*
‘What are the chances?’ Tom Berry rejoiced, spilling his beer on the unvarnished wooden floors of the Hotel Darwin’s public bar. ‘There I was, thinking I was the unluckiest son-of-a-bitch to ever hold a pickaxe, and then I look up and see this barefoot blackfeller dressed like feckin’ Napoleon!’
Aubrey restarts the Ford on the side of the dirt road and motors on at a pace not much quicker than he could walk if his body wasn’t so broken. He remembers the smile on Tom’s face. The sheer wonder of it all. The sheer good fortune.
There must have been twenty or so local goldminers in the bar that afternoon and Aubrey Hook was one of the youngest. The men were celebrating the miraculous return of Tom Berry, who had gone missing three months earlier while prospecting alone in the rocky tablelands far beyond the Clyde River. Tom bought three rounds of whisky for every man present and then, to a chorus of rowdy hoots and hollers, he told the extraordinary and seemingly implausible story of the three months he was missing in the deep country.
For several days, he recounted, he’d made progress on a quartzite seam, in a location he was careful not to disclose. There he lived on beans and whisky, and he spoke of the seam’s potential only to his packhorse of twelve long years, Samson. Tom told his horse how he would be returning home a rich man and that his beloved wife, Bonnie Berry, and his beloved children, then-teenaged Violet and Peter Berry, would be waiting for him and he would tell them to pack up their things quick smart because they were moving to Sydney because Tom was getting out of the gold-digging business and getting into the caviar-scooping business because their ship had just come in on waves of raw gold. He told Samson how he would then march on down to Smith Street, Darwin, and find every last smug goldminer in every last dark corner of every last pub in town; every last man who had ever laughed about his gold-digging abilities; every man who’d ever said he had more book sense than gold sense; every man who’d ever said there was more twinkle in Tom Berry’s eyes than there ever was in his pan. And he would gather these men together and he would glow like gold itself when he told them of his riches.
Then, hacking away at the quartzite seam, Tom noticed a rash across the underside of his left forearm and that rash began to spread across his whole left side. He worked on with his axe and rock hammer, but soon he began to cough uncontrollably and his chest began to wheeze and he could not suck enough air into his lungs. In a fevered sweat, he wisely chose to pack his tools and provisions, and he climbed onto Samson and steered the faithful horse towards Darwin, where Tom Berry would see a doctor for what he was convinced was a deadly case of influenza.
But soon his limbs grew so weak he could not stay upright on his horse and he rode for three miles on his belly with his dead arms hugging Samson’s side. With little instruction, the horse walked aimlessly through the deep-country scrub, then took a path high into the plateau lands. It chewed on grasses by the sides of paths and when it came to a choice of routes it simply based its choice on the quality of grass each one had to offer.
The horse clopped along for ten miles through treacherous mountain country until it came to a wild, fast-flowing river that led to a thunderous waterfall down below that Tom was only just lucid enough to register in his ears.
Samson stopped at a bridge crossing the rapids. ‘But it was no bridge made of nail and hardwood,’ Tom Berry whispered to his transfixed audience in the public bar. ‘It was a bridge made by the blackfellers, ya see, a few thin logs that felt like twigs to a packhorse. Samson refused to go any further.’
Tom Berry slid from the horse and landed in a mess of arms and legs on the dirt and stone edge of the rapids. He could no longer walk, as his legs were paralysed. Half his face was paralysed, too – the whole left side was numb and sagging so much that he felt it was going to drop clean off his head. With his face pressed against the earth and his dry tongue licking dust, he tried to drag himself towards the bridge and he moved a couple of yards, but he was spent altogether when he got within an arm’s reach of the bridge.
He closed his eyes and he slowed his breathing and he regretted the fact he lacked the strength to throw himself into the rapids, where he could die quickly, smashing his head against a rock or being sucked down into the waterfall and sprayed off a clifftop and then drowned soon enough in pounding whitewash. Instead he would die slowly of thirst in the dirt beneath the baking northern Australian sun. He thought in that moment of how there was a time in his life when he’d intended to put his brain to better use than swinging a sharp axe at rock faces he was always too proud to admit were barren. He had planned to be a schoolteacher. A local priest, Duncan Hall, in Palmerston had been starting up a small Catholic school, largely for the children of mining families, and he’d asked Tom if he would teach the kids grammar and rhetoric, given he was such a keen and well-spoken advocate for the wonders of literature. But Tom had turned the priest down because he carried a weakness inside him and that weakness glowed between cracks of
