by Alex Nicol
Not only did she, like any self-respecting member of the theatrical profession, need to see this show, she also had a friend involved. Diana had directed a young, redheaded, freckle-faced James H. Bowles in an amateur production, and had encouraged him to head to Sydney and ‘have a go’. James had gone and he’d landed a job in Hair—he was a dresser.
‘A dresser for Hair—all those girls! It’s like dying and going to heaven,’ he reckoned.
Harry M. had pulled off a coup. The thought of all those naked breasts on stage sufficiently enraged Joh Bjelke-Petersen that he declared Hair would never be staged in Queensland. That saved Harry M. the expense of restaging the production, because half of Queensland made the trip to Sydney to see it. Each Friday and Saturday, fleets of buses would disgorge the maroon hordes onto the streets of Kings Cross, and every Sunday morning the satiated degenerates would pile in and head north again. Kings Cross loved Joh.
Diana had asked a friend to babysit our mob for a weekend. She was coming to Sydney—just get those tickets.
The young lady at the box office laughed when I asked for two tickets for Saturday night, and enquired what year I was thinking of. Tickets for Hair could not be had, not even for ready money.
I could have broken the bad news to Diana but I’m naturally sneaky. There were plenty of other avant-garde companies in Sydney doing cutting-edge stuff; we’d see one of them instead. She’d understand.
‘Have you got the tickets for the show?’
‘Yes, dear.’ I wasn’t lying, just being nonspecific.
I’d been living in the hotel at the Cross long enough to be on first-name terms with the bloke who drove the lift—yes, they used to have a lift driver in those days—and I introduced him to ‘my wife, Diana’.
‘Oh yes?’ he said—nudge, nudge, wink, wink.
The weekend was not off to a good start.
I took Diana to a hotel for a meal. A wedding reception was in full swing at the bar. The bride looked magnificent as he breasted the bar, casually pushing the veil back from his face to down a schooner. Diana didn’t notice … a little local colour gone begging.
She picked up the fact that we were heading the wrong way to get to the theatre, and I then had to break the news that we wouldn’t be seeing Hair, ‘but …’.
I can’t remember what the show was that we saw. We had very good seats, front row; everyone else in Sydney was at Hair. It was very avant-garde, and a young lady wearing nothing much at all really did leave the stage and sit on my lap and feed me pieces of apple. It was very symbolic.
Diana was not amused.
We saw Hair restaged in Melbourne in the 1990s. What a gentle, old-fashioned little show it was by then.
GOLDEN MEMORIES
At Orange you need to be careful when you talk about early gold discoveries. The Tom families are still very much part of the community, and any suggestion that Edward Hargraves—that jumped-up usurper, that blow-in from California—found the first payable gold will get you a history lesson. William and James Tom were the men, and Hill End was the site.
There was a road connecting Bathurst and Mudgee that ran through Hill End. I’d used it once or twice; it was always a good idea to check your vehicle afterwards for the parts that had fallen off. I’d always thought it unfair that Ballarat and Bendigo had such lavish displays of the wealth brought by the gold rush, while Hill End looked forlorn.
Hill End is now in the care of NSW National Parks and is well maintained. But when Neil Inall and I went there looking for colour pieces for the pilot program of All Ways on Sunday, it was a very different place. Buildings were deserted and in disrepair, and it had the look of a ghost town about to happen.
We weren’t having much success finding suitable ‘talent’ either, until we came upon a cottage that looked to be settling down on the side of the road. I guessed that originally it had been on the same level as the road, but that, every time they top-dressed, the road rose a little and the house seemed to sink a little. Inside was a lady with a story to tell.
The Holtermann Nugget: they sat it on grandmother’s best tablecloth and said, ‘Anyone who can pick it up can have it.’
Look up the register for great gold nuggets, and right at the top you’ll find the Holtermann. It’s not strictly a nugget, the books will tell you, but at somewhere around 290 kilograms it’s the largest piece of gold ever mined.
The Holtermann came out of the Star of Hope mine in Hill End. ‘And it sat on that table,’ the lady told us.
‘This one? The one we’ve got the recorder on?’
‘Yes, right there. My grandmother told me that the men were looking for somewhere to display it. They wanted everyone to come and have a look. Everyone was crowded into this room. They were so excited. They said that anyone who could pick it up could have it.’
We were sitting around a piece of history!
It was a fine old sturdy Victorian table. Nothing special, but, yes, it seemed strong enough to hold that great chunk of rock and metal.
‘Grandmother wasn’t too pleased, you know. She had her best tablecloth on the table, and they didn’t give her time to take it off or anything.’
She wasn’t sure what sort of tablecloth; we speculated that it might have been one of those nice crushed-velvet cloths with the little baubles around the edge. Yes, she agreed, it might have been. All these years and two generations later, her displeasure at the indignity was palpable.
‘Well, they took the gold away, and the next day they came back and asked grandmother for the tablecloth.’
‘So they were at least going to wash it for her,’ we offered.
‘No, they wanted to make sure there wasn’t any gold left, caught up in the cloth.’
For the record, they extracted something like 3000 troy ounces of gold from the Holtermann—around 93 kilograms. And they found even bigger pieces in that mine, but broke them up to make it easier to get them to the surface.
THE LIGHTS OF COBB & CO.
I was working in Albury, presenting the program from the ABC studios there, when a nurse from the local hospital put her head into my office one day and asked if I’d like to talk with ‘the last Cobb & Co. driver’.
Arthur Robinson was in hospital. He was very unwell, and I had some reservations about asking him for an interview, but he was cheerful and ready to talk.
I told him, ‘I’ll stay until you tell me to leave.’ And he never did. He took me back to the nineteenth century, opening a window onto work and ways long gone.
Arthur’s right arm was deformed, bent. It looked to me as though he’d broken it as a kid, and that it had been roughly set or even left to set itself.
‘No,’ he told me, ‘that’s bent from holding horses.’
His lifetime of working with horses began at an age when our children are just stepping up from primary to secondary school. At thirteen he was working in the horse yards, harnessing teams for Cobb & Co.
Cobb & Co. began life with the gold rush, and its early runs served the goldmining towns. The company built its reputation on quick and dependable service. That reputation was in the hands of young kids like Arthur.
The coach teams, Arthur told me, travelled at a hand-gallop over stages that varied, but were around 10 to 12 miles. They travelled at something like 6 or 7 miles per hour. Keeping up that speed over the whole length of the trip depended on having quick changeovers at stations along the way. As a boy, his job was to make sure that happened.
‘How many horses to a team?’ was an obvious question. The answer was either five or seven; but the number of horses wasn’t as important as the quality.
You can buy harnesses for horses these days; when you do, you’ll be buying ‘off the rack’. That didn’t do for Cobb & Co. Arthur told me that each horse had its own harness, and that was very important if you wanted to get the best out of that horse. Part of his job was to make sure that he put the right harness on the right horse.
The next team of horses would have
to be standing ready when the coach pulled in. ‘You’d drop one team off and get the fresh team in, and the driver would be away in a matter of minutes,’ he told me. Arthur’s next responsibility would be to cool down the spent team, remove the harnesses, feed and groom the horses, and look to any repairs that might be needed.
Imagine a Cobb & Co. coach at full stretch. The picture in your mind is of a coach kicking up dust somewhere at midday, right? I got quite a surprise when Arthur told me that the coaches could travel at night. It made sense: it was cooler, and so easier on the horses.
‘But how did you see at night?’
‘A big bullseye lamp up on top of the coach,’ he said, which ‘gave a pretty good wide light’.
I laughed and said that roos were a problem with night driving these days. He assured me that things were no different then: it wasn’t unusual to have a near miss with a mob cutting across in front of the horses.
Arthur drove three runs in western Victoria and southern New South Wales. He knew the road between the gold towns of Ararat and Landsborough, and the tracks to what then would have been the isolated communities of Tocumwal and Finley. He also drove the Hay–Booligal line.
People would have been in a hurry to get to the goldfields in those days, and I guessed that the coach would on occasion have been overcrowded. ‘What was the usual load?’ I asked.
Arthur’s answer pretty well summed up attitudes in those far-off times: ‘I’ve had up to fourteen real people. But I’ve carried twenty-two Chinee.’
CHINESE GOLD
The strangest story I ever covered for All Ways on Sunday began with a small parcel the size of an audio cassette. Inside was not the expected tape, but what proved to be two ingots of solid gold. Attached to the package was a note saying that if I presented the contents and the note to a particular person at Prouds, the jewellers in Sydney, it would be proof that he could tell me their story. Even more intriguing was the suggestion that if I wanted to make contact with the sender, I would have to do so via telegram to a post office in North Queensland.
Whoever sent that package certainly knew how to prick a journalist’s interest.
It was the early 1970s, the Whitlam government, having just come to power, had announced its plans for decentralisation. Gough was already talking about Albury–Wodonga becoming the new Brasilia, and the ABC must have decided that it would make a token gesture in that direction. I was being moved from Canberra, where I’d been working as both the rural political reporter and the presenter of All Ways on Sunday, to Albury. At least one national program would be broadcast from this would-be mega-city.
Of course I wanted to know the mystery of the little package, but I couldn’t get from Albury to Sydney and back in time to present the following Sunday’s program. I asked a colleague to unlock the secret for me. I couldn’t believe the result.
The package had been sent by a Mr Zarb, who claimed that the gold was a small part of a cache of Chinese gold and artefacts he’d discovered at the old Palmer River goldfield. He wanted to present the gold and the artefacts to the newly announced Museum of Australia. Could I help?
Gold was discovered on the Palmer River in 1872–73, relatively late in the gold rush era. This was in Far North Queensland, about 170 kilometres inland from Cooktown, and it was uncharted country. Northern Australia at that time was sparsely populated; unlike most other areas where gold had been discovered, no white settlement was in place. Miners would come face to face with some very hostile Aborigines.
Chinese workers in the area would be different too. Most were brought to the fields as indentured labour controlled by ‘tongs’ (Chinese cultural organisations). Many of them had no idea where they were; they thought they were at workings on the east coast of the United States. In time, Cooktown would become a very big Chinese settlement, home to many more Chinese than Westerners.
Initially there was no road as such to the new diggings, just rough bush. Early on, there were cases of miners starving to death along the track, with a billy of gold beside them but no food. This is tropical country, so would-be miners faced the added difficulty that they’d be unable to move in the ‘wet’, while pack animals would be short of feed in the ‘dry’. There’s a marvellous story from the area of a packhorse being found wandering at the point of starvation, fully loaded with rich quartz. Who loaded the animal, and where the quartz came from, no one knew.
To add to the romance of the place, the track led through a pass in the range that came to be known as Hells Gate. It’s a very narrow pass, just wide enough to get a pack animal through; even today, if you visit the pass—and not many people do—you’ll see the rub marks of the pack-saddles on the rocks. It’s the ideal place for an ambush, and the local Aborigines developed a fearsome reputation for defending their country. At Battle Camp a party of warriors took on Europeans armed with rifles; they stood and fought, with great loss of life.
The story grew that these natives were cannibals. Now, cannibalism among Aborigines has always been hotly denied, but if you read the reports of early government officials in the area, they certainly believed it went on. Whether they ate anyone or not, and there’s no evidence that they did, they certainly hunted Europeans and Chinese alike, in defence of their country.
Any story that came out of the Palmer River goldfield had to be a good yarn. I put the bare outlines of what I knew about my mystery package to air and was amazed by the result. Almost immediately I had a phone call from the director of the as-yet-unbuilt Museum of Australia. He guessed that all this was a joke, but wanted to be sure. I promised him that, as far as I knew, this Mr Zarb was genuine. Certainly the gold was. With the director’s say-so, I responded to my mysterious explorer.
Telegrams went to and fro, and I learned that my informant had already had dealings with the Queensland government. Officials had contacted him, claiming that his find amounted to ‘treasure’ and so was the property of the state. He might get a reward for the find, but first he had to hand it over. His response was one that he would use again and again: ‘If it’s yours, you must know where it is. Go and get it.’
What did he want from the museum? With an eye to history, Mr Zarb said that he wanted the collection to stay together—the gold and the artefacts. He wanted his name associated with the collection, and he expected a monetary reward, but something less than the value of the gold.
This story had great television possibilities, and I contacted John Sparks, the director of A Big Country, who was very interested. We started the search to find out as much as we could about this magical pot of gold. There were characters stamped into those little ingots, so our first task was to find out what they might mean. As a country, Australia had not yet officially recognised Communist China, so the ingots were taken to the Taiwanese embassy with a request for a translation. That proved to be very interesting.
The gold, we were informed, carried the mark of the Black Dog Tong. That tong still existed and was active; we were advised to put the gold back where we’d found it.
So there was no doubt that it was Chinese gold.
I had a photograph of the ingots, and many years later, when I was working for the Australian Wheat Board, I showed it to a Chinese friend at the board who’d just saved the company from making a monumental cultural blunder in China. She was very interested and asked how I’d got the photo, and I told her the story. Chinese characters can be read in a number of ways, she told me, but these clearly said: ‘Black dog. Say nothing.’
It’s almost certain that the Chinese were sending gold from the field back to China, and the suggestion is that they did so in a number of ways. The more inventive stories centre on brass buttons and burial urns.
The story goes that Chinese workers might be repatriated in two ways. If they completed their indenture, they’d be sent home in a new coat with a double row of brass buttons—which were really made of gold that had been lacquered to look like brass. On the other hand, if they died in this godforsaken country, then
their spirit would wander the earth. They had to be returned to China. They’d be buried, disinterred after a period of time, and their bones folded into a clay burial urn for return home. The long bones that went into those urns—so the story goes—would be hollowed out and filled with gold.
There are reports of ‘war’ breaking out between rival tongs on the goldfields and at Cooktown. Out-of-luck European miners were recruited into private Chinese armies.
It was becoming more and more possible that Mr Zarb may have stumbled on something of considerable cultural, if not financial, significance. The museum was interested and A Big Country was interested; negotiations continued.
Mr Zarb proved quite willing to be part of the TV program, but he raised an important difficulty. Where the gold lay was very inhospitable country, he claimed, and we would never get a film crew in.
Not to be outdone, John Sparks approached the Army; because of the involvement of the museum, perhaps they would arrange for a helicopter to take the crew in and the gold and artefacts out. That was agreed to. The museum was happy to meet the cost of Mr Zarb’s reward. Given that he was gifting all this to the Australian people, there was no question of it being classified as ‘treasure’. Let final arrangements begin.
Up to this stage, the system of exchanging telegrams had proved clumsy but workable. However, now the system broke down. I had no reply to one telegram, nor the next, and then, out of the blue, a very strange message—in essence: ‘Who are you? I’ve never heard of you in my life.’
Something was very wrong. I pressed him. It was pointless trying to say that none of this had ever happened; after all, I had seen the gold. What was going on? Was more money required?
Mr Zarb responded with a very strange tale. He lived out in the bush, and one night he had some visitors—Chinese visitors. In his words, they ‘told me that I had something that belonged to them and they’d like it back please’.
