She watches them digging. Aubrey Hook is two years older than Horace Hook and half a foot taller. The brothers are aged in their mid-thirties but too much toil and too much Darwin sun have dragged them prematurely into their forties. Both brothers wear wide-brimmed black hats that shadow their hands as they break to open their rectangular and rusting Havelock tobacco tins and roll their smokes, silent as always. The men wear white cotton shirts and black trousers and black work boots covered in dirt. Their spines bend sharply at the top, as if their shoulder blades are pushing their heads over, like they were born disfigured, but it’s all because of the shovel work. Digging graves for the dead and all those years they spent digging eventual graves for themselves in the sorry rear end of the Northern Territory gold rush. It takes decades for a spine to assume the dig position, but it catches on eventually, starts curling into a comfortable place, the way Horace and Aubrey will one day curl gratefully into a mud-cake brown-dirt hole just like the one they’re digging beside the black rock frog rock.
Aubrey has a moustache but Horace does not. Red kerchiefs round their necks for sweat, white handkerchiefs in their trouser pockets to wipe dirt off their foreheads. Men of bone and skin and work and broken sleep and worry. Men who Molly believes might have been born in dirt. Men who did not come from the place she came from. Men who emerged from the earth they’re always digging up. The girl knows if she drove Bert into her father’s belly and stomped on the blade shaft with her right boot, she’d find the same red, yellow and brown earths she keeps finding beneath all these old black cemetery gravestones lining Blackbird Creek. She’d find the Darwin kandosols her dad has told her about, those hard Top End soils that hold little water, the sandy and loamy surface soils, inside her own father. Then she’d dig deeper and she’d find no innards in the man, no gut tubes, no organs, no heart, just the vertosols, the same cracking clays and black soils found beneath the Top End’s vast floodplains. She can’t picture Uncle Aubrey’s insides, thinks he’s hollow like the dead, termite-ravaged trees that gave this cemetery its name. All he has inside is shadow.
‘Black rock frog rock,’ Molly mumbles to herself as she pans.
The black rock frog rock beneath the milkwood tree looks to Molly like the black rock frogs she always sees hopping through Hollow Wood. The frogs remind her of burnt damper. Hopping lumps of burnt bread.
She likes those words. ‘Black rock frog rock.’ She sounds like a croaking creek frog when she says those words fast. ‘Black rock frog rock. Black rock frog rock.’ And she laughs.
Molly shakes the pan from side to side, vigorously enough to turn the gravel, gently enough to keep the gravel in the pan. She takes the larger gravel rocks from the pan, washes them clean in the water, discards them. Circular pan movements now, revolutions of gravel and water as dirt and clay dissolve. The gravedigger girl’s fingers working lumps of dirt and clay, working smaller rocks to the surface, letting the heavier minerals – the gold, Mum, the gold – settle at the bottom of the pan. The pan goes up and the pan goes down and the dirt spins like the earth spins beneath Molly Hook’s dirt-brown bare feet. And she searches for those flashes of gold for forty-five minutes and she never finds them.
But after all the searching, all the sifting, she finds that the sky-gifted pan has been washed clean on both sides. The wet copper shimmers in the Darwin sun and she turns the pan in her hands and she guides a reflecting beam of the sun onto her left palm and she wonders if the beauty of that light on her skin is prettier than any large nugget of gold she could ever find, anyway. Maybe this was the kind of treasure her grandfather hunted across every corner of this land. The treasure of pure golden light.
She’s tired now and she lies back on the dry creek bed to rest and she looks up to the wide blue sky and she talks to it. She asks a question of it: ‘Why did you give me this?’ And the sun blasts whiteness in her eyes and she shields the sun with the perfect circle of the copper pan and she wonders if that’s why she received this gift, so she could look up and see only sky. But what she sees when she looks up is cursive. Words. A series of sentences roughly engraved on the underside of the prospector’s pan. She reads the words with the same interest with which she reads the epitaphs on the crumbling gravestones of Hollow Wood Cemetery, all those final deep-grief stories yielding clues to the lives of the departed souls, while the mud beneath her right forefinger nail underlines each strange word.
The longer I stand, the shorter I grow,
And the water runs to the silver road
She repeats those words to herself. Repeats them over and over. ‘“The longer I stand, the shorter I grow, and the water runs to the silver road” . . . “The longer I stand, the shorter I grow, and the water runs to the silver road.”’
From the words runs the etched line of what could only be called a map, but it’s like no map that Molly Hook has ever seen. She has seen maps of her country. She has seen the dot of Darwin resting like a jewel in a princess’s tiara on the left-hand corner of the top of Australia. She has seen the rectangle of the Northern Territory wedged in straight lines between a mapped out and vast Western
