The Colour

Out of Nelson, the Wallabi ploughed north into the Tasman Sea with a strong southerly wind in pursuit, helping to speed it on. But as the old steamboat rounded Cape Farewell and turned south-west into the roar of the wind, it seemed to the passengers of the Wallabi that they had entered an altered world.

Now, they felt the true and heartless immensity of the sea. Through the mist and spray, they could see land, still, and they turned their eyes again and again towards it, wanting to glimpse some refuge there, in case the struggle of the ship against the high waves began to be lost. But what they saw on the shore were mountains rising into view, one above the other, straight from the water’s edge, and it seemed to them, on this West Coast, that the land had set its face against them.

They kept searching for a place where a boat might put in if it had to, but none appeared. The cliffs were implacable, the dense bush clinging to every inch of their fantastic height. The men on the boat could only hang on to the Wallabi, to those objects that were bolted down, objects that should have been immovable, but which now seemed to alter position as the ship pitched and rolled. They were heard to curse as a taut rope suddenly went slack, or the ship’s rail – even this – reared up and bruised them on the arm or the jaw. A perpetual ache lodged itself in them. They felt as though they had walked a hundred miles.

Joseph stared at the mountains. He thought back to the journey from England on the SS Albert, and the hope that had seemed to shine then on the blue-green waters and the triumphant feeling that he’d had of sailing away from danger. He could barely recall days of cloud and cold, though there must have been some on that first voyage, but in his memory, all across the Indian Ocean, as week followed week, the seas had been bountiful and bright.

Hours he’d spent, staring at the wake of the Albert, seeing distance accumulate between him and the things that had almost destroyed him, and it was as though the sun were following him, moving southwards as he moved, and in the nights the stars came crowding to his eye.

But here, after Cape Farewell, both sun and stars disappeared, as though for always, as though the Wallabi were moving irrevocably beyond any ordinary or comforting thing into a place from which nobody on board would ever return.

Joseph and the boy, Will Sefton, held to the ship’s rail in the stern. The boy was pale, sunk in silence, shivering in the raw cold. When something white and slick floated up and was borne along for a moment in the wake of the boat, Will stared at it until it disappeared. Then he began to tell Joseph how he’d spent two years working for an undertaker in Queenstown.

‘The job I had,’ he said, ‘was the filthiest job on earth. Sucking out with tubes the foul stuff from the dead man’s gut and pumping in the chemicals.’ He said: ‘If you want to know what I think, Mister Blackstone, I think the living body is ninety per cent dead matter and only some little spark in us keeps the rest of it alive.’

Joseph urged the boy to endure, for that was all there was to do, to carry on existing. Either the Wallabi would be engulfed by the waves and they would all drown and their bodies be hurled against the hard roots of the bush at the edge of the land, or the paddle-wheels would keep turning, inching them on against the onrush of the sea, until the mouth of the Grey River was passed and the level ground of the Hokitika plain let them in.

But when Joseph contemplated the shore and let his gaze rest on its green vastness, he felt for the first time that the struggle to dig gold out of such a wilderness would be greater than any vision he’d ever had of it. He thought that his arduous work on the Cob House, cutting tussock grass and mashing it with earth, would seem as nothing compared to what would be asked of him here and that perhaps gold was the only thing that could lure men to a place where Nature asserted so supremely her disdain for anything unable to exist in the darkness of the forest floor or in the high branches of black beech.

Will stared out and up at the mountains. His eye rested on the tops for a moment, then on the sky above, where now and then they could spy a bird circling, but his expression didn’t alter. ‘Same way as I survived on the Arrow,’ he said. ‘Do my duties. Keep silent. Wash my arse in the river.’

There was sickness on the ship, with men vomiting and spitting and some howling like dogs in their misery and fear. And most of them thought, while these days lasted, that no cradleful of gold was worth the terror that had rushed in on them with the southward turn of the ship. They wished themselves back in Christchurch or wherever they had come from. They longed for warmth and stillness and a soft place to lie. They found it difficult to breathe in the salt air. They complained that they had not been warned that, on the West Coast, there was nothing but mountains – mountains on land and mountains of dark water rising up in the winds against the dark sky.

Joseph, too, was sick. As he clung to the rail, retching, his body felt so weak, it was as if it had capitulated again to the fever that had arrived on the afternoon when he’d found gold at the creek and from which it had taken him so long to recover. He lay down on the deck and Will covered him with his blanket and he was grateful for this little kindness and he managed to fall asleep, even in the teeth of the wind.

Hour after hour, the Wallabi limped on, round the cape and on, past the mouth of the Grey River and then at last the passengers saw the change in the shore-line they had waited for. It was as though the mountains had moved, because in this place, there seemed to be nothing that was not moving and altering from moment to moment; the mountains had stepped aside and shown them a scrub-covered plain and a long grey strip of beach.

And now, the steamboat was turning and slowing. Joseph woke and felt stronger and stood up and saw that they were making for the shore, where the beach came slowly into view. Will produced a stale ginger biscuit from his pocket and gave it to Joseph and he ate it gratefully, glad of its sweetness.

Closer and closer came the beach and a cluster of low buildings could be seen along the estuary edge. The mist had turned to rain when two of the exhausted crew pushed through the crowded decks to the prow, where they dropped a lead-line and stared down into the depths of the sea, shouting instructions back to the wheel-house. The passengers, soaked and weak and shivering, clustered round them, sensing that something new was happening and the danger wasn’t over yet.

The word went round: it was the Hokitika Bar, a long snake of sand and shingle that shifted with the tides, sometimes swelling up into a solid mass, lurking a mere two fathoms beneath the surface of the water. It lay in wait for incoming ships, calling to the keels of ships like a magnet and breaking them apart. One rumour had it that only the Maoris knew the moods and alterations of the bar and that, in their shallow mokihi, they whispered to the sand, whispered death to the pākehā on their tall, keel-heavy boats. On the grey beach, among the driftwood, the men aboard the Wallabi could see the empty hulls and broken masts of ships wrecked on the bar. ‘Every tenth day, on average, there’s a drowning at Hokitika,’ said one of the diggers, with a satisfied smile. And all had the same thought: could we swim to shore from here if the steamship strikes the bar? So a conversation began. How cold was the water? How great was the pull of the undertow? How powerful were the breakers?

Joseph thought of how in his life he had very often got near to something and then lost it. Now, he was face to face with the landscape where his future lay waiting in some harsh stone gully or beneath the roots of the manuka scrub. But this capricious last stretch of water still lay between him and the hard ground of his hopes and he dreaded to die here, within sight of it, but never reaching it. He swallowed the last crumb of the ginger biscuit and said a prayer: Let me come to riches, let me come to the happiness of riches before I am taken away.

But the steamship was still making headway. Everyone was waiting for the moment when the keel would strike the sandbar, but the moment never came. The Wallabi had a draught shallow enough to elude the tentacles of the bar on this cold day and sailed gamely forward, pressed on by the breaking waves. At last, Joseph and Will and the other passengers felt the wind die and the rain miraculously cease as the wide arms of the Hokitika River took the Wallabi in and let it glide towards a safe mooring.

It was barely there yet, the town of Hokitika: a place so lonely and far from everything, it looked as if it had never expected to become a town or anything resembling a town, but had imagined itself soon enough breaking adrift from the coast, like a raft, to wait for the tides to carry it away.

There was a wide wharf, buttressed against the unknowable rise and fall of the water, and along the wharf a cluster of low shanties. But now, muddy streets were beginning to straggle outwards from the quay, backing hesitantly towards the bush, surprised by their own existence. These were yards and alleyways brought into being by the gold-diggings: stores offering tents and picks, fishing rods and matches; a bakery; two banks; a hotel with a flagpole already rusted in the salt winds; a warden’s office, painted yellow, selling miners’ licences for thirty shillings.

As night fell, the arrivals on the Wallabi crammed into the hotel and paid a few farthings for hot water and a place to lie down and sleep. Some of them already had their licences clutched in their hands; others had felt unable to undertake the simple transaction of parting with thirty shillings and told themselves that their lives were somehow suspended, that there would arrive, in due time, some necessary tomorrow in which they would be resumed, but it was not now. All that now contained was rest and the knowledge of firm ground under their bones. They washed themselves and ate each a meagre plate of stew and lay down to sleep. They spilled out from the bedrooms into the passages and public rooms, lying on thin mattresses, wrapped in grey blankets, and the sound of their snoring was like a snarling of their souls, disgruntled at having found themselves so near to being lost.

Joseph lay among them for a while, but he couldn’t sleep. He’d been one of the first to hurry to the warden’s office and buy his Miner’s Right, and now he took the licence from his pocket and stared at it in the dark. It entitled him to peg out a seventy-two-foot claim and work the claim ‘for a period of one month’. His name was written on it in fine calligraphy: Joseph Blackstone. And this had thrilled him, as though the licence were itself a bank bond of substantial value. But now, in the darkness, Joseph understood that what it resembled most was a ticket in some enormous lottery. For no one knew precisely where the gold was to be found. Greenstone Creek on the Taramakau had yielded the colour to the first comers but, as others arrived in the Rush, the gold had begun to vanish and now Greenstone was declared ‘exhausted’ and no one remained there, except a few hardy fossickers, picking over the tailings other men had left.

Rumours now were all of Kaniere, five miles upstream on the Hokitika River and most of the new arrivals would head there when the next day came. But Joseph understood that the men of a Gold Rush were like moths, going towards a golden light and in time – inevitably – that light began to die, and so they hurried blindly on to the next and the next, always hopeful but always aware of the enormity of the pursuing dark.

Joseph got up, with his blanket wrapped around him, and made his way among the sleeping men to the door of the hotel. He walked out into the dirty street and, following the sound of the breaking waves, arrived once again on the beach, where the grey driftwood lay all around. The big pieces of wood reminded Joseph of the dead, lying in attitudes of ecstasy or torment, as though some final and terrible human conflict had taken place here on the sand. A half-moon was up and glimmering on the roaring sea, and Joseph thought that he’d never seen any place on earth like this or felt the power of it in his heart.

Though the wind was cold, he was glad he’d left the hotel. He walked to the sea’s edge and stared at the water and remembered that he’d travelled this ocean in a paddle steamer and survived. To the wind and the waves he said: Let this not have been in vain.

He stood unmoving for a long while and then he searched for a sheltered spot and made a fire from grass and twigs and sat by it, feeding in small grey limbs of driftwood, until he’d achieved a blaze big enough to warm him.

Then Joseph Blackstone lay down on the sand, swaddled in his blanket and began to cry. He wasn’t crying because of what he’d suffered on the Wallabi, nor because he knew now that his dreams of finding gold had led him to this place with nothing in his pocket except a piece of paper that was probably worthless. He was crying because he understood, now and for ever – or so it seemed to him – that the person he had loved was Rebecca Millward, truly loved her, as much as any man is capable of loving anyone outside his insistent self. Joseph was crying because he knew, as his driftwood fire blazed up and hurled sparks out into the sky, that he should have given in to what he’d felt and honoured it instead of denying it. He was crying because it was too late; he should have married Rebecca. But he had not married her: he had killed her.

He returned to the hotel, where he found his fellow-passengers from the Wallabi eating a breakfast of porridge, tea and fried herring. He took a bowl of porridge and a mug of tea and sat down with the men. Their mood was loud and jocular and their talk was all about Kaniere and the finds there.

‘You’re a new chum, eh? Never heard the term “riser”? Better than tucker ground, mister. On tucker ground you can pay your fees and get something for yourself, for your stomach and your thirst, but not much else. With a riser, you could make a good bit more. Send a few pounds home, or where you will.’

Joseph drank his tea, which was strong and bitter. He had no appetite and let Will Sefton eat his porridge as the men began to leave the hotel to walk to the warden’s office for their licences or begin their trek up-river to Kaniere. He told Will to follow the diggers and not wait for him, but Will shook his head, wiped his mouth on his sleeve and said quietly: ‘I heard a tale, Mister Blackstone. Heard two of them whispering in the privies. Kaniere may have a riser, but something’s happening at Kokatahi. Trapper killed a blue-duck there. Found a lump of gold in its gizzard. Lump the size of a beech nut! So that’s where them two pissers are headed.’

This was what Joseph wanted and Will had understood it: to be apart from the horde. He felt inclined to marvel at the boy’s ability to read his mind, but then at once became aware of his own naïveté: for wasn’t this exactly what every gold-miner longed for, to be in front of all the others, to strike out and strike lucky on his own and keep his finds to himself? Perhaps, only latecomers to a Rush were truly happy men? The miner in the vanguard saw all his patient workings brought to insignificance by the invading havoc around him.

Joseph remembered his creek. He put his hand into his pocket and touched the handkerchief containing the scant accumulation of gold dust, hidden for so long in the tea box behind the calico wall of his room in the Cob House.

Joseph bought a handcart, like a barrow with a single wheel made of wood and rimmed with iron against the hard ground. He found a sluice-box, on sale for three shillings, which had, instead of canvas on its collecting tray, a piece of faded green velvet. He imagined how the gold would shine, lying on the velvet, and thought this box might bring him luck, so he bought this, too, and found that he didn’t seem to care any more about the cost of things.

He discovered Will staring longingly at some fishing rods. With a rod, the boy said, he could catch ‘all the fish in the river and us live like pigs in clover’, so Joseph, who now cursed himself for leaving behind his own rods and the fly box with its hidden curl, bought a rod and a can of maggots. ‘This is called a grub-stake,’ said Will. ‘I’ll owe you some gold for this, if I find any.’

A girl called to him from a doorway, and he stared at her and met her eyes for a moment, but passed on. All the while, he could hear the roar of the sea and it was as though he was afraid to leave it and go into the silence of the hills.

Joseph and Will Sefton followed the Hokitika River in its south-westerly course. Along its length, they saw diggings begun and abandoned among the scrub. Near the mounds of wash-dirt, they saw broken shovels and picks, crates which had once contained hens, sacks of flour left out in the rain and turned to glue and scraps of newspaper blowing about in the wind.

Now that they were finally moving towards their destination – or at least towards some destination that Joseph could envisage – he began to feel better. His stomach settled and he and Will rested a while and chewed a piece of bacon. And, in the wake of his night of weeping, he felt calmer than he’d felt for a long time, as though the persistent fever in him had broken and gone.

Joseph set down the cart. He wiped the sweat from his neck with a rag. The walls of the valley were still steep, throwing echoes into the air, and now he could hear what sounded like a wild orchestra assembled among the scrub, beating out music on the stones and in the tall trees.

‘Yes. Or use it for draining their shafts. Gold lies on the blue-clay bottom and it’s that bottom you have to find. But sometimes the water’s your enemy. Fills your shaft and keeps filling. You can see the blue, but you can’t reach it.’

They walked on. The narrow track was gently rising all the time and Joseph had begun to feel the weight of the loaded cart in the ache of his arms. He would have gladly stopped at Kaniere, but this was not what he wanted, to peg some ‘duffer’ claim among the hordes. He wished that he and Will could skirt round the diggings, but they had to follow the river until it divided and they saw the open pathway to Kokatahi. So they went forward at a slow pace and the winds that tormented the coast began to drop and the sun was warm on them. In the fast-flowing water of the Hokitika River, they began to notice the rubbish of the mine – the stirred mud of the pay-dirt, slices and ends of rope, greasy wrappings of stale food and tobacco, old bottles and jars – borne away towards the sea.

And then the Kaniere goldfield opened up in front of them: the scrub uprooted and burned, the trees felled and stripped down into saplings and planks for the windlasses and for the flumes on stilts that carried water from the river to the hillside claims. The ground had a pocked and tousled look. Tents stood on this ground at tilted angles, in untidy rows. The scene, thought Joseph, resembled a field hospital for the remnants of some small, forgotten army. Slab huts, roofed with ti-ti leaves and barely larger than dog kennels, had also struggled into being: shelter for those who’d had no money to buy rope or canvas. These were hovels held together with nails and flax, and Joseph saw men sitting in their narrow shade, puffing on pipes or brewing tea, or just staring into vacancy, nursing the pain in their arms from their ceaseless work, like convalescents.

Everywhere, the rattle of the sluice-boxes bore witness to that work: for there was no other way to get gold here but through the digging and washing and sifting of the earth, and all around the diggers of Kaniere, the earth spoke to them and insinuated itself into their dreams and wouldn’t let them rest.

No one paid any attention to Will and Joseph. The Kaniere miners knew the Rush was on and that, day by day, more and more people would arrive and the claims would spread out wider and further, right up to the implacable bush-line. In the nights, by their fires, the men would drink and tell stories, but the daylight was a precious commodity never to be squandered in words. It was thirty-shilling light.

Joseph stared at the scene before him and found it hateful. A memory of his father, trapped against iron rails by a squealing cartload of pigs, holding high his precious gold-edged auctioneer’s ledger, came into his mind. Afterwards, Roderick Blackstone had been embarrassed by the smears of pigs’ slobber on his black trousers, but had been ‘victorious’, he said, ‘absolutely victorious because my ledger has no trace of my ordeal upon it’.

Though the melancholy tune was consoling and seemed to lure them on, Joseph set down the cart where he stood, at a good distance from the music. He waited for a moment, looking about him, feeling the dusk coming towards him and aware of how exhausted he was.

He told Will to search for twigs and wood for a fire while he set up the tent he’d bought such a long time ago. His back and arms ached as they had never ached on the farm, but he set out the tent with as much patience and care as he could muster. The music stopped and, in its absence, Joseph could hear again the glide and fall of the river. As he hammered in the tent pegs, he realised the ground he was standing on was much softer than any ground that they’d passed that day or any that he’d imagined.

‘I only whistle in the night,’ whispered Will. ‘Always the middle of night, because I like it that way, in the darkness. On the Arrow they called me Whistling Willie! Apt as any name could be. But they knew I would only do it in the darkness.’

‘All one. Told you. Do my services. Get my pay . . . Some liked me to kiss them and I’d even do that. Kiss their lips like a girl. And that’d craze them sometimes and they’d call me tender names: Willie-my-sweet, Will Sefton my lovely boy . . .’

Joseph reached out a hand and touched Will’s thin shoulder. He opened his mouth to say to Will that he didn’t want his ‘services’, that he hadn’t befriended him for that reason, that, if he found gold, he would give a share to Will because Will and he had travelled together and that travelling together was better than travelling alone. But he felt too stunned, by all that he’d endured and by what he knew was happening now, to form these words, to form any words. So he just lay there, touching Will and staring at him and understanding that Will would leave him the next day – leave him to take up with another man who would want his ‘services’ and pay handsomely for them – and that his own gift of the fishing rod would count for nothing. And he saw his own approaching loneliness as something unendurable.