‘Except that we can’t eat it,’ Pa said practically.
‘Oh, horse isn’t bad,’ Geordie told them. ‘I’ve eaten horse rather than starve.’
The next morning, when an adventurous young Davie fell out of a tree on one of their earliest stops and broke his arm, Geordie set it for him carefully and patiently.
‘I used to be a doctor,’ he said brusquely when Bart thanked him. ‘It might be helpful in the diggings.’
Back at the farm neither Kirstie nor Sam had thought that when they finally left Melbourne for Ballarat they would be part of a vast exodus of folk walking and riding to the gold fields. With two bullock-drawn drays and the horse and wagon they were among the more affluent of the travellers—although, as Kirstie commented, that wasn’t saying much. They were mostly big, heavily whiskered men, many with pistols thrust into their belts. Some were already drunk, early in the morning though it was.
Pat, indeed, always lively and curious, gave a loud squeal when they passed a scarecrow of a man driving a rackety cart pulled by a spavined horse.
‘Look, Big Sister, look, it’s the two tramps from outside The Criterion. Fancy seeing them here!’
So they were. The little red-headed one was sitting up and looking around him while the big, dark one was lying on his back, eyes closed, a bottle in his hand, dead to the world already.
Kirstie sniffed her disgust at them. ‘Hush, Pat. They might hear you.’
‘Oh, Corny and The Wreck won’t mind. They’re used to people noticing them. Corny says they get more money that way. He’s the little one.’
‘There’ll be more money for them in the diggings, perhaps,’ commented Pa. ‘And you’re not to talk to them, Pat.’
‘Oh, I don’t talk to them. Besides, only Corny talks. The Wreck never says anything. Just looks.’
‘And smells!’ sniffed Kirstie.
‘One thing, though,’ said Geordie later, ‘at least they weren’t trying to cadge a free ride.’
He, Bart and Pa had been compelled to beat off with their whips great hairy ruffians trying to climb in beside them. One bold fellow, stinking of grog, jumped up and thrust his whiskered face at Pa, demanding that he sell him a ride. Pa threw him off, and left him behind in the dirt, hurling curses after them.
Some people were pushing wheelbarrows, full of their possessions, and their little children, some not as old as Herbie, even, were walking behind them. Public houses, inns and sly grog shops, so called because they were not legally licensed, lined the road. One lean-to shed had a sign, ‘Last sly grog shop before the diggings,’ which was a lie since a few miles further along was another with an even bigger sign saying, ‘This really is the last sly grog shop before the diggings.’
Geordie, who had a dry wit which kept them entertained, suggested that ten miles after the last one they came to they ought to set up their own grog shop and make a fortune—except that someone else would be sure to build another a few hundred yards further on! He didn’t drink, though, refusing a swig from the rotgut passed round after they had eaten their grub, and he never asked to stop at a grog shop.
He soon grasped that Sam Moore and Big Sister were the driving forces of the expedition. Sam was quiet and determined and made the decisions. Big Sister did all the donkey work. She rounded up the children, kept watch over them. scolded them, and bandaged their cut knees, in between doing the many chores which came her way. It was Big Sister who washed the clothes, lit the fire, cooked the food, banged a spoon on a tin plate and shouted ‘Grub’s up’, a sound which began on the journey and which was to echo round the diggings in the months to come.
And on the road she entertained them by singing, in her small true voice, the songs which Ma had taught her to sing—their last link with long-gone England.
Kirstie knew that the diggings were going to be a man’s heaven and a woman’s hell as soon as they reached the ruined landscape which was Ballarat. The diggings were called the diggings because that was exactly what they were. There were hundreds of great deep holes, many filled with water, with soil flung up around them, and left there in heaps. Besides that, there were more people than they had ever seen before, even in Melbourne, crammed though it had been. They swarmed round the muddy holes and the canvas buildings like wasps around a honey pot.
Whatever there had once been of rural beauty before the gold rush began had long since disappeared. The settlement pullulated with life and noise, particularly noise, something which none of the party had expected, and to which none of them was accustomed—but which, like everyone else, they came to accept and ignore.
Symbolically, perhaps, the first people Kirstie saw as soon as they arrived were The Wreck and Corny lying in the muddy road where their driver had turned them out when he had found that they had little to pay him with. Somehow they had managed to beg enough to share a bottle and a pie between them, and were busy sleeping their impromptu banquet off.
Worst of all, Kirstie could plainly see that living in the diggings was going to be one long, improvised and dreadful picnic. Any hope that she might resume the orderly life she had been used to on the farm disappeared in the face of the cheerfully impromptu nature of gold-field society.
The men would love it, she thought bitterly, trust them. No need to be good-mannered, to sit down decently to eat. Male entertainment of every kind was laid on in abundance, for there was no getting away from the alleys where the grog shops, brothels, gaming halls, and bars flaunted their wares to the world.
There were even boxing booths, she discovered, and shortly after they arrived a small improvised theatre called The Palace started up—as though any palace could be constructed out of tent poles and canvas! There were few women in the diggings and Kirstie soon discovered that little was provided for them in this masculine paradise.
But exploring Ballarat was for the future. For the present it was time to settle in, to discover how to make one’s claim and work it, and how to sell the gold—if they ever found any, that was.
Unkempt men, quite unlike the husband whom Pa had promised her, their soil-encrusted clothes reeking of sweat, came over to speak to the new chums, to advise them where the stores were, who was honest and who wasn’t. They stared jealously at the drays and bullocks, at Geordie’s horse and wagon, and the equipment which the men began to unload while Geordie helped Kirstie to light a fire outside, and set up a tripod and cooking pot over it. Meals would have to be eaten in the open.
‘Really need all this, do you?’ asked one ginger-haired digger. He was pointing at the trunks and blankets Sam was lifting out. ‘Give you good money for this,’ he offered, putting a hand on a storm lamp.
Sam pushed the eager hand away. ‘Nothing to sell, mate. We need all we’ve brought for ourselves.’
‘Seems a lot to me,’ said Ginger, whose real name was George Tate. ‘If you’ve ever a mind to sell anything, I’m in the market for what you don’t want.’
The firing of a gun in the middle of removing Ginger’s sticky fingers from Kirstie’s cooking pots surprised them all. Kirstie dropped the frying pan she was holding and the younger children began to cry. Emmie Jackson, already depressed by their primitive living conditions, howled with them.
‘That’s nowt,’ said Ginger phlegmatically. ‘All digging has to stop when the gun goes off. It’s time to light the fire, eat your grub, and…’ he paused a minute to wink at the men ‘…that’s when the evening’s fun really begins.’
‘For the men, I suppose,’ returned Kirstie smartly, for only men, she thought, would want to live in this dreadful way—and enjoy it, too. No woman of sense would ever want to settle down in such dirt, confusion and mess, even to find gold.
Just to show that