Old Days, Old Ways

by Alex Nicol

  My companion happened to own said horse, and politely suggested that she put her money somewhere else.

  ‘She’s a very pretty horse,’ observed my daughter.

  ‘Yes, she is, dear, but she’s not going to win this race.’

  Her grandfather would have got the ‘mail’ immediately. But it seems that sort of nous isn’t passed along in the genes. My daughter gave the owner a withering ‘what would you know?’ look.

  As my dad would say, ‘Experience is the best teacher.’

  THE ROCK

  ‘Darwin on the line, calling Orange recorder. Darwing calling Orange recorder.’

  That was Peter Knudsen, a regular All Ways on Sunday reporter. This would be one of the great colour pieces from the Top End that he regularly sent, and it was coming via a landline from the ABC’s Darwin studio.

  ‘Roll tape, please. Roll tape.’

  I pushed the button and settled back to be entertained.

  ‘Identification,’ and there followed a name with very obvious Middle European roots and a title. Peter was talking with the managing director of a Northern Territory mining company, who was worried, very worried.

  It was 1973 and It Was Time. We had a new government, hellbent on changing Australia. So strap yourself in and enjoy the ride.

  Let’s get a little perspective on this. The latest change of government wasn’t the political merry-go-round we’re now used to. It had been 23 years since the government had changed, and every day brought a fresh announcement from a stable of ministers who’d done a 20-year apprenticeship on the wrong side of the despatch box and were in no mood to tarry.

  Peter’s interviewee had an ‘arrangement’—well, more of ‘an understanding’—with the previous government, and was concerned that the new broom would sweep his company away. Remember that the Territory was then controlled from Canberra, and Aboriginal Land Rights wasn’t yet a popular slogan. Australians, by international standards, were still innocents. We weren’t yet used to hearing the phrase ‘It’s in the national interest’ trotted out in support of some very doubtful enterprises. But this particular manager’s work was certainly in the national interest.

  He was mining, or preparing to mine, a rare metal. The world was just starting to understand the true worth of this mineral, and potentially this was Australia’s next gold rush. It was as big as that—so long as this new government kept out of the way and let private enterprise get on with the business of making us all rich.

  I was perplexed. Why was Peter sending me this story? This was ‘hot’ news. It should be aimed at AM, our flagship current-affairs program.

  ‘Why should the government be concerned?’ Peter enquired.

  ‘We’re mining in a sensitive area,’ responded his guest.

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Ayers Rock.’

  ‘How close to the Rock is the mine?’ Peter asked.

  ‘No. No,’ came the accented reply. ‘The Rock. The Rock.’

  Peter tried again for some clarification, while his guest fumbled for the words to make himself understood: ‘The Rock. The Rock.’

  Then the penny dropped. ‘Ayers Rock?’ Peter queried. ‘You’re mining the actual Rock?’

  Now he had it. This was just exploratory work, you understand, but his company had been taking core samples from the Rock, and they’d proved to be particularly rich in this rare mineral. They’d been working discreetly with the local Aboriginal people, away from the view of tourists, but of course all that would now have to change.

  The business plan to support full-scale mining had been developed; within months, mining activities that would make this country and his company very rich would begin. Surely the new government would see the wisdom of this exercise?

  Something was very wrong here. I let Peter’s story run a little longer. If any of this was halfway true, it was explosive stuff. Why was he sending it to me?

  I spooled the tape back and listened again, carefully. Knudsen had a marvellous facility for adopting voices and accents. He was interviewing himself. The whole story was a ‘have’—but, boy, it was a good one. Of course, next Sunday would be April Fool’s Day—this was a bit of fun.

  I let the story roll, and as it progressed, the story of Peter’s ‘interviewee’ became more and more bizarre. I was worried that he’d take it just too far, but no. The story was certainly nonsense, but there was enough doubt there to make you wonder: could this possibly be true?

  I put Peter’s story to air on Sunday morning with a completely straight introduction and waited. It didn’t take more than five minutes for the phone to ring, and at the other end of the line was a very angry man.

  He introduced himself as an assistant to one of our new ministers. He was good. Did I have any idea how irresponsible this sort of action was, he demanded furiously. ‘This is the sort of underhanded business this government intends to stamp out.’ He wanted names, details, contacts. They’d be putting a stop to this vandalism.

  Really it was a tremendously impressive tirade, but I’m not as green as I am cabbage-looking. I wasn’t about to be ‘April Fooled’ over an April Fool’s Day story.

  ‘If you could just let me have your phone number, I’ll get those details for you,’ I promised.

  When he did so, I went cold. I’d been working in Parliament House as a political reporter just the year before, and the number he rattled off was horribly familiar. He was working for one of our new ministers.

  The great thing about working for the ABC is that you can always depend on the corporation to defend you. I rang Graham White and asked for his advice on dealing with what was proving to be a very embarrassing situation.

  His advice was succinct: ‘You did it—you fix it.’

  A VERY OLD-TIMER

  I was in Launceston to do the program, and my contact had lined up a chance to talk with one of the very old-timers from the Beaconsfield mine.

  We have a vision of the diggers being tough individuals, but of course all the really profitable mining was company mining, and those diggers were employed workers. I wanted to know what it had been like working underground for someone else.

  It didn’t look promising. The ‘talent’ I was introduced to was certainly an old-timer, but I wondered how much of a grip he had on today. He was wearing an overcoat—but as far as I could make out, that was it. He had stories of the terrible conditions underground, but he was most interested in telling me of the schemes the workers had developed to steal gold.

  Early attempts to smuggle gold out in their ‘cribs’ (the containers they used to carry the food for their meal breaks) weren’t at all successful, but the scam that worked best was to secrete gold in the grease around the hubs of the axles of the old wagons and retrieve it later in town. Where there’s a will, I guess.

  All the heavy machinery for the mine had to be shifted there; I remembered I’d seen a massive piece of rusting equipment. I asked the old-timer how they’d carted it.

  ‘Bullocks,’ he assured me. ‘You remember when that got here? You remember? It was the day we got the news that Mafeking had been relieved.’

  I had to tell him that my memory didn’t stretch quite that far back. (Mafeking was a town under siege in the Boer War. Relief came early in May 1900.) Obviously there was nothing wrong with his long-term memory.

  ANAKIE

  The most expensive gift I ever received was two sapphires, but the lady who presented them to me valued them not at all. She hailed from Anakie, Queensland, and she and her husband were changing the way they mined sapphires.

  I’d been invited to open the annual show at Emerald, the principal town of the gemfields. I can’t say I understand the practice of ‘opening’ agricultural shows, and I pity the poor society secretaries who, year on year, scour their brains as they try to find someone who’ll open next year’s show.

  I like the job, and I did it in all sorts of places; I met a lot of very interesting people that way. But, as I say, pity the poor secretary.<
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  The Emerald Show gave me a chance to get to the gemfields. That Sunday the program would be broadcast from the ABC’s Rockhampton studio, which, they told me, used to be the safe of the old Mount Morgan Gold Mine, and that meant a 340 mile (or 545 kilometre) round trip to get out to Emerald and back. Another job for the poor show secretary to organise.

  Anakie was a contradiction. The first miner my guide introduced me to was a young failed farmer. Drought had forced him off his place, and he’d brought much of his farming machinery to the gemfields, modified it and used it to turn what had been a hobby into a business. Indeed, as I was to find, it was a very lucrative business.

  Everywhere else on the field I met fossickers, and they all had one thing in common. They all carried a little presentation case containing the very best of the stones they’d found, beautifully cut, polished and presented. Naively, I thought sapphires were blue and that was that. I had a lot to learn.

  Nestled in those little cases I saw gems of every colour, from gold to green to black, as well as the traditional blue. And I saw my first and only ‘pigeon’s blood’ ruby. About the size of a split pea, it nestled in a snow-white presentation case and, yes, it did pulse. I’d never seen anything like it.

  Gemstones have been part of the history of this area of Queensland for a long, long time. I met an old lady who’d found her first stone at the turn of the century; she was the first to tell me to ‘pop the stone in your mouth. A sapphire is hard and cold. You can tell.’

  She had been a little girl bringing the cow in to be milked when she spotted a likely looking stone lying on the side of the track. She picked it up and popped it into her mouth in the approved fashion; she got such a shock when it was an emerald that she promptly swallowed it. Mum and Dad did the only sensible thing: they sat her on the pot until it reappeared.

  Now, fossicking is about luck, good and bad, and my guide was anxious to show me a photograph depicting the worst luck any group of miners ever had.

  His photo was in black and white, and the half-dozen or so sons of the soil depicted had faces set like stone and arms like tree trunks folded across their chests. They were big boys and they were having their photo taken, and that was serious business.

  Each had a foot on a bag in the centre, a leather bag about the same size as the one footballers these days use to cart their gear to a game. There was a bit more than boots and jockstraps in that bag—it was full of uncut sapphires. You could only guess at the amount of money in that bag, but it represented a year’s work for those young hopefuls.

  ‘Can you see what’s wrong?’ asked my guide. ‘Have a look at the date.’

  The photograph was dated May 1914. So?

  ‘The only place in the world that cut sapphires then was Germany,’ laughed my mate. ‘The poor buggers sent that lot off to Germany just before the start of the First World War. Never saw them again.’

  Henry had better luck. Henry was your archetypal fossicker. Of indeterminate age, with long hair and a beard, and skin that only gets that colour and texture from years of being baked, he lived in a shed made from tins of Plume Kerosene that had been beaten flat. Power kerosene used to come in those square-sided tins, and you found them all over the bush. Henry had put an awful lot of them to good use. He had a house, of sorts.

  ‘Show him your stone,’ ordered my guide.

  Henry wore ‘Bombay bloomers’, and he obediently plunged his hand down the front. He rummaged for a moment or two, and located a piece of string. Using it, he hauled from the depths a little yellow leather bag. He opened it and dropped into the palm of my hand an uncut green sapphire the size of a matchbox.

  Stupidly, I gasped, ‘God, how much is that worth?’

  Laughter all round as Henry asked, ‘How much have you got?’

  There was a story to Henry’s stone. It was roughly the shape of Queensland—well, you needed a bit of imagination, but roughly—and Henry had decided to approach the then premier, Joh Bjelke-Petersen, to buy it and have it cut as the ‘state jewel’.

  Joh was having none of it, so Henry had to hang on to his stone. But he couldn’t resist showing it to people, with the inevitable result that two young blow-ins stole it from him.

  They weren’t too bright. They tried to trade the stone for a tank of petrol in town, so—unlike the unfortunates in the photo—Henry got his stone back.

  And why, with a stone like that in his pocket, was he living in a tin shed and still fossicking?

  ‘Ah, its mate’s gotta be around here somewhere.’

  That young farmer turned professional miner lived in a shed too. His was a little more upmarket—it was made from fibro. He was sorting the wheat from the chaff. He challenged me from the other side of a conveyor belt covered in what to me looked like very ordinary stones: ‘There’s sapphires there. If you can pick one, you can keep it.’

  Politeness pushed me to choose a very small sample, and he chided me to be a bit more adventurous. Eventually, I picked a stone that looked a bit different and held it out for inspection.

  ‘Put it in your mouth,’ he commanded. ‘Go on, put it in your mouth.’

  I did what I was told and waited for the magic to happen. Nothing.

  ‘Is it cold?’ he queried.

  Well, of course it was cool—it was a stone.

  ‘Cold? Really cold?’ he insisted.

  I confessed it was not.

  ‘That’s because it’s a lump of blue metal. You can have two more tries.’

  So I’m not going to make a fossicker.

  Later, I watched as he sat down with a visiting Thai gem buyer. The men sat on opposite sides of an old mirror and spread stones across it. Depending on the way light reflected through the stones, they sorted them into piles; when both were satisfied, they shook hands and the buyer opened an overnight bag stuffed full of big notes and counted out money. This was a cash-and-carry business.

  My miner told me that on occasion he’d take a suitcase of uncut stones to Thailand and do the business there. I can only imagine a suitcase of sapphires going through the X-ray scanners now in place at every airport.

  While the miner and the buyer were chatting, the young man’s wife offered to show me her hobby. She collected ‘fancies’, she said. Would I like to have a look?

  From that fibro shed she brought a four-litre ice-cream container full of carefully washed, rough sapphires of every conceivable colour and shape. She proceeded to give me the layman’s tour of the business.

  She explained that the mineral which gave the stone its colour wasn’t always concentrated all over the crystal, and you could get different, even mixed colours, in a crystal. Then she showed me a long piece of crystal, in which blue melded into green melded into gold.

  ‘That’s a hound’s tooth,’ was her explanation. ‘It’s the end of the crystal. Oh, look—here’s another one.’ And she pulled a similar-looking stone from the collection.

  There looked to me to be a considerable amount of money in that ice-cream container, and I couldn’t help asking the crass question: ‘How much is all that worth?’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know really. They only want the blue ones. But they are pretty, aren’t they? Where are those hound’s tooths?’

  ‘I put them back. I put them back,’ I assured her.

  ‘Oh, no. They’re for your wife, but you must promise me that you’ll pay to have them cut and polished. Promise?’

  Promise I did, and she gave me the name of a cutter in Emerald. He looked at her/my stones and muttered that ‘they may not be anything’. And I left it at that. Later, four beautifully cut and polished parti-coloured sapphires turned up in the post with a bill for cutting.

  The irony of all this is that, now that blue sapphires can be synthesised, it’s the colours and the parti-colours the buyers want. I hope the miner’s wife kept her collection.

  Back in Emerald, it was showtime. It was my turn to stand before the crowd, which would obviously rather have been looking at the prize bulls or
riding in Sideshow Alley than listening to some boring bloke waffle on. But I declared the show open, and that night the party would be in my motel room. I don’t recall organising that—let’s say it was spontaneous.

  A motley mob turned up, clutching alcohol in many forms, but one among the uninvited guests stood out. This young lady was tall, tanned, terrifyingly fit—and she had a wall-eye. One eye was a pretty blue and the other had that milky-white ring around it. She’d stand out in any crowd.

  Behind her back, they told me she’d been running bulls in the Territory. My guess was that she’d been in the business, then popular, of running water buffalo down with a sort of fixed lasso affair attached to the side of a four-wheel drive. If that was the case, she was a tough lady indeed, and worth talking with. It seemed there was an interview there.

  In the light of what was to follow, I have to say that I can remember what I was wearing at the time. Remember, it was the 1970s. Rollnecks were all the go, and I’d chosen to wear a black silky-looking rollneck. I know, in the middle of Queensland … All I can say in my defence is that we all make mistakes.

  I noticed that the young lady in question had been watching me for some time, and eventually she came across to speak to me. Good, I thought: here’s a chance to see what she’s been doing and line up an interview.

  She was direct. ‘You a poofter?’ she demanded.

  ‘Yes,’ I stammered.

  Ever since, I’ve claimed that I said that to make a stand against discrimination. Don’t believe me—I was terrified of her.

  Her response set me a conundrum. ‘Piss this lot off, and I’ll take you to bed and fix it for you.’

  BREAKFAST AT ALICE

  I’d just finished broadcasting a program in Alice Springs in 1974, and as was usually the case when I was away, I’d worked most of the night and had had nothing to eat. I remember wondering aloud on air what might constitute a Territorian breakfast, and I got two very different answers.