From that day on, Arthur Hook could only hate Bonnie Little. And he hated her absolutely. But he hated Tom Berry twice as much as he hated Bonnie and his hate for Tom Berry bled into what later seemed to his fifteen-year-old son, Aubrey, to be a hatred for all of life. Arthur hated the leaves that dropped from trees and gathered on his porch. He hated horses and the sound their hooves made on concrete, and he hated the smell of their droppings as he meandered through hillside paths and range tracks that he took with his young sons, Aubrey and Horace, on gold-prospecting trips through Pine Creek country. He hated the woman he eventually married, June Buttigieg, the only daughter of Stanley Buttigieg, owner-operator of Darwin’s fledgling Hollow Wood Cemetery. Poor and sorry June, he told himself, with that lazy left eye that always sat like a fallen mango at the bottom of her eye socket whenever Arthur asked her questions about dinner or weather patterns or what it felt like to carry a child inside her belly. The gravedigger’s daughter with the dead left eye. Pull that eye out and bury it six feet deep, he told himself. He hated the way June howled during childbirth and he hated the smell of the black shit that burst from baby Aubrey’s backside and over his fatherly fingertips. He hated the tea leaves that built up in the bottom of his teacup and he hated the branches from the backyard oak tree that scratched against his tin roof and he hated the sun that kept on rising and telling him to go to work and he hated the sound of the fiddle players in the Hotel Darwin and he hated the beer that warmed too quickly in his hand and he hated anyone who wished good fortune on Tom Berry because he hated Tom Berry most of all.
Arthur beat his sons. He beat the backs of their ducking heads with his closed fist and each beating made him hate Tom Berry even more because he blamed Tom Berry for stealing the only thing he ever loved and turning him into the kind of man who beats his sons. He beat his sons with rocks and whip handles and sticks and fists and then he watched his sons grow into muscular teenaged boys who beat each other.
‘Hate’s not such a bad thing,’ he told his boys once, swigging whisky under campfire light on a long Pine Creek gold search. ‘Never underestimate the power of hate. My hate for Tom Berry is what gets me up in the morning. I hate him so much that it gives me the energy I need to work those mines. I hate him so much I want to steal every piece of gold he’ll ever hope to get his hands on. And I will. I’ll do it. My hate for Tom Berry’s gonna make us rich.’ And Arthur Hook drank his whisky and his head turned to his sons, looking through the flames of the campfire. ‘What do you boys hate?’ he asked.
And Aubrey and Horace turned to each other, both knowing the other’s answer but not giving it.
Arthur Hook grew to hate the very gold he was seeking to find. He grew to hate the very mountains that hid the gold he despised. He hated the hills and valleys and ranges that kept their gold secrets from him. In the pubs of Darwin town he would hear whispers of Tom Berry’s successes in the goldfields and he would be enraged and he would curse the earth that chose to smile on such a deceitful man as Tom Berry and ignore a decent, hard-working miner such as Arthur.
He drove his pickaxe into those hills and every wild swing was an act of vengeance. Fellow prospectors often questioned his reckless approach. He cut great trenches into the earth but he never took the time to repair the holes he dug, leaving the mountain wounded. Older goldminers would pass his digs and shake their heads. ‘That mountain’s gonna turn on him one day,’ they said, because the older goldminers knew what the blacks knew about the mountain, about the Northern Territory earth. It felt things. Mysterious things. And it rewarded the prospector who felt those things, too, and it punished, they said in campfire whispers, the prospector who ignored those mysteries.
Hate drove Arthur Hook to ride horseback with his sons deep into the scrub beyond Marrakai Crossing, east of fruitful Mount Bundey and the nearby Rustler’s Roost goldmine, seeking the long-lost and near-mythical Black Leg Mine. It was named after its owner, Percy ‘Black Leg’ Gould, a seasoned prospector whose left leg had become wedged under a fallen rock in a trench when he was twenty-two. By the time Percy was found, his leg had turned gangrenous and black, and it had to be cut off and replaced with a wooden peg that he walked on for four more decades before disappearing somewhere in the hills between the Rustler’s Roost mine and Mount Ringwood, along the Margaret River. The Black Leg Mine was said to contain great riches just waiting for anyone brave or foolish enough to try to hack through its unstable and unpredictable rocks.
Arthur Hook found what he thought was the Black Leg Mine after he and his sons rode along a precarious cliff-edge track that skirted Dead Bullock Needle, a natural obelisk pointing 150 feet into the sky that wandering
