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.