulus, had been stripped of its densetimber, feverishly disembowelled, and was now become a baldprotuberance strewn with gravel and clay. The whole scene had thatstrange, repellent ugliness that goes with breaking up and throwinginto disorder what has been sanctified as final, and belongs, inparticular, to the wanton disturbing of earth's gracious, green-spreadcrust. In the pre-golden era this wide valley, lying open to sun andwind, 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 thanone creek had meandered across its face; water was to be found thereeven in the driest summer. She-oaks and peppermint had given shade tothe flocks of the early settlers; wattles had bloomed their briefdelirious yellow passion against the grey-green foliage of the gums.Now, all that was left of the original "pleasant resting-place" and itspristine beauty were the ancient volcanic cones of Warrenheip andBuninyong. These, too far off to supply wood for firing or slabbing,still stood green and timbered, and looked down upon the havoc that hadbeen made of the fair, pastoral lands.

Seen nearer at hand, the dun-coloured desert resolved itself intouncountable pimpling clay and mud-heaps, of divers shade and varyingsizes: some consisted of but a few bucketfuls of mullock, others weretaller 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 humanfigures that went to and fro were hardly to be distinguished from theground they trod. They were coated with earth, clay-clad in ochre andgamboge. Their faces were daubed with clauber; it matted great beards,and entangled the coarse hairs on chests and brawny arms. Where, hereand there, a blue jumper had kept a tinge of blueness, it was sobesmeared with yellow that it might have been expected to turn green.The gauze neck-veils that hung from the brims of wide-awakes orcabbage-trees were become stiff little lattices of caked clay.

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

But except for this it was a wholly mechanical din. Human brainsdirected operations, human hands carried them out, but the sound of thehuman 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 thetime with euchre and "lambskinnet," played moodily, their mouths gluedto their pipe-stems; they were tail-on-end to fling down the cards forpick and shovel. The great majority, ant-like in their indefatigablebusyness, neither turned a head nor looked up: backs were bent, eyesfixed, in a hard scrutiny of cradle or tin-dish: it was the earth thatheld them, the familiar, homely earth, whose common fate it is to betrodden heedlessly underfoot. Here, it was the loadstone that drew allmen's thoughts. And it took toll of their bodies in odd, exhaustingforms of labour, which were swift to weed out the unfit.

The men at the windlasses spat into their horny palms and bent to thecrank: they paused only to pass the back of a hand over a sweatyforehead, or to drain a nose between two fingers. The barrow-driversshoved their loads, the bones of their forearms standing out like ribs.Beside the pools, the puddlers chopped with their shovels; some evenstood in the tubs, and worked the earth with their feet, aswine-pressers trample grapes. The cradlers, eternally rocking with onehand, held a long stick in the other with which to break up any clods acareless puddler might have deposited in the hopper. Behind these camethe great army of fossickers, washers of surface-dirt, equipped withknives and tin-dishes, and content if they could wash outhalf-a-pennyweight to the dish. At their heels still others, whotreated the tailings they threw away. And among these last was asprinkling of women, more than one with an infant sucking at herbreast. Withdrawn into a group for themselves worked a body of Chinese,in loose blue blouses, flappy blue leg-bags and huge conical strawhats. They, too, fossicked and re-washed, using extravagant quantitiesof water.

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

This dream it was, of vast wealth got without exertion, which haddecoyed the strange, motley crowd, in which peers and churchmen rubbedshoulders with the scum of Norfolk Island, to exile in this outlandishregion. And the intention of all alike had been: to snatch a goldenfortune from the earth and then, hey, presto! for the old world again.But they were reckoning without their host: only too many of those whoentered the country went out no more. They became prisoners to thesoil. The fabulous riches of which they had heard tell amounted, atbest, to a few thousands of pounds: what folly to depart with solittle, when mother earth still teemed! Those who drew blanks nursed anunquenchable hope, and laboured all their days like navvies, for anavvy's wage. Others again, broken in health or disheartened, couldonly turn to an easier handiwork. There were also men who, as soon asfortune smiled on them, dropped their tools and ran to squander thework of months in a wild debauch; and they invariably returned, taildown, 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 brushedfrom a butterfly's wing; in heavy, chubby nuggets; or, more exquisitestill, as the daffodil-yellow veining of bluish-white quartz: thesewere gripped in the subtlest way of all. A passion for the gold itselfawoke in them an almost sensual craving to touch and possess; and theglitter 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.

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