Life at Molly Swift’s cottage in the dreary miners-camp end of town was very different from life at Binburra. Luke missed Daniel and Bear and beautiful Belle. He missed the elegant homestead, the well-stocked library, the nursery of native seedlings and cuttings. It was like going to prison all over again. Torn from those he loved, denied the satisfying, intellectual life he craved. Yet he never once regretted his decision to leave.
Daniel came to Molly’s time and time again, begging him to return.
‘Forgive me, Luke, for keeping the circumstances of your father’s death from you. In seeking to spare you, it seems I’ve caused you more pain.’
Each time Luke stubbornly refused to tell Daniel why he’d left. How could he return to Binburra if he was a threat to Belle?
His one remaining pleasure was to ride Sheba into the mountains. Daniel had given him the mare, who lived in a dusty little paddock behind the house. Paying for her feed swallowed up an alarming portion of Luke’s small wage, but he refused to sell her as Angus suggested. She alone afforded him some freedom.
With the discovery of gold, Hills End had grown into a town of almost two thousand people, not including the prospectors and trappers living rough in the hills. It boasted a row of shops, including a blacksmith, butcher, wheelwright, post office, bakery and two general stores. There were plans to build a school on land beside the railway line. Hills End also had a police station. Luke had seen his own Wanted poster on the noticeboard outside, offering a fifty pound reward. The grainy photo taken when he first went to prison was thankfully unrecognisable. He barely knew the wild-eyed boy himself.
Molly’s cottage stood in a row of overcrowded slums built on a narrow, rutted road on the bare hill above the mine. Well-heeled members of the Hills End community – tradesmen, merchants and mine managers – lived in the lower part of town. Houses were larger there, the streets broader and cleaner. Prevailing winds blew past these dwellings to the mine, sparing their residents the clouds of filthy smoke and fumes belching from the smelter chimneys.
Luke wasn’t so lucky. He lived in the back room of Molly Swift’s rented cottage, with a dark, depressing view over the mine. Angus had originally occupied the poky space, but had been promoted to the main bedroom. Molly was accommodating enough, but, if the truth be known, Luke felt a little jealous of her. Angus was his last remaining friend in the world and now Molly took up most of his time. However unfair it might be, she made a convenient scapegoat for what was wrong with his life.
His board was three shillings a week, a sum that Angus had covered until Luke found work. Luke struggled against it, seeking all sorts of other positions, but eventually he agreed to join Angus down the mine. Most townsfolk owed their pay packets, directly or indirectly, to Henry Abbott.
In the past few months Luke had learned more than he ever wanted to know about mining. The earth set up a great many barriers against those who sought to rob her of her riches. The men worked in huge, unstable underground chambers known as stopes. Massive staves of timber reinforced the stopes, tunnels and shafts. Penetrating these rock walls was difficult, dirty and dangerous work. Miners drilled holes with primitive augers, creating dense dust clouds. They packed the holes with dynamite, lit fuses and retreated to what they hoped would be a safe distance. Detonation followed: a moment of tearing stone, deafening shock-waves and flying rocks.
Unexploded charges could be set off by a man drilling his next round of holes, killing or crippling him with the loss of limbs or eyes. Sometimes fuses ran too quickly, allowing no time to escape the blast; sometimes too slowly, causing unexpected detonations as miners returned to the job.
The dark tunnels were death-traps of falling rocks, pools of water deep enough to drown in and pockets of poison gas. In this filthy, unforgiving environment, laden with rotting timbers and human waste, even small abrasions could develop into life-threatening infections.
Carting his tools with him, Luke negotiated the labyrinth with only an oil lamp fastened to a helmet. Each miner received three candles for his ten-hour shift underground. Careless use of lamps and candles could leave men stranded in total darkness.
Luke was started as a mucker. After rock was blasted from the stone face, teams of muckers used sledgehammers to pulverise the boulders and shovelled loose rubble into ore cars. Loaded cars were pushed manually to the main shaft, hoisted out in a cage and delivered to the smelter. Muckers were considered unskilled labour, earning even less than the miners, suffering worse privations, forced to meet brutal daily quotas or risk losing their jobs.
Luke hated everything about his new life. Descending the shaft in the clanging cage was like being buried alive – a descent into hell. Ringing shift bells sounded like death knells. Roaring machines assaulted his ears and he could barely breathe the choking air. After his months spent in the pristine beauty of a vast wilderness, the mine was pure purgatory – an unforgiving, claustrophobic world of gloom and confusion.
The darkness of the mine entered his mind, his soul. It extinguished hope and pity. Luke knew the mountain to be a live and malevolent being, resenting the presence of man. At times the ground heaved and buckled beneath his feet, as if the earth meant to spit him out. And as Luke broke his back loading cars, as he struggled to reinforce rotting timbers in the dark, as he smashed the dull ore to smithereens, his hatred for Henry Abbott grew.
Autumn was turning to winter. High in Binburra’s ranges, the beech trees would be turning from green to gold, but there was no way of marking the seasons underground. Angus and Luke sat near the main shaft one afternoon, eating a meagre meal of bread and cheese. Angus slumped stiffly, back hunched against the damp tunnel wall, his body periodically racked with rasping coughs.
Lately, each surface streamed with water, and the clammy humidity sapped everyone’s strength. No matter how cold it was up top, it always remained uncomfortably warm in the mine, getting hotter the deeper they went. Sweat poured from the miners’ bodies. They drank gallons of water to ward off dehydration and to soothe their burning throats.
Luke peered at Angus in the dim light. The old man seemed completely spent, but his shift wouldn’t finish for hours. ‘Thought you said you were too old for this job?’ said Luke. ‘Whatever happened to opening a store with Molly?’
Luke had broached the subject before, but always received evasive answers. Right now Angus was too tired to avoid the question – and to remember not to use his young friend’s real name.
‘That’s still the plan, Luke. Still the plan. I just need a bit more capital first. Molly thinks we’ll have enough in six months or so.’
Luke’s knuckles tightened around his water flask. ‘Are you telling me that Molly put you up to this? She sends you down this flaming hole each day so that she can have her shop? That’s more than a woman has a right to expect of a man.’
‘Hold on. Don’t get your back up. Fact is, I love Molly, and if we’re ever going to have that store, the money’s got to come from somewhere. I’ll not leave her to go traipsing all over the countryside trapping again, so this is me next best option. Don’t you go blaming Molly. You know what they say about the men who come to this town, don’t you, Luke? The mine gets them in the end, no matter what they say at the start. Just take a gander at yourself.’
A nearby miner looked curiously at them. Luke wished Angus could remember to call him Adam. On the main point he grudgingly admitted that Angus was right. They’d both been determined to avoid the mine, but here they were anyway.
At the end of their shifts they rode the cage up the shaft. The crowd of weary men dressed in filthy, dripping rags emerged squinting into the cold winter sunshine. In twelve hours they’d do it all again. Mr Dickens, the mine foreman, met the men at the gate and gestured for them to gather around.
‘You lot need to look sharp tomorrow. We’re expecting an important visitor. Edward Abbott, Sir Henry’s son. He’ll be inspecting the mine. Seems Sir Henry’s keen for his boy to learn the ropes. I’ll be escorting him personal, I will, and don’t want any cock-ups. You blokes better be on your best behaviour. Show him what a smooth operation we run. I want your word.’
The dog-tired men murmured their assent. All except Luke. He snorted with disgust and marched away.
Angus hurried to catch him up. ‘What’re you trying to do? Get yourself fired?’
There’s nothing I’d like more, he wanted to say, but kept his peace. Luke planned to go to Melbourne to see his mother and sister, bring them some money in an attempt to atone for his father’s death. He needed the work as much as Angus did. They were both slaves to Abbott’s paltry wage. Now he was expected to put on a happy face for the benefit of Henry’s snivelling son.
Belle socialised with the Abbotts. She’d told him about her friendship with Edward, assured him that Edward was not like his father. But Luke already despised him. He strode on ahead of Angus without speaking, resentment rising in his breast like a bad case of indigestion.
That evening Luke found it difficult to be civil to Molly. He sat at the dinner table, stern-faced. Angus’s dry cough punctuated the silence. What sort of woman would send an old man down a mine? Luke had lost his own father. He’d pushed Daniel away. He didn’t want to lose Angus too.
Luke picked at the sinewy mutton and roast potatoes on his plate. He’d fared better living rough at the hut. Prime lamb each day of the week. Here, the humble spud in various guises formed the mainstay for every meal. He’d forgotten how often in prison, with nothing but cold, thin soup and mouldy bread night after night, he’d craved roast potatoes. Their salty, crisp skins and warm, fluffy middles.
Molly sat down and started on her own small meal. A thin woman with bright red hair, pale freckly skin and a pinched bird-like face. At thirty-one she was twenty years Angus’s junior. She sat quietly eating her food and trying to ignore Luke’s obvious dissatisfaction with his.
‘Angus gives you all his pay, doesn’t he?’ said Luke. ‘I’d have thought you could cook up a bit of beef now and then.’
‘Don’t you speak to Molly like that,’ warned Angus.
‘I can’t eat this muck.’ Luke shoved back his chair and left the table.
Molly knotted her fingers together as Angus tried to apologise for Luke.
‘Don’t mind Adam. He’s tired, is all.’
But the harm was done. Molly didn’t like the boy. If Adam wasn’t related to Angus she’d have put him out by now.
She cleared away his barely touched meal, returning it to the pot on the stove. Times were hard and she wasn’t about to waste good food. The money from Angus’s last trapping trip sat in a biscuit tin under her bed. Soon she’d buy a shop far, far away from the misery of Hills End.
Every Friday, Molly added half of Angus’s meagre weekly wage to this nest egg. She found it difficult to run the household on the remainder. True, she now received Adam’s three shillings a week, but he ate more than his board was worth. Molly scowled, recalling an argument over her hens in the coop out the back. Adam had named them, later refusing to throttle one for Sunday lunch, even when she pointed out they were old and barely laying at all. She’d had to do it herself.
Meat was a luxury. Molly worked hard in her garden to supplement the table with fresh vegetables, but the polluted air damaged her crops. Except for potatoes. She had a green thumb for growing potatoes.
On top of her financial woes, Molly worried constantly about Angus’s health. She knew the mine was no place for a man his age, with or without the ever-present threat of an accident. Molly always murmured a quiet prayer when he left for his shift. And, as she busied herself during the day with broom, dustpan and mop, in a constant battle against the grime from the mine, this anxiety never left her.
Molly had grown to love Angus. He was a kinder man than her husband, who’d sickened and died two years earlier. She didn’t know whether it was the mine or their filthy living conditions that had killed him. Diseases were commonplace in the town: typhoid and measles, smallpox and diphtheria. Fresh milk was always suspect. As a child in a logging settlement, she’d watched her family die, one by one, from tuberculosis contracted from the milk of their own much-loved house cow. The street had no sewage system or rubbish collection. Molly dumped her rubbish in a foul culvert out front of the house. A stinking earth pit in the backyard served as a toilet.
Molly was a close friend of grief. She’d lost her babies too, all five of them. Tiny mites born months before term and buried in the children’s garden at the mine’s own cemetery. Miscarriage was as common as birth among miners’ wives. Bereaved mothers worked miracles at their children’s gravesides, coaxing swathes of foxgloves and roses to bloom in the noxious earth.
The one thing that Molly and Luke agreed upon was that the miners’ camp was no place to live. There was no escaping the dust and smoke and noise. Roaring machinery and blasting never ceased. Stamper mills below the mine on Slaughteryard Creek pounded ore and eardrums twenty-four hours a day.
The miners used copper, cyanide and mercury to extract gold from ore. Tailings washed into the creek, poisoning the fish and wildlife. The mill workers suffered too. Using mercury, known as quicksilver, led to mad hatter disease. Tremors and fatigue led to accidents. Afflicted men grew stiff and headachy and never felt properly rested. Stomach pains and dysentery plagued them. Their gums bled and their teeth fell out.
Cyanide poisoning was worse, amounting to slow suffocation, causing the skin to flush a characteristic cherry-red. Molly had seen many such men. They grew weak, confused, short of breath and dizzy. Sometimes they displayed episodes of bizarre behaviour. One man was convinced the giant steam hammers were whispering to him. He jumped in to hear what they were saying. His end at least was swift. Most victims suffered a slow slide into the grave.
The cause of these illnesses was common knowledge, but the workers couldn’t prove it. The mine denied all responsibility and routinely sacked men too sick to work. Thankfully Hills End drew its water supply from Black River, above its convergence with Slaughteryard Creek. Yet the river flowed south to other towns, polluted and barely drinkable.
Sunday preachers did good trade in Hills End. Molly despised these sermons that promised people relief from their burdens in the hereafter. What use was that in the here and now? Despite all these hardships, most mine workers accepted their lot and, for better or worse, life was the mine and the mine meant life. Not everyone wanted out as badly as Molly and Luke did.