GOLD.

Observer, Volume XXXV, Issue 44, 10 July 1915, Page 15

GOLD.

Gcild, gold, gold, gold, Round and yellow, hard and cold, Now stamped' with the image of Good Queen Bess, And now of a Bloody Mary.

I EXPECT the above is misquoted. Any Grammar School boy will tell you what Tom Hood really said in his luV tory of Miss Kilmansegg. One thing Tom Hood didn't know anything about—the weight of gold in the bulk. He attributed to the late Miss Kilmansegg the possession of a leg of solid gold, and lie has definitely stated that the deceased lady danced with the aid of her precious limb. Considering that any common sized leg of pure gold would weigh about half a ton, it is clear to- the intellect of a City Councillor that physically Miss Kilmansegg was well developed. In artistic magazine pictures, illustrating tales of treasure trove, one frequently notices that email pirates carry large flourbags full of bullion, as if the bags were full of chaff.

I've dome some goldrushing myself on a feeble scale, and in my old age can still tell the difference between a tea-billy and a miner's dish, but I haven't any gold. Cheques, postal orders, bank-drafts, and bags full of bullion may be sent to my private add rem. (Please do not leave thorn at the office!)

Tine real hard-doing gold fossicker is nearly always as good a chap as may be' found. Alluvial or deep miners are among the best. The alluvial miner keeps on mining if he has bad any luck, and usually winds up with chronic rheumatism in an Old Men's Home. The deep reef miner gets pneumo, etc., etc.— which Bill and Jim and Charlie ca.ll "miners' complaint." I struck a match on a piece of dissected miner's lung once to demonstrate to the assembled folk how rough it was with the particles of inhaled quartz —! What?

"The best gold story I know, said Mulrooney, of our staff, this morning, "is about a diamond. You've probably heard it. Old Vandam, a dopper who had, settled outside Kimberley, used to prop his backdoor open with a large pebble. A chap named Malcolm McPherson (a Hungarian, I believe) came along with his grocery waggon (he was a veldt hawker), sat on the stoep and haggled! with Vandam about pills and cough cure and plasters (Dutchmen are terrors for medicine). Macpherson knew nothing (Hungarians never do). He sold Vandam twelve boxes of Seagull's pills, a case of Mother Chambermaid's Syrup, and an assorted lot comprising Derby Salts, Heart's Ease, and other really tried remedies. While Vandam was in the kitchen prising the money out of the sofa, the Hungarian trader stuck the pebble in a mule nosebag hung it to the disselboom, and substituted a chunk of stone he was in the habit of using to sink mule buckets in dams to water the team. Then, after a few "Allemac-tio-s" and "God's Blessings' and "Ah'll be gangin' along the noos McPherson (the Hungarian) trekked for the North, and ultimately sold the diamond for much gold (this is where the gold comes in), returned and bought Vandam's farm and sold it to the great firm of De Stout's. He has now a very large estate in the vicinity of Dundee (the capital of Hungary). One son married a Duke's daughter tost January, and another is a Dochter ot

(By 149.)

Deeveenity (Edir.borou.gh Urn" varsity), and preaches 'Lay not up,' etc"."

Turn down the lights, take my hand, sing a hymn, and call on Little Cissie. I tremble. I &cc before me the great stony bed of a babbling river fringed with the dear blossoming golden wattle. Here and there, delving like devils are feverish men now and then rushing to the waterside with pansful of reddish diirt. All the men are haggard, dirty, unwashed, unshaved and blasphemous—when they have time to talk. They scoop up dishes full of water,, rotate them violently, let the fluid flow over the edge of the dishes, and gaze fixedly at the residue. I see one man draw a bottle from his pocket and carefully feed a handful of something into it. All the morning he feeds the bottle at intervals, and when he leaves the dry, red hole, I notice that his pocket is distorted, that his face follows suit, and that he is clay from hat to boot. I follow him—me, and Little Cissie. I hear him murmuring something about "Going Home" again, and about a girl in Cheshire, or Chesh-a-m, or Chatham, or something, and I watch him skid for the store and see him push his bottle across tine counter. 1 hear him say: "Oh—Ai say, old chap, will you— er—buy this—^-gold?"—and I know that ho is a newchum. And the "old chap" empties out the glittering flakes and little shapeless lumps, laughs a hard, metallic laugh, avoiding the eye of the newchum while he says nasally, "Crikey, my boy, dis isn't gold, it's mica!" And I notice that the boy smears hie dirty hand across his sun-peeled brow and looks dazed. Them the storekeeper carefully returns the worthless stuff into the' bottle and—when the newchum is gome—more carefully stows it away in a nice large iron box under the counter, where the change and the are kept. That night Cissie and I noticed that the newchum "up swag," left his eight by ten tent standing, and wandered uphill along the track, saying something about "bustedi hopes" and! empty bottles, and! a girl, and things Cissie seemed to understand better than me. The last words I heard the newchum say that night, as he lay down under a big bluegum, were: "She's a duffer!'

We went back and gazed on the mica merchant, and noticed that he was a little perturbed in, his actions. He owned a very good horse—l remember that it was a nuggetty black "rig," with a fine crest and a pretty good fall of hair back and front—and he put a new saddle out of the store on the rig, and Cissie and me following on the wings of the wind, or words to that effect, saw that he dlug out a wayside postmaster, and got a message on the wires. Subsequent investigations by Cissie proved that the storekeeper believed l the newchum's claim so useless that he wired urgently to his brother—who was a livery-staole-keeper at Tanganoola, telling him he had found a claim that was no good. Days later— according to Cissie the Spirit—the Tanganoola brother is hard at work in that discarded claim—having made due and legal application to the warden. The mica the pair got was really wonderful, and they stacked it in chamois leather the twenty ounces or so in the newchum's bottlte. Tlie Tanganoola brother—who called himself Smith—

dug, and the storekeeper brother (whose name was Rigard) received and bagged. And! so suddenly, the little store with the change and the revolver under the counter, knew the brothers mo more —for a spell— and they rolled the mica in common blue blackfellow blankets, loaded the packhorses with tucker, and clothes, and sundries, including "mica," and simply fadedl forth. Cissie saw them crossing the wattle-fringed river, saw them flog the ponies up the twisted, path everybody called 1 Dingo Hill—because hungry wild dogs once ate a starving swagman at the curve where that blasted old Chinaman, Wun Fut, has a garden—watched them cutting into the big stretch of stringy-bark that lies to the southward'" of Kangaroo Dip and Phelan's Folly—-where Phelan jumped over a 500 'feet cliff for the wager of a bottle of whisky—and observed them carefully shepherding the ponies around'the High Bluff. And then suddenly Cissie saw the nose of a blue roan horse poking out from behind a tree. The man on the horse was a large man with long legs, and hie had a bit of black cloth over his face and a Snider carbine in his hands—for the roan horse's bridle was flopping on his neck—Cissie forgets whether the gee-gee was a gelding or a mare (these spirits have very short memories). Cissie says that there were many men further in the bush, but that the chap on the roan horse came out at a slow walk and said quite quietly—none of your blatant Robbery Under Anns yells— "Bail up!" The gentlemen in, the bush rode out, too-. Result, the storekeeper and the liveryman leave their ponies and their swags with the bushrangers (Presbyterian horror at the mention of bushrangers), and are simply told to "get to hell out of it!" They went back to the store. Cissie stayed with the bushrangers, and hovered round them. They ransacked the swags. The big fellow on the roan horse was deeply interested when they came to a bottle full of something, and he took off his bit of black- cloth from his face to see a little better. "Oh, Ai saay, look heah, yon chaps, it's my bally bottle." He ran the gold out into his hand, and Cissie, who- knew gold when she saw it, told me it- was "good coarse," and I know it was, because I'm telling the yarn, and it has to be. "This is tbe jolly stuff the boundah said was no bally good," the man who rode the roan horse continued!. "How d'you know?" inquired a nasty looking person with an evil beard and a wall-eye. "How? Why, because of this little lump!" holding it between two fingers. "Ai thought, when I washedit out, how like my dear old governor's nose it was. What?" Simple story. Disappointed boy. Bailed up by bushrangers. Nothing worth taking. Joined the mob. Rode a roan horse. Happened on worse robbers than bushrangers. One week later Cissie saw the blue roan horse, the rider, andl the rest of the bushrangers and their horses moving slowly back to the rush. They tied their horses up to the wattles on the riverbank, and interviewed the storekeeper and his brother. The boy with the roan horse did all the talking, and it wasn't oratory, and Cissie heard the storekeeper blurt out a- confession about the mica (that was gold worth four pounds an ounce), simply because that silly boy held a Shidler carbine under the storekeeper's nose. I regret to say that the man with the swivel eye and the wicked beard desired urgently to hang both brothers, and am glad, to- be able to observe tbat the boy on the blue roan prayed him to desist, believing that a generous application of the boot, some sprinkled kerosene, andi a match would wipe out the. wrong. And these common commercial articles were used with some effect, and the ultimate fight between the miners and the bushrangers didn't matter much because Mulcahey, the bushranger, who was the only man killed 1 , wouldn't have lived long, anyhow, and Fitzgerald, the renegade parson digger, who got a slug in the leg, deserved it, anyhow. And the

youngster with the roan horse ? Well, he's done for, poor-chap! Married the daughter of a Mudgee-bar-ber, and is now an M.E.C. ,' '■* ' - ! Thank you; Cissie ! .. * - '* . * •'-.'''

Once there were "two mates. I know they were mates because I saw them* fight ten dingdong rounds about the colour of a dog. They sat on their bunks that night and laughed uproariously with burst lips, and smiled at each other out of discoloured eyes. They were really sheep men, but when the Gobung rush broke out—they left. They simply demanded their cheques from old Footrot, the owner of Mallee Downs, and cleared out with their hacks and their packborees.

But that's neither hero nor there. They arrived, and as they were greedy they both pegged out claims. Jim thought that Honeysuckle Flat looked 1 good, and Jack staked: his reputation as a shearer on a bit of a hollow known for no earthly reason as Emu Tail. They both got to work.

Jack found gold literally hanging to the roots of th© grass. He couldn't go wrong. Every day, for three months, Providence refused to allow him to draw a blank. He socked the nuggets away in the common tent. Jim, who was a harder worker than Jack, didn't get a colour. Jackcame home one night with ten ounces (approximate). They used a one pound tin of Golden Wasp jam to judge the weight. Jack, the lucky one, who was just an ordinary, everyday kind of backblocks Australian,' snarled, "Share and share alike," and shoved about half into Jim's hand. Jim threw it under a bunk, and I refuse to write the language he used, because it would offend the ears of the Rev. Jasper Cakl-er, who read's this column every Sunday morning. "When I come crawliii' to yous," he said, "it'll l be time fer voiis to be slimgin' charity at a bloke." Then Jack . hit Jim with the frying-pan, and Jim retaliated with the tea-billy, and both lay down and sept after grinning really bard at one another. Seeing that it didn't seem much food for Jim to go on working his claim, he saddled! up a packhorse and his own moke next day, and went to Gong-Gong for stores. It is a curious coincidence that as soon as Jim's back was turned, Jack went to work in Jim's claim, and you 11 believe me he worked up a sweat. Jim returned wet to the skin, but with the stores under plenty of tarpaulin he had sneaked off a rick near GongGong. He was very bitter. Thinking of the "duffing" claim, I supl>ose. ~ il . ~ "I'm goin' ter sling tins game. he said. "Diekin!" say® Jack. "Yous never know yer luck. Have another buck at it, anyways!" ...___ , Jim had a good feed, and felt better. Next day he went to the claim, and picked and shovelled and washed and whirled. About a quarter of an, hour to sundown, I think it was, when he rushed over to Jack's claim, holding a handful of something tight. He gulped. Jack asked, "What t'hell s the matter?" . "I've struck it," he says, as quiet as anything. "What?" says Jack. "Gold," says Jim. "Go on!" says Jack. They weighed up as well as they could 'with the pound tin of jam for a guide, and found that the total finds were each equal within an ounce or two. Jim, with the duffer claim, had the better of the squaring, if anything. Audi Jack never eaidl a word to a living soul—except to me twenty years after—about the trouble be had gone to in planting half his gold in that pocket of the Honeysuckle Flat claim. And neither Jack nor Jim have got a cent to-day—so what's the good?