A HAZARD OF HEARTS (35 page)

From the outpost of Emu the road sloped sharply
upwards in long hairpin bends, affording stupendous views back to the coast.
There was also the added excitement of negotiating a passage past spring wagons
laden with travellers and their goods, mobs of sheep being herded west to a
squatter’s domain, horsemen and men on foot with all their worldly possessions
upon their backs, undaunted by the miles to be covered over disheartening terrain.

The three day trip was a total delight to Elly,
despite the appalling road. In places, rocks protruded up to two feet above the
surface of the track. However, the coach crashed hardily up and over to roll on
undamaged through the forest towards Springwood, where they stopped for
refreshment. The grandeur of the mountains, their magnificent stands of trees
and fern-filled glens, the constantly occurring vistas of valleys and peaks and
red-rock canyons continued to delight Elly. Then the scene changed to a
bleaker, more alpine terrain, with stunted trees, their bark webbed in
silver-green lichens. Yet even this had power to awe with its silence and the
uninterrupted ranges marching away in splendid isolation towards the horizon.

The other passengers, an ex-digger returning to
his farm, a husband and wife on a visit to their married daughter in Bathurst
and a tongue-tied young man about to join a group of surveyors, were pleasant
enough company. But Elly longed for privacy with Paul, for an opportunity to
discover whether there was still a chance for true intimacy between them. It
was such a joy to have him beside her, within touching distance, but
tantalising, too.

At King’s Tableland, where they would spend the
night at an inn, the temperature dropped sharply and Elly gladly left the coach
for a log fire and a cup of hot cocoa.

‘The fleas were thrown in as an extra,’ she
quipped the next morning to Paul as the coach moved out onto the mist-veiled
track. There had been no opportunity for them to be alone together at the inn.
She could only look forward to their day together in Bathurst before taking the
coach home. Surely Lucy Whatmough could wait a few hours longer.

Her spirits rose with the sun. The journey, the
change in surroundings had done their job, and despite chilled feet and a body
bruised and shaken, with Paul beside her and her responsibilities left behind,
Elly was happy for the first time in months. As the coach slipped and slid down
the steep pass, brakes hard on, with a great log chained to the back to slow
them enough not to overrun the horses, she gazed out at the vista of rich
pastoral lands and downs sloping out to the horizon and knew it for a rural
Paradise. No wonder men fought to have their share.

The following day they crossed the sparsely-treed
plains marking the most westward of the nineteen counties and rolled into
Bathurst after sunset, muddy from stream crossings, the horses hanging their
weary heads. At the inn, a verandahed two-story stone structure as fine as any
in Sydney Town, Elly found herself so stiff she had to be lifted down. Held
briefly in Paul’s arms she allowed herself the luxury of pressing against him.
Then she was on her feet looking up at the inn lanterns burning in the frosty
air, with the tingle of circulation returning to her limbs, and recognising one
of those rare moments of complete happiness.

‘Thank you for bringing me, Paul. I’m so glad I
came.’

‘I’m every bit as glad. But I hope you feel the
same way on the return journey.’ He raised his head. ‘Those clouds are ominous.
There’s snow coming.’

Elly tensed. ‘Oh, no!’

‘I’m afraid so. Elly, I think we should fetch
Lucy immediately and take the morning coach back.’

Pearl crouched on the back of the laden
dray, swaying and lurching with each jolt. She was cocooned in a bone-deep
weariness that had the advantage of masking both physical discomfort and the
interminable length of days measured by the walking pace of a bullock. Always
honest with herself, Pearl knew her inertia had its roots in disappointment
after long-sustained hope.

Certain that Li Po would be found in one of the
miners camps beyond the mountains, she had trudged the weary miles from Ophir
to Hill End to the more far-flung diggings, through dust and dung, buoyed by
this belief. Over the next rise, at the next creek he’d be there, sifting sand
through his pan, rocking the miner’s cradle, plucking out gold from dross.

There were days when, parched by a merciless
sun, she scrabbled in creek beds and sieved grit between her teeth to extract
moisture. There were nights spent rolled in a ball under the roots of a fallen
tree, plagued by hunger and pain in her abused feet, prepared for an uncertain
reception at each new camp.

She questioned Chinese men who worked the
abandoned tailings of more impatient westerners but none had heard of Li Po.
Others treated her variously with hostility, derision or simple indifference as
she followed the tracks marked on her map, earning food by cooking or binding
up wounds. Enduring soaring temperatures and summer storms that cracked the
forest giants and toppled them around her, without shelter or friendly company
to ease the rigours of her journey, she combed the hills and plains of the
western goldfields until her certainty crumbled into a despairing admission. Li
Po was not there.

Then, like a trumpet call to arms, news of
another great strike in Victoria swept through the camps, bringing hope to
spirits ground down by months of toil and disillusionment.

“Victoria’s the place to go, boys. Let’s pack up
and try our luck further south.”

Mustering her persuasion, Pearl managed to
attach herself as cook to a party of four with an ox-pulled dray to carry their
equipment. They were decent enough men beneath their rough, bearded exterior,
who treated her with an off-handedness which suited her well. She ran to their
cries of ‘Chinky, boil up the kettle’, baked their mutton chops and damper and
kept her distance.

Through rough mountain terrain, down to the dry
grass plains following the stock route, fording creeks, ferrying across the
last great river dividing the two colonies, they reached the high gum forests
of Victoria. There they joined the stream of gold-seekers and stockmen droving
cattle from the north to feed the miners already established in their thousands
throughout the land.

Pearl left her party when they turned off east
to the Ballarat-Bendigo diggings. Having lost her pack of medical equipment
when fording the Murrumbidgee River, she needed to replace this means of
earning a livelihood. Cooks could be found amongst the weak or disabled, but a
person with medical skills was prized beyond gold itself by men living in
conditions ripe for disease and accident. She also wanted to honour her promise
to Elly by visiting the Post Office in Melbourne, and to seek traces of Li Po
amongst the burgeoning Chinese community in that city.

She arrived on the outskirts one afternoon to
find herself in a town gone mad. Inpouring migrants scoured the stores to set
themselves up for the diggings, while those who had made their pile but lost
all common sense, whooped it up on the spending spree of their lives.
Wild-looking fellows in cabbage-tree hats and moleskins galloped the streets on
gold-shod horses, firing off pistols at will. Others had gathered flashy
companions of both sexes in shiny new carriages and whipped through town at
reckless speed while downing the best champagne and lighting cigars with five
pound notes.

Amazed, Pearl stood well back on the boardwalk
of Collins Street, the main thoroughfare. There were no saunterers, no people
going sedately about their business, only men with purpose written on their
faces, scurrying across the traffic to avoid being mown down by the roisterers.
Gaudy street-women, chattering like macaws, clung to their escorts and screeched
with laughter as men reeled from a nearby hotel to empty champagne bottles into
a horse-trough, inviting passers-by to drink with them on pain of assault.

Pearl slipped away from the brawling streets to
find the Chinese immigrant quarter, a cluster of shops, laundries and vegetable
gardens, where Li Po’s name evoked no response, although she did learn that
most men of her race favoured the goldfields at Forest Creek, Bendigo and
Ballarat.

She sheltered over-night in the home of an
ancient apothecary who gave her his own brand of salve to rub on her blisters,
then sallied forth with renewed vigour the next day to visit the Post Office,
buy new boots and medical equipment, and book a place on the stage to
Castlemaine, Forest Creek. The fare of four pounds would deplete her hoard, but
it would take her so long to walk the eighty-five miles. She feared her brother
could move on to the new fields being opened up each week. Also, she had been
warned of the dangers on the track, from ex-convict plunderers to snakes to
sudden violent storms filling potholes deep enough to drown a horse. There had
been adventures enough getting this far. Now her brother was almost within
reach. This time, this time...

At six a.m. the next day a coach run by Mr Cobb’s
American Telegraph Line left the Criterion Hotel in Collins Street, with Pearl
perched behind a pile of baggage thirteen feet above the wheel hubs. She had
not expected to be allocated an inside seat. Crimson plush was not for scrubby
oriental boys.

Wedged between luggage and the iron rail running
around the roof she held on tight as the ‘Yankee Whip’ on the box, once clear
of the city, picked up the pace on a track knee-deep with dust. This rose to
hang like fog over the drays and carts toiling along the ruts. Horses and
bullocks strove under the whip, barely avoiding running down men on foot with
swags on their shoulders or pushing wheel-barrows laden with tools.

Pearl saw children harnessed to carts, women
trundling prams piled high with camping gear, their babies tied to their backs.
A packhorse went by with a portable iron bedstead tied on, then a carriage
pulled by a team of large white dogs. Every imaginable stratum of society was
represented: runaway servants and seamen; ticket-of-leave men fresh from the
penal settlements in Van Diemen’s Land; men who had abandoned business or
profession; prostitutes, gentlemen, clergymen, the hale and the weak; plus
whole families scrambling out of the slums and onto the rutted highway to
riches, north to the goldfields.

The journey turned into an endurance test, with
the six horse team being changed every ten miles so expertly that the
passengers barely had time to register that motion had, blessedly, briefly
ceased. They whirled past the grog shanties which had sprung up along the
route, where many foot-travellers stopped for a dose of oblivion. Pearl’s heart
was touched by the sight of children left untended and exhausted beside the
track, along with the carcasses of horses and bullocks pushed beyond tolerance
then left to rot.

Rain had fallen steadily since they started the
long steep climb up The Gap then plunged down the other side into Gisborne,
thirty-four miles out of Melbourne. The worst stage of the journey lay ahead.
Pearl sensed the other roof passengers’ anxiety as they entered a thirteen-mile
stretch of range country which included the gloomy Black Forest – notorious for
the shocking state of the track and the number of attacks by bushrangers who
hid amongst the dense thickets of ironbarks.

Her own nerves tightened as they entered a
cavern of trees where birdsong ceased and the only sound was the drumming of
hooves and raindrops pattering on canvas. Common-sense told her the more
obvious victims would be gold-laden miners returning to civilization, or even,
daringly, the gold transport under armed escort. Yet logic had little weight
when the senses were oppressed by such sullen, lonely surroundings and the
travellers’ tales told with false bravado while eyes darted from tree to tree.
Along with the other passengers, Pearl relaxed her taut vigilance only when the
Wood End Inn at Five-Mile Creek came into sight, with its promise of food and
rest and, above all, safety.

It poured all through the next day’s travel
north over undulating high country, but eventually the coach drew into a muddy
market square lined with wagons drawn up outside a row of shopfronts and
weatherboard and canvas public houses. Shivering in her wet clothes Pearl
climbed stiffly down to survey with unbelieving eyes the thousands upon
thousands of dun-coloured tents extending through gullies for miles in all
directions.

Despite its name, there was no sign of a forest,
only a few straggling trees left as a reminder of how the land had once been.
The slippery clay, pockmarked with immense holes, had been chopped to a muddy
slush, knee deep in places. Everything dripped, including the ugly fungal
growth of tents swallowing the countryside.

It was immense – impossible to search.

Pearl sat down on a tree stump, feeling her
courage ebb. But she hadn’t come this far to be defeated. Soon, she rose again
and set off asking directions to a Chinese encampment. Eventually she hurried
off into the dusk, mentally repeating the rough instructions, anxious to find
the creek before full dark.

Stumbling down a sandy bank she followed the
almost dry bed down to a junction with another trickling stream. Half a mile
further on she heard the familiar cadence of voices like her own, smelled the
pungent aroma of spices in the cooking pots and incense rising from the tong
leaders’ tents as they knelt on their prayer mats and approached their
ancestors on behalf of their people so far from home.