Heart of the Outback Read online

  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 easygoing 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.

  On Saturday night the din from the cream-tiled bar with its beer-stained counter reached monumental proportions by seven o’clock. Two men, egged on by a cluster of miners, were arm wrestling at one end of the bar. A darts competition was in full swing towards the side entrance door and a pall of cigarette smoke floated about fifteen centimetres above everyone’s head. In the far corner a group of six men, glasses in hand, were vigorously debating some political matter, and another group were arguing about the estimated value of the iron ore deposits found in the Pilbarra. Several were talking about pulling up stakes and moving to Western Australia.

  Mickey and CJ stood in the open doorway to the bar. Mickey recognised a bloke from down south and stopped to talk to him so CJ entered the fray alone. Almost immediately his eyes began to water from the cigarette smoke and the smell of stale beer. He elbowed his way through the throng to the front of the bar … and then he saw her.

  Her cheeks were flushed with exertion, her lightweight summer frock clung to her like a second skin, and a fine sheen of perspiration covered her neck and arms. Jet black hair curled and bobbed attractively around a face he could only describe in his head as angelic. She was attractive but not beautiful, not in the accepted sense. Her mouth was a little too wide and too full and her eyes were too large in a slightly narrow face that had a pointed chin. Who on earth would send such an innocent to work in this rough place? he wondered. Looking at her was like discovering an oasis in a desert, or the joy he felt at seeing a shooting star on a moonless night. Unexpected, wonderful. Absolutely splendid.

  For once CJ didn’t mind waiting to be served because he could watch as she moved along the bar filling orders. He was quick to note the admiring gaze of several of the men and something alien tightened inside his chest. He tried to think logically. She was young, pretty, new. Out of the corner of his eye he spied the licensee giving him a onceover. There was a very definite meaning in the older man’s eyes. Okay, he could live with that.

  “Yes?”

  He blinked as she stopped in front of him. “Hello, you’re new here?”

  “Yes. What can I get you, sir?” Mary asked in a harried tone. She had long ago lost count of the times she’d been asked such a question. The back of her legs ached like the devil because she still wasn’t used to standing for ten hours straight. Even after two weeks of it her body hadn’t adjusted.

  “I’ll have a schooner of old, miss?” He should get something for Mickey, he realised. “Make that two, please, miss.”

  “The name’s Mary,” she said with a shy smile. Something in his eyes made her look at him again. They were so blue. She could hardly break her gaze away from him. He had a nice sounding voice too, not rough and loud like some of the other men.

  CJ put his money on the bar, picked up the glasses and elbowed his way back to a position from which he could enjoy his beer and still observe Mary as she worked. She was diligent, he observed, the ever-watchful licensee couldn’t fault her in that.

  It was only after the second schooner that Mickey noticed the cause of his partner’s distraction.

  “Yeah, she’s a bit of all right, mate.” He nudged CJ in the ribs. “But you could have competition. I see at least four other blokes drooling over her too.”

  CJ winked. “Only four! Hardly any competition at all.”

  Curious, Mickey asked, “So what are you going to do?”

  “Absolutely nothing.”

  “Nothing?”

  “Well, not right now. Mary’s the kind of girl you don’t rush. She’d run a million miles if I came on strong to her. No, the way to Mary’s heart is,” he grinned at his shorter mate, “I think, the slow, safe route. Get to know her first.”

  “What if one of the others beats you to her?”

  “They won’t,” CJ said confidently. Thank God he hadn’t told Mickey about Brenda. For some inexplicable reason he had held back disclosing his engagement to the Townsville widow. Just as well. Mickey was a bit straitlaced for all his rough living ways and his colourful past. Brenda. A pang of guilt flooded through CJ. There she was, waiting patiently with her young daughter, Natalie, and here he was with the hots for a dark-skinned, naive youngster. He should know better. He did, but something about Mary drew a response he couldn’t deny. She was quite irresistible.

  The following week CJ worked the mine like a man possessed, putting in twelve to sixteen hour days without complaint. He had this great surge of energy and he knew its origins. Thoughts of Mary sexually and physically stimulated him and he couldn’t wait to see her again. Neither could he get her out of his mind. Awake he thought constantly about her and when he fell asleep, exhausted, in his narrow bunk, he dreamt of her.

  On Friday afternoon he found the best indication yet that they were on the right track. He had chased a promising level of potch. Mickey set and exploded several sticks of gelignite along the drive and after disposing of the mullock, down a disused drive, both men had seen the first real sign of precious opal. The level ran horizontally along the mine wall, maybe ten metres below the surface.

  CJ’s work-roughened fingers followed the milky white trace and he began to chip delicately at the colour. This was when it got nerve-racking. Too hard a blow could shatter the opal, wasting hours of effort. But not this time. An hour’s gentle tapping revealed a good-sized milk opal. He licked it and then held it up to the light on his miner’s hat. Colours sparkled and danced. Beautiful. By the end of the day he’d liberated four fair-sized stones. A good day’s work in any opal miner’s language.

  Mickey wanted to keep on working the level but CJ insisted they celebrate. He wanted to see Mary again even though he could only watch her from a distance. She was too busy to indulge in a mild flirtation with him, even if she knew what a mild flirtation consisted of.

  More by luck than design CJ saw Mary walking home from St Peter and St Paul’s Catholic underground church in Hutchison Street on Sunday morning. Dressed in a light-blue cotton dress with short sleeves and a mid-calf skirt, white sandals and white netting gloves and a straw hat with a daisy chain around the brim, she looked delightful.

  Considering the straight-out approach best, CJ walked up to her and began keeping step with her strides until she turned her head sideways to look at him.

  “Hello. We haven’t been properly introduced. My name’s CJ Ambrose.”

  “Oh.” She remembered him. The man with the wonderful blue eyes. She remembered how he watched her all the time too. But so did several other men and she had become very good at ignoring their pointed stares.


  “My name’s Mary Williams,” she said politely. To do otherwise, to ignore him would have been rude. “Did you say, CJ? Just CJ?”

  He smiled at her, aware that when he did so it showed his even white teeth and the slight dimple in his cheek. “That’s right. Everyone calls me CJ.” He held out his hand. “Pleased to meet you, Mary Williams.”

  Something made her respond and she gripped his hand in return. It was firm, and warm and she could feel rough calluses on the inside of his fingers through her gloves.

  “I’ll walk you home.”

  His offer made her brown eyes sparkle. “Home is just down the street, at the back of the hotel.” It was only about thirty-five metres away from where they were standing but somehow, though she knew it wasn’t necessary, his attempt at gallantry pleased her. CJ looked like the kind of man, with his self-confidence and rugged good looks, who could have anyone. So, why did he want to be bothered with her?

  “Thank you, I’d like that,” she replied finally.

  “Do you have today off?”

  “I’m expected to help with lunch for the guests staying at the hotel, then I have the rest of the afternoon off.”

  “Perhaps you’d like a spot of afternoon tea at the cafe down the street?” CJ knew it was the only place in town, other than the hotel, which served food. Mary’s indecision was palpable. CJ could almost hear the nuns’ words of warning running through her head. Slowly, old man, don’t rush it. “Another time then,” he said, letting her off the hook. “Perhaps next Sunday would be more suitable.”

  Should she? Mother Magdalena had told her to be very careful of men. Not to trust them. That they only had one thing on their mind when it came to young women. He was nice though, she decided. Not like some other men who’d been after her, who’d pawed and whispered suggestively in her ear when Gus wasn’t watching, which he couldn’t be all the time. “Yes. Next Sunday would be fine,” Mary said with a smile.

  That was how Mary and CJ’s relationship began. CJ courted her with old worldly charm, taking her wildflowers he picked himself when the desert bloomed after a spot of rain and boxes of chocolates which he said she had to eat straightaway, before they melted. And, when he learnt that she liked to read, he plied her with books; some new, some bought second-hand, to read at night while she listened to the radio.