Heart of the Outback (2 page)

Darkness had invaded the room when CJ next opened his eyes. All was quiet, the milling sounds of guests and their vehicles gone, finally. He reached forward to the desk and flicked on the lamp. The light highlighted the coloured photograph of the largest opal he’d found when mining at Coober Pedy years ago. “You little beauty” was inscribed on a brass plate beneath the photo. Staring at its irregular shape, roughly the thickness of a man’s little finger, triggered something, and his thoughts — which till now had been immersed in Richard — suddenly harked back more than twenty-six years. To a very different time and place before his son had even been thought of. To Mary … the one person he had, over the years, strenuously kept out of his conscious memory.

But the memories, once set free, destroyed the layers he’d spread over that time, trying to keep at bay the images, and the guilt. A pair of brown eyes that could haunt him even now, after so long. What a bastard he’d been.

F
rom the age of six C.J. Ambrose had been known as “CJ”. On his first day at the regional outback school in Longreach, the school bully, Reggie Dent, had challenged him saying that Cyril Jedediah was the stupidest name he’d ever heard and he was going to thrash the living daylights out of young Cyril just for having it. Unfortunately for Reggie, who was two years older than Cyril, he hadn’t taken into account one simple fact. Cyril also hated the name his parents had saddled him with and, with an instinct that would become part of his future trademark, he knew that to have any peace at school he had to stand up to the bully and earn the other school kids’ respect.

Another thing Reggie didn’t know about Cyril was that he had a mighty fine temper and when it reached boiling point — which it did when his given
name was mentioned — then Cyril became a force to reckon with.

After school at the back of the schoolhouse the unequal duel took place. The bully, a stone heavier went home the worse for wear, sporting a black eye and a bloody lip. Cyril went home too and announced that from that day on he’d be known as CJ and, as his reputation as a fearsome scrapper grew, no-one there or for that matter anywhere else, queried the shortening of his name to his initials. As he grew to manhood some people may have raised an enquiring eyebrow at the unusualness of it, but on seeing the warning light in CJ’s eyes, any questioning quickly died a timely death.

The Ambrose family had for three generations worked their own piece of land in north Queensland until the early fifties when CJ’s grandfather, Percy Ambrose, went bankrupt. The family lost everything in a punishing drought. The loss of their medium-sized cattle station, Amba Downs, and the subsequent hard life drove CJ’s gentle mother Rachel to an early grave. His father Neville had been forced to look for work as a station manager-cum-jackeroo wherever he could, earning, as he moved from town to town and station to station, the nickname of “Walkabout” Nev. His children, CJ and Shellie, tagged along wherever the search for employment took them.

CJ, a lanky thirteen-year-old who’d learnt to ride almost before he could walk, hadn’t minded the harsh, semi-nomadic life, but he certainly had minded the family’s fall from being landowners. He’d minded it like the very devil. One day he would have inherited Amba Downs and he was secretly angry
with his grandfather and father for not having been better prepared to survive the years of drought — a common occurrence in the Australian outback.

Possessing a high intellect but little patience for book learning, CJ happily left school at fourteen to strike out on his own. He worked up in the Gulf country shooting crocodiles and wild buffalos, then he cut cane on a sugar plantation south of Cairns to see if he liked it, and by his late teens he had jackerooed the length and breadth of far north Queensland. During his years of work and travel he came to an important conclusion. If he was to get back on the land he loved and own a station again, he had to make money, big money. That’s what it would take to buy a reasonable-sized property, stock it and then build up the herd.

Leaving Shellie to look after his ailing father, CJ’s quest for wealth took him first to Broken Hill to learn about mining then across the country to Mt Lyell and to Kalgoorlie panning for gold. Finally, by the time he’d reached thirty, he found himself at Coober Pedy prospecting for opals. All the while his bank balance was growing but not fast enough to put him where he wanted to be — on his own piece of land with the finest breeding stock in far north Queensland.

He and Mickey Edgars (the two had met in a gold mine at Kalgoorlie) had agreed to fossick for opals at the Coober, initially around the mullock heaps to see what missed gems could be picked up. Mickey had once mined opals at Lightning Ridge and he taught the eager, quick-to-learn CJ everything he knew. From
their first meeting they had forged an easy-going friendship even though the two men were vastly dissimilar in nature and builds. For some inexplicable reason a friendship had developed as they’d worked “Kal’s” gold fields and now the Coober Pedy’s opal fields which to them held the promise of great, and if they were fortunate, quick wealth.

One Saturday night they left the rough camp they’d made on the fringe of the diggings — they’d been noodling the dumps for small opals overlooked by other miners — to go into town. And maybe, after a beer or two, and if they were lucky, one or both of them would come across an unattached, willing woman as well.

Instead, CJ found a poker game and played the game of his life. He’d taken the pot which included eighteen hundred dollars in cash, a registration slip for a rust-encrusted VW kombi-van and a miner’s right to a “supposed” opal mine west of the town’s limits.

“That mining lease is no good to you,” the cigar smoking player who’d lost everything told CJ.

“Why’s that?” Mickey wanted to know. A little man, ex-jockey and ex-army, he often made up for his lack of height by a strutting belligerence. He was dark-haired, with upslanting grey eyes and unremarkable features but prided himself on his forthrightness. He didn’t like people who were cruel to children, or poor losers like the man opposite him.

“Opals there are played out. Everyone knows it. But,” the card-player added, his tone soft so few could hear the words. “I’ll take if off your hands for two hundred dollars.”

“Don’t listen to him, mate. You can never tell with opals. Could be a fortune down there,” a grizzled miner said. “Been proved time and time again. Someone mines for a while, finds nothing and lets his lease run out. Then a new bloke comes in and finds good opal.”

“Yeah. You’ve got to work it to find out,” said another.

CJ listened to all the comments. A thick-set, broad shouldered man with blonde hair that had the tendency to curl and then flop over his forehead, he was by no ways handsome. CJ had been involved in too many punch-ups in which his nose had been broken twice and he’d had his left cheekbone shattered. But something about him caught people’s attention. A certain presence, an air of command. By the age of thirty, there was a hardness in him which bespoke the background from which he’d pulled himself up. And along the way he’d acquired an aura that fitted in with the tough men of Coober Pedy. People may not have liked him but the tilt of his head, the expression in his cool blue eyes said I don’t give a damn, so long as you respect me. His single-minded goal in life, he jokingly called it his magnificent obsession, was to acquire great wealth, legally if he could, to keep his family happy.

He had come a long way in that regard. On one of his many visits to Townsville (where his father and sister Shellie lived since she’d married a businessman named Peter Kirkby) he’d met and courted a young widow, Brenda deWitt. Brenda was an only child and her father, Miles deWitt, owned a score of sugar cane plantations which stretched from Nambour to Cairns,
as well as a couple of commercial buildings in the heart of Brisbane. Miles wasn’t overly pleased that his daughter had fallen head over heels for the brash, opinionated Ambrose. He suspected that CJ was an opportunist looking to marry a woman of means. Knowing deWitt’s suspicions were fairly accurate, dented CJ’s pride, so he intended to prove his future father-in-law wrong by making it on his own.

CJ convinced Brenda that they shouldn’t marry until he had substantial funds behind him, so they had become engaged on the understanding that he would take a year, no more than two, to establish himself. Soon after he’d left for Kalgoorlie eager to find the riches that would put him in a better light with Miles deWitt.

CJ studied the cigar smoking card-player. CJ’s blue eyes were startling, an electric kind of blue capable of staring with disconcerting intensity, often making people squirm. “If it’s no bloody good, why are you willing to pay good money for it?” CJ asked sternly.

“Oh, among the potch there might be a few small stones, enough to warrant the investment.”

“I’ll have a look at it first, then I’ll let you know if I want to sell.”

The next day, in his newly acquired VW van, CJ and Mickey found the M45 mine using a hand-drawn map the previous owner had grudgingly made for them. That the previous owner had said there was little chance of discovering traces of precious opal only increased CJ’s resolve to have a damned good look for himself.

The mine was no more than a hole in the ground with several piles of mullock surrounding it. Near it stood a crude, but liveable dugout which had been hacked out from the hill. The dugout had a galvanised tin front wall with a door — no windows — and the inside was hollowed out like a cave to make one large room. The floor was hard-packed earth, the furniture basic and half of it homemade. A single burner spirit stove, a gas bottle fridge, a rickety table and two chairs and two bunks, one without a mattress stood inside. A kitchen dresser held an accumulation of mismatched crockery and saucepans all of which were covered with a fine layer of dust.

Both men knew that the aridity of the landscape meant there would be little water around but a galvanised iron water storage tank stood at the side of the dugout to catch whatever rain might fall. It was, of course, empty! They knew that they would have to buy and haul their water from the general store, like everyone else did on the diggings.

CJ didn’t know as much about mining opals as he did about iron ore or gold but some sixth sense — he had developed an innate ability to make decisions that led to him bettering himself — told him to give this mine a shot. The price of quality Australian opals on the international gem market was rising, and if he found a decent vein it could make him rich overnight.

“The bloke’s equipment’s still here. I’m going to give it a go.”

“What, full-time?” queried Mickey.

“Why not? I’ve the nest egg of those poker winnings. That’ll tide me over for several months.
Want to come in with me, Mickey? Two will get a lot more done than one.”

“As a full partner?”

With eyes narrowed, CJ thought about it for two seconds. “Of course, what else?”

That was how the Ambrose-Edgars opal mining partnership was formed at the M45 mine.

The two men worked well together and had no trouble putting in ten to twelve hour days digging, hand gouging and detonating for the elusive opal-bearing seams. They’d cart the potch — useless opal and soil — out of the mine, sort it again for stones they may have missed and then dispose of the worthless material. After no time at all more cylindrical pyramids of mullock began to form around the site.

CJ and Mickey read what books they could find on mining opals but listening to the miners talk, around campfires, the general store and the pub, was the best education. Bit by bit they picked up the knowledge needed to differentiate precious opal from common opal, and to recognise the many varieties. One book said there were fifty-seven different kinds of opal but the important ones worth finding were crystal, water, pin fire, matrix, harlequin, girasol, milk and moss opal.

After two months their cache of a few quality opals of the harlequin, milk and fire variety had grown sizeably, enough for them to take a few days off and venture into town again for some relaxation and entertainment.

Young Mary Williams was getting used to the work in the bar. At first the noise of plain-speaking men, some
with funny accents who could hardly speak a word of English, and those who didn’t ask politely for a beer but yelled for one at the top of their lungs, had alarmed her. She knew they had to shout to be heard over the noise but she just wasn’t used to it. After all, this was only her second week of employment at the hotel as an assistant barmaid, the only job the nuns from the mission school had been able to get her. The job included her own room at the back of the hotel, board and a poor weekly wage of seven dollars and fifty two cents.

There wasn’t much to spend one’s money on in Coober if one didn’t drink or gamble or buy opals, which she didn’t, so she was happy to sock most of her earnings away for the future. Perhaps for a visit to Adelaide. She’d heard it was a wonderful city with tall buildings, churches, lovely green parks with flowerbeds beside the Torrens River. She had seen pictures in books and longed to see the ocean and the beaches one day too. So different from Coober Pedy.

Fresh from the mission and not knowing how to react or behave, keeping the men who had shown interest in her at a distance had been hard for her at first. The nuns had forewarned her about men and, thank goodness, Gustav Farber the licensee and his thickly-accented, hard-working wife, Rita were God-fearing, kindly Germans. Gus kept an eye on Mary, as he’d promised Sister Magdalena he would, and if any of the young bloods got too bold he quickly told them to piss off.

Tall and slender and quietly spoken, Mary had been raised at the mission school never knowing either of her parents. She did know that her father
was white and her mother part Aboriginal. She had been left on the mission’s doorstep at the age of nine months with a note that begged the nuns to take care of her. They had, but when she reached eighteen they were obliged by the mission’s rules to find her work and send her out into the world.