Since the beginning of recorded time man has found it and lost it; loved it and hated it; lived for it and died for it – Gold! With such a salutation to the precious metal I am bound to accord it a rightful place in the story of the Golden West, and in my own life’s story, inconsequential though that may be.
From its beginning, the Western Colony had lagged behind its counterparts in the East and South of the Continent of Australia. They had dubbed it the “Ugly Duckling,” the “Cinderella Colony,” which was probably true, and it in turn nurtured a justifiable envy of the prosperity and population of which the East could boast, that had always accompanied the discovery of gold within its borders. In a serious attempt to find a like bonanza in the West the Government offered rewards for the discovery of payable goldfields within the vast area of over one million square miles.
That caused a rush of reckless men scurrying in many directions; in the first instance, in the far Northern reaches of the country. It was region of stark, rugged mountains, intersected by rivers flowing swiftly and intermittently during the season of what is known as “The Wet.” In the year 1886 the Kimberley Goldfield was proclaimed, and within a few months more than 2,000 men were scouring the land for gold. In gold-flecked sands and bars men found rich pockets of alluvial gold in unknown and yet undisclosed quantities, but the price paid in human effort and loss is a horror story to be told around the campfires of today’s prospectors and miners.
Such times are now an almost forgotten interlude in the otherwise romantic saga of the goldfields of the West. For my purpose, my story opens when Arthur Bayley rode into the small township of Southern Cross, slumped on the back of a knocked-up horse, and dumped five hundred and fifty-four ounces of gold on the desk of an astonished Warden Finnerty. He then lodged a Reward Claim for himself and his mate, William Ford. The following day he started out on his return trek to his rich gold Find, leading an escort of almost every male member of Southern Cross. It was the opening scenario of the great gold rush to the desert inland of Western Australia in 1892, changing the Ugly Duckling into a glorious Golden Swan!
Southern Cross, more than 200 miles from the Capital of Perth, had had its own brief burst of glory, when gold was found there, but after a short period, the gold petered out. During its heyday, a telegraph line had been opened to the Eastern Colonies, and provision was made for an extension of the railway from the near-coastal town of Northam to Southern Cross to take the place of the Coach service to the interior.
The news of Bayley and Ford’s gold strike spread like wildfire. They were experienced prospectors, who knew the meaning of the country through which they moved, the shape and nature of the hills and breakaways, and where water may lie in the parched land, particularly wells, artesian soaks and water catchments from bare granite rocks following winter rains. Near such a place the partners had watered their horses, and not far distant caught the gleam of alluvial or water-laid gold. First named by Bayley “Fly Flat,” it soon was known as “Coolgardie,” in the aboriginal tongue meaning “Hollow in the ground holding water.”
This lack of a reliable source of water was well known to the Government, which immediately set in motion various schemes to provide water for the ever-increasing number of men arriving from near and far, seeking portage and transport to the gold fields, reports of which told of gold lying on the surface of the ground, and of Bayley and Ford hacking the rich metal from the reef with their tomahawks!
Rows of galvanized-iron tanks had been set in place in Southern Cross in readiness for the services of teams of camels, hastily shipped in from the gold fields of South Australia. From coastal rivers and streams each camel carried two canvas bags or casks slung across its wide back, each bag holding 33 gallons of freshwater. So loaded, these animals loped inland under the goad of their Arab drivers, after the fashion of past millennia of time. The water was then poured into the waiting tanks, for the rationed use of the incoming crowds. Water condensers had been called into service, some capable of being dismantled and carried on the backs of horses or camels, and others of remarkable size set in place at strategic places. It is said the largest condenser was in Coolgardie. “It consumed 120,000 gallons of salty and brackish water daily, its rows of angled cooling towers ranging along the skyline like some modern rocket site,” in the words of a chosen author, Gavin Casey, author of the “The Mile That Midas Touched,” a Kalgoorlie writer living near my home.
Firewood was needed for the services of man and the mines. The adjacent stands of trees were soon cut out, and cutters, navvies and general workmen were fast laying narrow-gauge rail lines into outlying areas, preparing shaft poles, and wood for mine furnaces and domestic use. Soon Coolgardie and its environs became a dust bowl, and Bayley and Ford, whose discovery had triggered the great upheaval were aghast at the scene. They sold their Reward Claim for six thousand pounds and a one-sixth share in Bayley’s Reward Gold Mining Company, floated by the purchasing syndicate. The company commenced operations immediately, and according to verified figures dollied nine thousand ounces from less than five tons of earth, and later treated forty tons of stone to recover twenty-one thousand five hundred ounces of gold! As for Arthur Bayley and William Ford, they disappeared in the welter of coming events, Bayley to an early death in 1896 when he was 29 years of age, and Ford to a comfortable retirement in Sydney.
Meantime the steady stream of newcomers was reaching Southern Cross from all parts of the Continent, and overseas, each man contriving by available means to span the distance to Coolgardie. Some traveled by drays and carts; some rode horseback or bicycles; the stout of heart and limb humped their blueys on strong backs, in the most extraordinary pilgrimage ever seen in the almost empty land of West Australia.
It is my understanding that my Uncle Wilfred, eldest son of my Everett grandparents, eventually reached Southern Cross, ready to make the trek inland. I have taken my cue from a hazy recollection retained through the years. Unless memory is playing tricks with me, or my admitted fertile imagination is at work, the story concerns what Aunt Edie, Wilfred’s wife, once told me, that Uncle contrived a wheelbarrow of sorts, stacked it with provisions, mining gear and water, and set out on the long slight uphill grade to the Eldorado of each man’s dreams. Be that as it may, I know he eventually became part of Coolgardie’s hectic gold rush.
It is now stimulating to read the story of another young man who also traveled that same trail “in the days of Ninety-three.” It is told in rhyme, with the unsullied hopes and aspirations which belong to Youth alone. It was published in the “Kalgoorlie Miner” some-time in the spring of the year 1926, under the name or nom-de-plume of “Robert S.” To me it is invariably a Voice out of the long Past, and I quote it with few omissions.
Nor-East we tramped by the camel pads
In the days of ninety-three;
Blistered feet through the burning sands,
Yet who more happy than we?
Blistered feet, but with hearts that throbbed,
While the sun from a copper sky,
Looked down on the cohorts of sweating men –
But our hearts were beating high.
Strange was the trail of a Melbourne youth,
Who had never thought to roam,
Till the far-off lure of the yellow dust
Proved stronger than ties of home.
Then the thrilling tramp as the Ten-Mile sands
Each day marked the diggers’ tread.
And Burracoppin was soon forgot
When Coolgardie loomed ahead.
There was wine and dancing a night or two,
But our trek lay northward still
To the Menzies field, past the forty-mile,
And over the Burges Hill.
On the camel pads we made our way,
Where the twisted gimlets grow,
And pink and white everlastings stretched
Like a field of blood-flecked snow.
Some pushed wheelbarrows; some pulled carts;
Some carried never a thing
Save the strength of arms and the hope of hearts;
They had little else to bring.
And one – a girl! She had eyes like stars,
She tramped by my side all day.
Courage is not a man’s alone,
When it comes to the gold-rush way!
The sun looked down with a searing eye
On that strangest pilgrimage
And the voice of the desert bush land stirred
To the song of a golden age.
And the moon and the wise old stars which keep
Their ancient vigil above,
They heard the cry of the mating heart,
For the gold trail brought me love!
Eventually the love-lorn poet and his sweetheart reached their chosen goldfield, Menzies, one of the earliest and richest gold finds. We are then left to imagine their story of the years, for the poet’s mood changes as he in memory revives the Past. The intervening years offered his nostalgic reflections as he closes his sad story of:
“Gold! It’s little the new chum found
Save the gold of a true friend’s hand.
What is left of the town of hope? (Possibly Menzies)
Roofless its buildings stand.
Wheels on their poppets turn no more;
The dollying pots are dry,
And never a steel-stack belches forth
Its sulfur fumes to the sky.
Where are my mates? Where the men
Who worked with the pick and drill?
The quartz was digged for a sadder cause
On the side of the costeened hill.
Our names were writ in the shifting sands,
And blown on the thousand ways.
Dust of friendship: dream dust of love:
Whirlwinds of the gold-rush days.
I know how the desert is looking now!
It’s Spring and the wattle’s gold
With crimson desert tea,
And I am alone and old.
The rich gold that was Youth’s to waste
Was spent in the quest of tears,
And only the campfire sees with me
The ghosts of the bygone years.
Only the Nor’east wind which blows
At night round my lonely tent,
Can bring from the far Nor’eastern skies,
The sigh of a voice long spent.
The girl who toiled by my side all day
To the land of fortune ahead,
The girl with the star-bright eye – she too,
Is one of the Menzies dead.
….
Wind out of the far Nor-east,
What do you bring to me?
Is it of those old days you sing,
That your voice so thrills through me?
Is it from her lost grave this dust
You bear on your heaving breast?
Wind out of the far Nor-East, I’m coming.
Grant me rest!”
“Roberts”
Kalgoorlie Miner
Spring, 1926.
Fortunately, not all who answered the call of Gold in those first hectic days of 1892 and 1893 wrote so doleful a lament. Many there were who reached the land of their dreams, finding little of the gold they sought, but remained to see the large cities rise from the red-ochre sands. In countless ways they made their contribution to the progress of their country, living productive happy lives. Our poet is one of those who reached the goldfields of his choice, hoping to gather its rich rewards, but found instead “Dead Sea Fruit,” crumbling to dust at a touch.
It would be entrancing to remain with the rich Coolgardie field through succeeding years, to watch its development from Bayley’s Fly Flat, with its huddled mass of tin shacks and canvas shelters, to become the third largest City in the Colony of West Australia. That’s not my story for it is said: “Coolgardie, with its showy alluvial gold, and rich reefs and shoots, was only a flashy shop window at the goldfields. It was left to others to bring in ‘Hannans,’ later called ‘Kalgoorlie,’ that closely-packed underground storehouse of wealth twenty-six miles to the North-east.…”
It is here my story of the goldfields really begins, for it introduces the most historic character in the epic story of the West, Patrick Hannan.
