“Scald you half to death if you drink it. You’ll want it cooled down first.”
Tommy turned with his hand on his revolver. There were four of them, standing near his horses on the other side of the waterhole,filthy scarecrow men in a bizarre assemblage of ill-fitting clothing, adorned with hats and neckerchiefs, waistcoats and bowties. Thin as the picks and shovels they carried, beards down to their chests. Three were white, the other native; one hada rifle on a shoulder strap, and they were too near the horses to risk a gunfight. Tommy let go of the revolver, allowed hishand to hang.
“This all there is?” he called over.
“For the horses, yeah. We can’t let it run or it floods. There’s barrels you can get a drink from though.”
“Where?”
The man squinted at him. “Y’ain’t planning on robbing us are you?”
Tommy looked around. “What of?”
“Water’s in that barn there,” the man said, pointing with his pick. “Trade if you have anything. Save you waiting on the bore.”
Tommy told them he had tobacco, flour, dried mutton, and they exchanged excited glances like Father Christmas had just come.He unhooked his bladder bags and left the horses drinking from the reservoir and cautiously followed the men to the barn.There were others here, he realized. Perhaps a dozen men in all. He spotted them standing on distant hillsides, outlined inthe sun, or leaning out of their hovels with their chins resting on their arms. Some place this he’d stumbled on. He’d topup his bladder bags, maybe share a meal, then leave.
Outside the barn was a junkyard of furniture and wheelbarrows and bicycles and scrap; cash registers and bar taps and franking machines and weighing scales, all piled up or strewn loose on the ground. There were no doors on the building, only a cutout in the wall, and the roof was missing entirely—it rained so little they had no need. They led him inside, into a makeshift dwelling: there was a kitchen, a sleeping area, a rusted metal bathtub, a firepit, a blackened cooking stove. The man who’d done the talking so far showed Tommy a line of old beer kegs stacked against the wall, told him to have a try. Tommy turned one of the taps and clear water surged out. He tasted it: tepid but clean. “We got ourselves a trade, then? A meal for them bags filled?” the man asked, grinning. Tommy nodded and shook his filthy hand.
A bearded prospector wearing a flowery housedress and going by the name of Keith prepared a stew out of the mutton and a fewbeans, and baked two fat loaves of bread. Nobody commented on his getup. Must have always dressed that way. In from the fieldthey dribbled, this strange community of men, jabbering excitedly about Tommy’s arrival and whatever gold they’d scraped togetherthat day. Most were white, of all kinds: German, Dutch, Australian mongrels like Tommy, plus another blackfella and two Chinesebrothers, who only spoke between themselves. Tommy asked if their name was Song, the brothers from Bewley who’d gone to thegoldfields and never come home. Of course it wasn’t. He felt a fool for having wondered. In its heyday this place had swarmedwith thousands of men, they told him, from all around the world, now this sorry handful were the only ones left. The fieldwas all but dry, but they could just about make a living from it, and that was enough for them. Everything was communal. Sharingmeant they survived. Most had tried moving on at one time or another, but this was all they knew. It wasn’t much but it wassomething, which was better than nothing at all, and that’s what awaited them out there. Rarely did anybody make it fartherthan Yunta, a day’s walk away, before turning round and heading back here, to take up their pick again.
Tommy filled his bladder bags and left after the meal was over, as if whatever madness that afflicted these men might catch. They tried persuading him to stay longer; he should see the fun and games that went on after sundown. Music, dancing, drinking—no, he really shouldn’t, Tommy already knew that much. There was a chest of women’s clothing alongside a pair of fiddles and a foot drum, and he imagined Keith, and maybe the two Chinese brothers, getting dressed up in their glad rags and offering dances and maybe more—Tommy had spent enough time among lonely bushmen to imagine what might go on. He hitched the bladder bags onto his shoulder and backed out of the barn, his right hand free just in case. There was no need. The men followed him outside and waved him off like sweethearts on a train platform, and the sight of them lined up in front of the barn, big Keith in his housedress, the others like desperate vagabonds, had him chuckling all the way to Yunta, which he made by nightfall. He asked in the hotel about the goldfield. “Oh, those crazy fuckers are hell-bound,” the clerk told him. “The depravity they get up to—they eat people, so I’ve heard. It’s a wonder you got out alive.”
He stabled the horses and took the train to Adelaide, looked in on Dee while he was there;
