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.