Excerpt from Chapter 16 ‘Broken Hill’
Deconstructing a bridge
Think big. Picture the Sydney
Harbour Bridge spanning five miles,
flexing a mile upward. Imagine it
is a solid silver-lead-zinc line of
lode in metamorphic rock with an
outcropping arch of oxidised ore.
Visualize thousands of men in soot
(visualize a boardroom with men in suits)
dismantling a mountain by sharing hands
(dismantling a mountain by handling shares)
in a time incommensurable
with the cycle it took to form.
Pecking order
At first light we gather like fledglings
outside the office of The Big Mine.
From behind the wire fence
the foreman appears, his finger
jabbing the heavy air like
a mantling cock at mating time.
“You You You You And…
you,” he says, looking me in the eye.
From somewhere in the line there’s
a shuffle of feet, then a flurry of words:
“Hey, this ain’t no ‘On the Waterfront,’ mate.”
The counter-punch is quick and final:
“And you ain’t no contender.
Now get outta here, ya bum.”
Picture postcard perfect
The camera pans the landscape
like an eye following Rasp’s finger
to the hill of mullock. Click.
Suspended above the broken back of
the outcrop, flying foxes and uplifted picks.
Pull back from the open cut,
the smokestacks, smelters and magnetic
mills to the foreground. Click.
Small and heavy sacks of ore hand-sorted,
knapped, bagged and stacked on bullock carts.
Leave the bullocks and follow the sweep
of the wooden viaduct past the waste dumps
and focus on Delprat Shaft. Click.
Underground
At the
foot of
the poppet
head to Delprat
Shaft we assemble
like lost souls and
wait for the cage to
take us underground
Four bells
I might be back in Melbourne
taking an elevator to the office
except my world has turned
upside down descending a shaft
to darkness the number of bells
tolling the depth of its destination
Truckin’ or skimpin’
“You can either work truckin’ or
skimpin’. Either pushin’ trucks of ore
from the shute to the shaft, or takin’
skimps of waste from the shaft and
fillin’ in the stopes. The pay’s the same:
8s. 4d. for an 8 hour day, 10 bob a shift
for you skilled blokes. Twenty
minutes to eat your crib. Any questions?”
I stand in the plat with the other men
blinking into the blackness. Nobody speaks.
The manager issues a warning with
the three candles and iron spider:
“If I find out any of you blokes are
sundowners and don’t know a pick from
a bloody shovel, you’ll be back on a station
in no time fuckin’ sheep for a quid a week.”
The creep
“Id’n’t tew bad wunce y’d get used
t’th’ dark. Pay’s better’n
up t’grass, and tis a ‘elluva lot cooler
‘n summer down ‘ere. An’ th’ good
thing is, y’don’ ‘ave Cap’n lookin’
orr y’sholda all th’ time.
Bein’ on tutwork means th’ more
yew d’do th’ more yew’d get”.
Five minutes past crib time, half-
listening to Pat the Cornish miner,
imagining the two of us sitting in
Trafalgar Square feeding scraps to pigeons.
“They wun’t ‘urt ‘ee, lad. ‘Tis when
y’dun’t see ‘um that y’oum gotta wurry.”
Another crust of bread hits the dust.
Another rat scurries out of the shadows.
Survival, Pat says, requires rat cunning,
your wits about you, listening for
creaking timber, the ground to speak, the creep.
Exceeding the speed limit
Pat tells the story of
the day the earth coughed.
How twenty men were
working in the South Mine
when told to leave the stope
and move to the storey below.
Walking from the tunnel and away
from danger the miners welcomed
the chance to rest and clear
their throats of dirt and fog.
When the lungs of the earth collapsed
a whoop of air went like a wave…
and lifted off their feet like feathers
nine men death-sped to the wall.
Working on a chain gang
I hold the steel,
Pat hits it with
a hammer. A quarter
turn, another blow.
And so it goes:
hammer & tap
hammer & tap
until the hole is drilled.
The face is fired,
the roof barred down,
the fallen rock popped
with a sprawler.
And so it goes:
blast & pop
blast & pop
until the ore is carted.
And so it goes:
hammer & tap
blast & pop
until the shift is over.
The big O
“No man can strike”
I wanna kill him
“a drill and sing”
but I know it
“at the same time”
wouldn’t be right
“now get to work.”
So, between the flickering
And gutter of the candle,
I can see the boss is right.
As of today there will be
no more workin’for The Mine.
Acedia
A chthonic mountain of my own making,
the fourth storey reboant with doing:
an Italian poet’s quid pro quo
for a life of indolence, a failure of love.
Leave your candle and drill,
the voice says. Take the cage to daylight,
find the Virgil to your Dante.
[...] The Barrier Range is a verse novel which tells the story one man’s journey into the interior of Australia to find his dying uncle in Broken Hill. The book draws on the exploits of 19th century explorers Charles Sturt, who discovered the Barrier Ranges (where Broken Hill is located) on his search for an inland sea, and Burke and Wills who passed near Broken Hill on their ill-fated trip through the desert to the Gulf of Carpentaria. You can read praise for The Barrier Range and read excerpts. [...]