by Mark O'Flynn
One Sunday when I did go with Clancy to the top I had the bottomless sensation that my presence hindered the free flow of his and Violet’s conversation. I watched him twist two little pink trumpet-shaped blossoms from a flowering mountain devil. He handed one to Violet and they each nipped off the stem of the flower with their fingernails and sucked the pollen out as through a straw. I thought, I am an intruder on their intimacy.
There was a heavy stone in my stomach. In spite of myself I became sullen and withdrawn, wishing ill on the world. At one point I glanced up and caught Violet looking at me. There was something watchful in her gaze that I could not fathom. Had Clancy really told her that I had fifteen toes? In the end I mumbled some excuse and left them to their nectar, and when I was out of sight I ran.
Clancy would turn up late for work on Mondays, having slept at his mother’s then made the early descent. One of these mornings he appeared on the horse tramway with two blackened eyes. He looked like a boobook owl.
The other miners all chyacked him. ‘Was it a wet paper bag? Or a wet fish?’
He told me later that he had been waiting outside Violet’s house at what he thought was a safe distance when Mr Kefford, returning from his own hard week’s work, had caught him snooping about. Clancy refused to run. He had every right to loiter, minding his own business. Mr Kefford, who, having once been one himself, had plenty of experience of young men’s bulldust, sent Clancy on his way with a boot in the pants and a couple of swift shiners. If he ever came back, Mr Kefford said, he would knock Clancy into the middle of next week. Clancy skulked away, plotting how he might get back at Mr Kefford. The list of the people Clancy wanted to get back at was getting longer.
There was plenty of torbanite being dragged through the Daylight Tunnel from Nellie’s Glen. Crusher Edwards put me on the jenny wheel, which turned the coal skips around the right-angled corner and through the tunnel. Some months back, Crusher Edwards had put a team to work digging another tunnel through Narrow Neck to Nellie’s Glen. Mr North now announced that work on this second tunnel would be escalated. With two tunnels through to Nellie’s Glen, and plans for a third taking shape in North’s mind, production would rise and so would profits. He thought of changing the company’s title to something less of a mouthful. The Katoomba Coal Mine had more of a ring to it. It also associated the growth of the town with his own personal investment. He liked the title ‘the father of Katoomba’.
Trying to motivate his younger son, Douglas took Clancy to see the second tunnel, called the Midnight (so as to balance the Daylight). Our father hoped to show him the finesse with which a skilled miner could wield his pick and shovel. For some reason Clancy began to put his back into it. They worked the long wall there for several weeks, Clancy in his new boots showing everyone what he was made of. Among the other men Douglas treated Clancy as an equal. After a month on the jenny wheel as clipper I was put to spade work loading torbanite into the skips for the horse tramway. The ponies became part of my responsibility, and this was my favourite job in the mine. I always made sure their nosebags were full. They had no argument with anyone.
Clyde Dundas continued to visit regularly and talk to the men. Crusher Edwards barely tolerated his presence, spitting gollions whenever they crossed paths. During one such encounter Dundas asked him why the ceiling in the Midnight had not yet been timbered.
‘None of your effing business.’
Dundas reported to us that the Gladstone mine in Leura had cut the wages of those miners not yet twenty-one until they had been in the job for six years so that their experience was brought to match that of the older men. Some of our older men thought this a good idea, even though they stood to gain nothing from it. Clancy and I were of one voice: ‘That’s bullsh!’ If it affected him personally, Clancy was quick to speak up.
‘Then you had better listen to me,’ Dundas said. He asked the men what we would do if North tried to introduce a similar policy in South Katoomba. What action would we be prepared to take? It was another of those questions to which he already had an answer. However, there was no one mind among the men in response.
As it happened, Dundas was present on the afternoon in November 1891 when the earth gave an almighty burp and a grumble, the trees shuddered, and there was another rockfall at the mine.
A great torrent of rock and rubble about forty yards wide collapsed, bleaching yellow a section of the hillside. Trees were shouldered aside in its path. When the rumbling stopped there was suddenly a pale, new cliff showing us its fresh face.
Rockfalls are part and parcel of a miner’s life, sometimes deadly, like the terrible business with Grainger. We could see that this was the fault not of nature, but more of our meddling with it. In the immediate aftermath I first had to calm the ponies that stood trembling in their harnesses, whinnying to each other, their blind eyes wide with fear. Once all the dust had settled and the birds had ceased their squawking I joined the other men racing to the spot. When I got there I saw with a jolt of horror that the avalanche had completely sealed the mouth of the Midnight Tunnel. In fact it had obliterated it. We all looked around to account for one another. And we saw that among the crowd assembled before the scar of crushed sandstone there were four faces missing: Harv Selby, Billy Lynch, Douglas Wilson and Clancy. It was an emotion I would dearly love to forget, being suddenly defathered and unbrothered on that rock face. All my raw experience, everything I thought I had known was torn roughly from me as something flimsy and quivering and aborted. It was like I had swallowed fish hooks and was being reeled in different directions.
It was Dundas who raised his voice and roused us. ‘United we stand, men. This could be any of us. Any miner left in there shall not perish through our lack of determination.’
Frantic gravel soon flew from our shovels with the sound of fierce hail. Our small army shovelled the rock and stone aside, levering away boulders, digging around those too large to be shifted. Some were the size of houses. Tree trunks leaned askew in the rubble, their roots upraised. A great rock the size of a bullock was upended by five men and rolled a few yards further downhill.
‘Move carefully, men,’ called Dundas. ‘We want no more injuries here.’
The new face was still settling, and little streamlets of gravel rolled down the slope.
To his credit, Dundas had his waistcoat off and was tossing rocks aside with the rest of us. He seemed oblivious to the damage to his soft hands. As the long afternoon turned towards dusk we worked in teams, or alone, scratching at the rubble with any instrument available. Bonfires and torches were lit.
At one point, I paused in my work from sheer exhaustion, my throat choking me. As I breathed I had the eerie sensation Clancy and I had once had out in the bush, that we were all just ants under a glass. All noise seemed to fade, apart from the faint ringing of crowbars on rock, like birdcalls. Everything was both dull and vivid, numb and razor sharp all at once. As if it didn’t really matter, this frenzied activity. The stones rolling downhill, soundless. We didn’t belong here, and so none of it was important.
Dundas was suddenly there at my side. ‘Don’t stop, lad. Back to it. We never give up on our people – and you must never give up on your people either.’
‘Yes sir,’ I said, shaking my head and picking up my shovel. ‘I understand.’
My mother and the other wives brought food from Aulds’ store and we snatched bites for sustenance as we dug. I couldn’t stand to see my mother’s pale face waiting at the edge of the bush. Her stillness was awful. To see her was a feeling worse than my own terrible helplessness. As soon as he heard Crusher Edwards came and pitched in. But as the night drew on, the task began to seem impossible. Gravel from above kept slipping down into the hollows we had excavated. More and more often the men stopped to catch their breath before picking up their spades again. Our hopes began to fade. The rocks were tossed aside with more exhausted resignation.
John Britty North also put in an appearance, scratching his whiskered chin, but for
all his business acumen there was nothing he could do. Another black spot on the stockmarket, I suppose he was thinking. Dundas was seen to be having angry words with him: ‘— blood on your hands, North,’ came his strident voice. My muscles burned; the terror in me was like something skinned alive. But I kept working, refusing to think about my loss. I wanted my body to break, my emptiness to drown me.
Suddenly, in the distance, there was a cooee and a shout along the towpath, in the direction of the Incline. Again it came. There was a happy urgency in the call. ‘They’re alive. They’re alive.’
We turned, and out of the darkness we saw marching along the track the four lost miners, Harv Selby, Billy Lynch, Douglas Wilson and Clancy, framed by burning oil lamps, along with quite an escort from Nellie’s Glen. After a stunned moment a cheer went up. We threw aside our spades. My mother dashed forward and kissed and kissed and kissed my father. She didn’t care who was watching. The other two wives embraced their husbands, too, but for the moment they were all still communal property. It was suddenly like a wedding. A strange wedding in the darkness, with our fingers bleeding, in the filth of our clothes. There was bedlam and hilarity on the new rock face. Men danced. I hugged Clancy and clapped him on the back, smearing tears of relief across the dark dust of my cheeks.
‘You’re alive,’ I said, amazed. His spine was like a crowbar. I was too relieved to fully notice in what capacity he had, or had not, been returned to me.
John Britty North congratulated us all. He declared the following day a day of rest. We cheered. Eventually the lamps and burning torches faded away into the bush and we repaired to our huts. It took a long while, well into the early hours, for the village to settle down, but it was a sweet, euphoric feeling. The premature grief in me had suddenly turned to honey.
Late that night, Douglas told us what had happened, how they had dug their way out the other side. Clancy sat quietly at the edge of the lamp’s dim glow as our father explained how they felt the tremor, the ground tilting beneath them like the floor of a badly stumped house. They heard the rumble of the rocks and scurried full pelt towards the tunnel’s dead end. They knew the goaf had collapsed. Dust filled the air and their stinkpots blew out. It was clear they couldn’t go back. Behind them was a solid wall of rock. They were buried alive. Billy Lynch lit a candle. Its flame flickered, so they realised air must have been coming from somewhere.
‘Lucky for us there was only about half a yard to go, eh Clancy.’
‘Yes,’ said Clancy, without expression.
‘Thank God,’ said my mother, crossing herself over and over; she couldn’t stop smiling, her eyes bright in the lamplight. Midges swarmed about it, scorching themselves when they got behind the glass.
Douglas laughed. His words were swaggering. ‘But really, no luck at all. We knew a month or more past there was only half a yard to go. We had already punched through an air hole. No need to tell Mr Edwards. When do you think was the last time he or North came down the tunnel to inspect how we were getting on? Let me tell you: never. We just had to widen the air hole to a crawl-through.’
My mother was shocked. Not that they had cheated death, but that they had cheated North. ‘So what were you doing down there dragging the chain all this time?’
‘Oh, we were playing pontoon and gin rummy, putting our feet up. It’s a nice cool spot on a hot day.’ Douglas laughed again, nostalgically.
‘I’ll be blowed,’ said my mother.
‘A bit damp underfoot, but it was a good rort while it lasted. It only took a few hours to dig our way out. The Nellie Glenners were waiting for us.’
My mother hit him with her open hand. ‘A few hours? A few hours when my heart was in my mouth. I swear to God I could taste it. I thought you were both dead.’
‘Steady on. We had a bit of a panic ourselves you know, didn’t we, Clancy? It wasn’t quite that straightforward.’
Clancy agreed, with the barest of nods.
‘It took us a fair while to come up with the idea,’ Douglas added.
‘I thought my life here was over. I thought I’d have to leave, like poor Mrs Grainger.’
‘We still had to dig our way out. It wasn’t all roses and buttermilk.’
‘A few hours. I never want to live through another minute like that ever again, you lazy good-for-nothing shirker. I thought you were buried and gone forever.’
‘We were.’ Douglas had his hands up in surrender. He was pleading now.
‘I thought I was a widow. I never want to speak to you again.’ With that she flung herself into his lap, hugging him to her. I found that I had a silly grin on my face as I watched them. I felt like my blood was fizzing. When I glanced at Clancy he was without expression, as though a part of him was still in the tunnel, forced to avert his gaze at the candle flame only after a moth blundered into his eye.
FIFTEEN
Mr Goyder had a problem. When Violet was replacing the heavy set of clock keys on their hook behind the reception desk she saw him through the open door to his office, tracing the coastlines of his whiskers to their peninsulas halfway down his jaw line. Sitting at his dark walnut desk he was poring over a calendar.
Two very important guests had written to say they were coming to Katoomba to test the ‘salubrious and recuperative powers of the mountain air’. (All Violet knew was that when people came to the higher altitudes from Sydney they yawned a lot and slept well. The whole hotel knew that Goyder had had many a lucrative bridge game thwarted through the recuperative, if soporific, powers of the mountain air.) Two very important guests, the sort of guests for whom Room One, the luxurious King George Suite, was reserved. Their signatures in the guestbook – Violet had seen them – filled Goyder with pride. The Premier, the Governor. And there was also the Famous Artist.
His quandary, an unfortunately recurrent one, was that the forthcoming visits of his very important guests overlapped by four days, or more importantly, four nights. Who should get the room? And where would he lodge the Famous Artist? It was like a thorn in his sock. Usually the allocation of rooms was a simple matter for the desk clerk, but in this instance there were, Violet supposed, political considerations.
Violet was fussing with a wastepaper basket. She saw that the reception desk had not been dusted.
‘Violet. Violet, is it?’ Goyder called to her, then beckoned her into his office.
‘Yes, sir?’
‘Tell me, would you say that the bed in Room One was adequately comfortable?’
Violet started. ‘I never did lie on it, sir.’
‘No?’
‘No, sir, that’s Mrs Haddock’s domain.’
‘Of course, of course. The other beds on the upper landing, Room Fifty-eight I am thinking of in particular, are they comfortable?’
Violet had to compose her answer. She looked at her hands. ‘They feel comfortable, sir.’
‘Yes?’
‘Oh yes, sir. The mattresses – the mattresses are so soft they’re like a …’ she glanced out the window, ‘… a cloud, sir. I’m sure if you died in one you would hardly notice.’
Goyder seemed to consider this, then returned to his calendar with a steady hand.
Following the rockfall at the mine, the new cry for a meeting was enthusiastically taken up. Dundas had an agenda. He said he would bring someone from Sydney to speak to us. The meeting was called for ten o’clock on a day a week after the rockfall. North didn’t dare oppose it. If we were hollowing out the mountain at this present rate how soon could we expect the next collapse? It was every miner’s nightmare. The Midnight Four (already they had a title) had been remarkably lucky. What was management going to do about the condition of every adit in the mine? If the mood was to – another new word – strike, then I would vote for it.
On the proposed day, North cut his losses and shut down the winches. The ponies were rested. Every man made the climb out of the valley on a morning when cloud filled the air and the mist cast a gauze over the world. Typical mountains weathe
r.
We loitered outside the Congregational Church Hall, some smoking their pipes against the fog. This time there was no sign of Buggery Clout. As the time for the meeting approached there was a general shuffling into the hall. Again the echo of our boots on the floorboards. Laughter and merriment and some belligerence filled the air. Even though everyone’s wages would be docked for the day we now saw this as a wound of honour, a battle scar. We were also determined to enjoy the break from our usual routine and make a day of it. Many of us thought we had North over a barrel.
The men who had been trapped underground were treated as heroes. Even Clancy had his back clapped in congratulation by men who had barely acknowledged him before. As I was related to two of the survivors some of the shine of their glory seemed to rub off on me. No one mizzled about Clancy’s and my inexperience now.
We took our pews and waited. However, ten o’clock came and went and Mr Dundas, our principal organiser, didn’t appear. Like children in the schoolroom without a teacher we began to get restless. Someone pegged an apple core at Baldy Baldock’s head.
‘Just cut that out,’ he said, to general merriment.
Voices swelled over the top of one another. There was no Ossie Farnell to take control. William Garbutt rose to his feet and tried to quieten everybody, but he was shouted down. It was hard to hear anything clearly. Then my father stood up. After his experience of being buried alive, he now seemed to command a greater authority and the men finally piped down. He thanked his fellow survivors, and the people who had worked so tirelessly to rescue them. There were three cheers. That done, though, Douglas had run out of things to say and he sat back down. Public speaking took it out of him.
