All Our Shimmering Skies

grey rock like a fire and that fire lit his soul. He then thought of his wife, Bonnie, and his son, Peter, who was a quiet and good boy, and his daughter, Violet, and how it made sense that such a fine woman as Bonnie would raise such a fine young woman as Violet. A voracious reader of books like her father. She’d been eating up his poetry books. She’d recite lines to her father over breakfast and her oats would go cold because she was so lost in the worlds of Byron and Wordsworth and Whitman. But the glow of the gold blinded him to all that. The glow saw him work too much on rock faces, and then it saw him drink too much because the drink kept lethargy away from the rock face, kept him working too much.

Now the miner turned over and stared into a different golden glow, and that was the full sun, and he willed it to set him alight, to burn his gold-lusting soul to ash.

‘But then I heard Samson holler out with a neigh like he was startled by somethin’,’ Tom Berry told the wide-mouthed whisky drinkers at the bar. ‘And I felt footsteps coming towards me in the dirt and I could not even move my head, gentlemen, because I was so weak. But I could move my eyes and I turned my eyes to the footsteps in the dirt and then a figure stood over me.’ Tom Berry paused for effect in the telling of his great tale and he lowered his voice. ‘The figure of a man, and this man blocked out the sun and all I could see was his coat. His long . . . black . . . feckin’ coat! A French admiral’s frock coat.’

Calls of ‘balderdash’ and ‘bunkum’ and ‘bullshit’ echoed across the beer-stained pub floor, but Tom Berry stood adamantly by his story. Longcoat Bob was old and tall. He was shirtless under the coat, but his long thin legs wore brown riding pants. There was scarring across his chest like the staff lines on the piano music sheets Bonnie Berry played from after dinner. He had a mess of curled silver hair and he had creases so deep in his long, thin face that the creases looked like battle scars. He wore the French admiral’s frock coat as naturally as a white man wears a vest. It was made of military-grade navy blue wool, with gold buttons and elaborate gold embroidery on the lapels and cuffs. The collar was so high and stiff it brushed against Bob’s earlobes. But the coat was no museum piece; it looked like the old man had worn it for decades, as it was torn at the elbows and covered in dust.

‘It was the real thing, too,’ Tom said, and men laughed and spat beer from their lips as they slapped their thighs.

‘I speak the truth,’ Tom gasped. ‘That coat had made its way from them Napoleonic Wars all the way to that bloke Bob up in those mountains.’

Tom’s audience was sceptical. ‘You went mad up there in those mountains, Berry,’ called Albert Strudwick, a seasoned digger from South Australia. ‘Tell me how a blackfeller all the way out there comes by a coat sewn by the French Empire?’

Tom knocked back a small glass of whisky and followed it with a swig of beer.

‘Well, there’s something you need to know about this feller Longcoat Bob,’ Tom said. ‘He’s not like other blackfellers.’

Tom then recounted how he dropped out of consciousness at Longcoat Bob’s feet because the vision of the strange Aboriginal had felt like a dream and there was little else he could do with his life at that point except slip away into that dream. He woke two days later inside a small hut with supports made of tree branches and walls made of rusting corrugated iron. The hut smelled of eucalyptus oil. His neck was throbbing, but he was no longer suffering the flu symptoms that had left him near dead by the rapids crossing. He ran his fingers across the back of his neck and felt a hole in the soft flesh behind his right ear. The hole was filled with a paste that smelled like piss and old grass.

Then an Aboriginal woman entered the hut. She said her name was Little Des, daughter of an older woman named Big Desree, and she wore an old grey linen shirt and she spoke in her people’s native tongue as well as English and told the lost goldminer just how fortunate he was to have been found by the extraordinary man they called Longcoat Bob, who had brought Tom Berry back to his camp and identified the paralysis tick the size of a pepper corn that had burrowed into the back of his skull and was digging a tunnel out of feasted human flesh that was about to break through the soft and juicy wall of his brain. At the same time as it was gorging itself on his insides, the tick was filling Tom Berry’s head with poison. Longcoat Bob had drowned the tick in wet tobacco ashes then dug it out with a burnt knife tip. He’d filled the hole it had left with a healing paste he made out of emu bush, tea tree oil, mashed moth larvae and one more secret ingredient that Little Des said he refused to disclose to tribe members, in order to maintain his superior air of medicinal mystery.

‘What are you doin’ wanderin’ about out here?’ Little Des asked. And Tom told Little Des about his shameful lust for gold and how he had found a promising quartzite seam maybe twenty miles from Longcoat Bob’s camp and he had hoped he would return to Darwin a wealthy man who could provide for his beloved family.

Stepping out of the hut later, Tom smiled wide at what was a small tribal camp of huts and firepits spread across a clearing fringed by stringybark trees and lush cycad