VIII
In a few weeks thought of the robbery had ceased greatly to disturb anybody. Michael settled down to working with his new mates, and the Ridge accepted the new partnership as the most natural thing in the world.
Life on the Ridge is usually as still as an inland lake. The settlement is just that, a lake of life, in the country of wide plains stretching westwards for hundreds on hundreds of miles, broken only by shingly ridges to the sea, and eastwards, through pastoral districts, to the coastal ranges, and the seaboard with its busy towns, ports, and cities.
In summer the plains are dead and dry; in a drought, deserts. The great coolebahs standing with their feet in the river ways are green, and scatter tattered shade. Their small, round leaves flash like mirrors in the sun, and when the river water vanishes from about their feet, they hold themselves in the sandy shallow bed of the rivers as if waiting with imperturbable faith for the return of the waters. The surface of the dry earth cracks. There are huge fissures where the water lay in clayey hollows during the winter and spring. Along the stock routes and beside the empty water-holes, sheep and cattle lie rotting. Their carcasses, disembowelled by the crows, put an odour of putrefaction in the air. The sky burns iron-grey with heat. The dust rises in heavy reddish mist about stockmen or cattle on the roads.
But after the rains, in the winter or spring of a good season, the seeds break sheath in a few hours; they sprout overnight, and a green mantle is flung over the old earth which a few days before was as dead and dry as a desert. In a little time the country is a flowering wilderness. Trefoil, crow’s-foot, clover, mallow, and wild mustard riot, tangling and interweaving. The cattle browse through them lazily; stringing out across the flowering fields, they look in the distance no more than droves of mice; their red and black backs alone are visible above the herbage. In places, wild candytuft in blossom spreads a quilt of palest lavender in every direction on a wide circling horizon. Darling pea, the colour of violets and smelling like them, threads through the candytuft and lies in wedges, magenta and dark purple against the skyline, a hundred miles farther on. The sky is a wash of pale, exquisite blue, which deepens as it rises to the zenith. The herbage glows beneath it, so clear and pure is the light.
Farther inland, for miles, bachelor’s buttons paint the earth raw gold. Not a hair’s breadth of colour shows on the plains except the dull red of the road winding through them and the blue of the sky overhead. Paper daisies fringe the gold, and then they lie, white as snow, for miles, under the bare blue sky. Sometimes the magenta, purple, lavender, gold and white of the herbage and wild flowers merge and mingle, and a tapestry of incomparable beauty—a masterpiece of the Immortals—is wrought on the bare earth.
During the spring and early summer of a good season, the air is filled with the wild, thymey odour of herbs, and the dry, musky fragrance of paper daisies. The crying of lambs, the baaing of ewes, and the piping of mud-larks—their thin, silvery notes—go through the clear air and are lost over the flowering land and against the blue sky.
Winter is rarely more than a season of rains on the Ridge. Cold winds blow from the inland plains for a week or two. There are nights of frost and sparkling stars. People shiver and crouch over their fires; but the days have rarely more than a fresh tang in the air.
The rains as often as not are followed by floods. After a few days’ steady downpour, the shallow rivers and creeks on the plains overflow, and their waters stretch out over the plains for thirteen, fourteen, and sometimes twenty miles. Fords become impassable; bridges are washed away. Fallen Star Ridge is cut off from the rest of the world until the flood waters have soaked into the earth, as they do after a few days, and the coach can take to the road again.
As spring passes into summer, the warmth of the sunshine loses its mildness, and settles to a heavy taciturnity. The light, losing its delicate brilliance, becomes a bared sword-blade striking the eyes. Everything shrinks from the full gaze and blaze of the sun. Eyes ache, the brain reels with the glare; mirages dance on the limitless horizons. The scorched herbage falls into dust; water is drawn off from rivers and water-holes. All day the air is heavy and still; the sky the colour of iron.
Nights are heavy and still as the days, and people turn wearily from the glow in the east at dawn; but the days go on, for months, one after the other, hot, breathless, of dazzling radiance, or wrapped in the red haze of a dust storm.
Ridge folk take the heat as primitive people do most acts of God, as a matter of course, with stiff-lipped hardihood, which makes complaint the manifestation of a poor spirit. They meet their difficulties with a native humour which gives zest to flagging energies. Their houses, with roofs whitened to throw off the heat, the dumps of crumbling white clay, and the iron roofs of the billiard parlour, the hotel, and Watty Frost’s new house at the end of the town, shimmer in the intense light. At a little distance they seem all quivering and dancing together.
Men like Michael, the Crosses, George Woods, Watty, and women like Maggie Grant and Martha M’Cready, who had been on the Ridge a long time, become inured to the heat. At least, they say that they “do not mind it.” No one hears a growl out of them, even when water is scarce and flies and mosquitoes a plague. Their good spirits and grit keep the community going through a trying summer. But even they raise their faces to heaven when an unexpected shower comes, or autumn rains fall a little earlier than usual.
In the early days, before stations were fenced, Bill M’Gaffy, a Warria shepherd, grazing flocks on the plains, declared he had seen a star fall on the Ridge. When he went into the station he showed the scraps of marl and dark metallic stone he had picked up near where the star had fallen, to James Henty, who had taken up Warria Station. The Ridge lay within its boundary. James Henty had turned them over curiously, and surmised that some meteoric stone had fallen on the Ridge. The place had always been called Fallen Star Ridge after that; but opal was not found there, and it did not begin to be known as the black opal field until several years later.
In the first days of the rush to the Ridge, men of restless, reckless temperament had foregathered at the Old Town. There had been wild nights at the shanty. But the wilder spirits soon drifted away to Pigeon Creek and the sapphire mines, and the sober and more serious of the miners had settled to life on the new fields.
The first gathering of huts on the clay pan below the Ridge was known as the Old Town; but it had been flooded so often, that, after people had been washed out of their homes, and had been forced to take to the Ridge for safety two or three times, it was decided to move the site of the township to the brow of the Ridge, above the range of the flood waters and near the new rush, where the most important mines on the field promised to be.
A year or two ago, a score or so of bark and bag huts were ranged on either side of the wide, unmade road space overgrown with herbage, and a smithy, a weatherboard hotel with roof of corrugated iron, a billiard parlour, and a couple of stores, comprised the New Town. A wild cherry tree, gnarled and ancient, which had been left in the middle of the road near the hotel, bore the news of the district and public notices, nailed to it on sheets of paper. A little below the hotel, on the same side, Chassy Robb’s store served as post-office, and the nearest approach to a medicine shop in the township. Opposite was the Afghan’s emporium. And behind the stores and the miners’ huts, everywhere, were the dumps thrown up from mines and old rushes.
There was no police station nearer than fifty miles, and although telegraph now links the New Town with Budda, the railway town, communication with it for a long time was only by coach once or twice a week; and even now all the fetching and carrying is done by a four or six horse-coach and bullock-wagons. The community to all intents and purposes governs itself according to popular custom and popular opinion, the seat of government being Newton’s big, earthen-floored bar, or the brushwood shelters near the mines in which the men sit at midday to eat their lunches and noodle—, go over, snip, and examine—the opal they have taken out of the mines during the morning.
They hold their blocks of land by miner’s right, and their houses are their own. They formally recognise that they are citizens of the Commonwealth and of the State of New South Wales, by voting at elections and by accepting the Federal postal service. Some few of them, as well as Newton and the storekeepers, pay income tax as compensation for those privileges; but beyond that the Ridge lives its own life, and the enactments of external authority are respected or disregarded as best pleases it.
A sober, easygoing crowd, the Ridge miners do not trouble themselves much about law. They have little need of it. They live in accord with certain fundamental instincts, on terms of good fellowship with each other.
“To go back on a mate,” is recognised as the major crime of the Ridge code.
Sometimes, during a rush, the wilder spirits who roam from one mining camp to another in the back-country, drift back, and “hit things up” on the Ridge, as the men say. But they soon drift away again. Sometimes, if one of them strikes a good patch of opal and outstays his kind, as often as not he sinks into the Ridge life, absorbs Ridge ways and ideas, and is accepted into the fellowship of men of the Ridge. There is no formality about the acceptance. It just happens naturally, that if a man identifies himself with the Ridge principle of mateship, and will stand by it as it will stand by him, he is recognised by Ridge men as one of themselves. But if his ways and ideas savour of those the Ridge has broken from, he remains an outsider, whatever good terms he may seem to be on with everybody.
Sometimes a rush leaves a shiftless ne’er-do-well or two for the Ridge to reckon with, but even these rarely disregard the Ridge code. If claims are ratted it is said there are strangers about, and the miners deal with rats according to their own ideas of justice. On the last occasion it was applied, this justice had proved so effectual that there had been no repetition of the offence.
Ridge miners find happiness in the sense of being free men. They are satisfied in their own minds that it is not good for a man to work all day at any mechanical toil; to use himself or allow anyone else to use him like a working bullock. A man must have time to think, leisure to enjoy being alive, they say. Is he alive only to work? To sleep worn out with toil, and work again? It is not good enough, Ridge men say. They have agreed between themselves that it is a fair thing to begin work about 6:30 or 7 o’clock and knock off about four, with a couple of hours above ground at noon for lunch—a snack of bread and cheese and a cup of tea.
At four o’clock they come up from the mines, noodle their opal, put on their coats, smoke and yarn, and saunter down to the town and their homes. And it is this leisure end of the day which has given life on the Ridge its tone of peace and quiet happiness, and has made Ridge miners the thoughtful, well-informed men most of them are.
To a man they have decided against allowing any wealthy man or body of wealthy men forming themselves into a company to buy up the mines, put the men on a weekly wage, and work them, as the opal blocks at Chalk Cliffs had been worked. There might be more money in it, there would be a steadier means of livelihood; but the Ridge miners will not hear of it.
“No,” they say; “we’ll put up with less money—and be our own masters.”
Most of them worked on Chalk Cliffs’ opal blocks, and they realised in the early days of the new field the difference between the conditions they had lived and worked under on the Cliffs and were living and working under on the Ridge, where every man was the proprietor of his own energies, worked as long as he liked, and was entitled to the full benefit of his labour. They had yarned over these differences of conditions at midday in the shelters beside the mines, discussed them in the long evenings at Newton’s, and without any committees, documents, or bond—except the common interest of the individual and of the fraternity—had come to the conclusion that at all costs they were going to remain masters of their own mines.
Common thought and common experience were responsible for that recognition of economic independence as the first value of their new life together. Michael Brady had stood for it from the earliest days of the settlement. He had pointed out that the only things which could give joy in life, men might have on the Ridge, if they were satisfied to find their joy in these things, and not look for it in enjoyment of the superficial luxuries money could provide. Most of the real sources of joy were every man’s inheritance, but conditions of work, which wrung him of energy and spirit, deprived him of leisure to enjoy them until he was too weary to do more than sleep or seek the stimulus of alcohol. Besides, these conditions recruited him with the merest subsistence for his pains, very often—did not even guarantee that—and denied him the capacity to appreciate the real sources of joy. But the beauty of the world, the sky, and the stars, spring, summer, the grass, and the birds, were for every man, Michael said. Any and every man could have immortal happiness by hearing a bird sing, by gazing into the blue-dark depths of the sky on a starry night. No man could sell his joy of these things. No man could buy them. Love is for all men: no man can buy or sell love. Pleasure in work, in jolly gatherings with friends, peace at the end of the day, and satisfaction of his natural hungers, a man might have all these things on the Ridge, if he were content with essentials.
Ridge miners’ live fearlessly, with the magic of adventure in their daily lives, the prospect of one day finding the great stone which is the grail of every opal-miner’s quest. They are satisfied if they get enough opal to make a parcel for a buyer when he puts up for a night or two at Newton’s. A young man who sells good stones usually goes off to Sydney to discover what life in other parts of the world is like, and to take a draught of the gay life of cities. A married man gives his wife and children a trip to the seaside or a holiday in town. But all drift back to the Ridge when the taste of city life has begun to cloy, or when all their money is spent. Once an opal miner, always an opal miner, the Ridge folk say.
Among the men, only the shiftless and more worthless are not in sympathy with Ridge ideas, and talk of money and what money will buy as the things of first value in life. They describe the Fallen Star township as a Godforsaken hole, and promise each other, as soon as their luck has turned, they will leave it forever, and have the time of their lives in Sydney.
Women like Maggie Grant share their husband’s minds. They read what the men read, have the men’s vision, and hold it with jealous enthusiasm. Others, women used to the rough and simple existence of the back-country, are satisfied with the life which gives them a husband, home, and children. Those who sympathise with Mrs. Watty Frost regard the men’s attitude as more than half cussedness, sheer selfishness or stick-in-the-mudness; and the more worthy and respectable they are, the more they fret and fume at the earthen floors and open hearths of the bark and bagging huts they live in, and pine for all the kickshaws of suburban villas. The discontented women are a minority, nevertheless. Ridge folk as a whole have set their compass and steer the course of their lives with unconscious philosophy, and yet a profound conviction as to the rightness of what they are doing.
And the Ridge, which bears them, stands serenely under blue skies the year long, rising like a backbone from the plains that stretch for hundreds of miles on either side. A wide, dusty road crosses the plains. The huts of the Three Mile and Fallen Star crouch beside it, and everywhere on the rusty, shingle-strewn slopes of the Ridge, are the holes and thrown-up heaps of white and raddled clay or broken sandstone—traces of the search for that “ecstasy in the heart of gloom,” black opal, which the Fallen Star earth holds.