Daily News – 19 November 1932, page 11
The Granites: A Hard Trek and a Rigorous Existence
Where Every Ounce of Gold is Earned Indeed
(By F. E. Baume, our Special Representative with the Madigan Expedition to the Granites goldfield. Written shortly after arrival at the field three weeks ago.)
‘The Madigan Geologist Expedition’ has arrived at the Granites after a five-day journey by motor truck from Alice Springs. That’s how you read of the arrival at these lonely goldfields. But you can never realise the desolation of a long Northern Territory trek, or the wonder of it, or the hardiness of the bushmen who make it possible unless you journey yourself into the heart of one of the worst deserts in the world.
TRAVELLING out from the overland telegraph line is no joke. True, it is not the ghastly business some vivid literature would have you believe. But it is a strain from beginning to end, strain when you think of your engine or your water supply, your tyres, your camping positions. For once you leave Coniston Station, owned by that fine old bushman, Randal Stafford, you are in lonely country with suspicious myall natives watching you from mulga and from stunted desert trees, fearing yet hating you as another invader who will take their precious water from drying creek, stinking soak or soupy rock hole.
Expedition truck with windlass in background – Photo SLWA
Today, of course, there is more traffic on the road than when the first camel prospectors swung out over the desert before Michael Terry had blazed the present track with his trucks not so many years ago. But all the traffic does not make the track one whit less lonely or the vast distances one inch the less.
Heat, Flies and Dust – The track from Alice Springs to the Granites is a tragedy of desolation, 380 miles of heat and flies, dust and spinifex. From Alice Springs the Madigan party followed the overland telegraph line for almost 80 miles to Ryan’s Well. On this stage the track wound over the McDonnell Ranges with their granite formations and occasional patches of shimmering white quartzite. Two wells on the way supply stock driven down from the top of the Northern Territory — Burt’s or Anthony’s, and Connor’s. At Ryan’s Well there is a link with the rest of Australia. It is a special telephone to Alice Springs which taps the overland telegraph line, and Mrs. Beale, wife of the owner of the Ryan’s Well holding, is the official postmistress and telephonist. Through her come the tales of joy and tragedy of the northern outback. A half-clothed native comes in from Coniston Station with a piece of paper, for ‘Missus,’ which might be an urgent telegram for Adelaide or an order for stores or a message about stock.
Laden Vehicle at Coniston Station 1935 – Photo SLWA
Glory in the Night – Ten or 12 miles out from Ryan’s Well — no one thinks of using a speedometer in this country — we camped for the night in a basin between rocky hills with white gums, and huge bush beauties over us. There was glory in that Northern Territory night. The silence was broken only by droning beetles and ‘hush-hushing’ cockchafers with an occasional mosquito. The mosquito is a strange gentleman. Up here one finds him in the middle of the desert, over 100 miles from water or by a running creek where one expects him to be. He bites as well in dry sand as he does by a waterhole. Out from Ryan’s Well, say 50-odd miles before Pine Hills station is reached, the rains had left their toll on the track. One bog took six hours to overcome, another two. But Simon Reiff, the Madigan driver and his assistant George Underdown, who have been prospecting the territory for almost a quarter of a century, took the bogs as they found them. They worked methodically with spades and axes, they cut down all the little gums for corduroys and they got out. Time is no object in the far northwest. So another day passed and the night’s camp was made on the bank of a creek, in which the big truck had been bogged for hours. The water was brackish but drinkable and was a pretty good experience for new chums.
‘Once you leavem Alice,’ says Simon, ‘water plenty colour like coffee, unless he crawl, you drinkem.’
A Murchison native dressed for coroboree
That was the rule. Those who persist in the idea that the bushman carefully boils his drinking water must give it up. He drinks it when and where he can get it, whether it is pure in the beautiful Woodford River, running crystal clear and silver shining, or in putrescent Brook’s Soak, where it is foul and yellow and lizards have fallen into it and died. The country did not change until after Conistan Station had been reached, the last outpost of the white man, almost 200 miles northwest of Alice Springs. The big 4 drums were filled in the Landor River, which was running after the heavy rains, but there were heavy mineral deposits in it and we were all glad when fresh water appeared at Cockatoo Creek which runs into the desert and ends, about 40 miles due west from Conistan.
The owner of Coniston, Randal Stafford, is a relic of the days in the Territory when a man’s life depended on his courage and his revolver. Several times he was threatened by natives — on one occasion they speared his bunk at his own station, believing him to be in it — he stuck to the outpost, and today his cattle are among the best in the country. Once out of Coniston the trail cuts through the natives country. We were stuck in the sand about 15 miles from Cockatoo Creek, just on the border of the spinifex country, when a boy of about 16, carrying a boomerang only, stepped out of some mulga scrub and stood, boomerang in hand, looking at the strangers. Three or four other, naked men stood off in the scrub. They did not bother about spears. No contact was made and the boy turned slowly and went back into the bush. A few miles on a bearded native, naked but for his loin rag and carrying spears, yam sticks and a boomerang, ran alongside the leading car. A few yards on another bearded myall, feathered and painted for a corroboree, stood and grinned, at his side was a very old man. They showed no violence at all.
The first desert camp was at Cockarbo Creek, where there is a delightful river flat, with gums and mulga — the last for hundreds of miles. The low scrub and spinifex had begun further back, near Mount Treachery, where there is a rock hole filled with vile water, and the green grass, almost park-like, at the creek was a welcome sight.
A Turkish Bath – Then began the last stage through the desert. On Wednesday the temperature was about 120 in the shade. The ironwork on the trucks burnt the hands. One sat in a Turkish bath from dawn to dark. Joggling and jolting over spinifex and sand the trucks became torture chambers. From a rise one looked over a huge, horizon-bounded sea of olive green. Occasionally a lizard scurried out of the way. But there was no other sign of life. It was in country similar to this that Keith Anderson and Hitchcock were lost and perished on their ill-fated search for the Southern Cross. Their sufferings must have been terrible, for even on our tracks we had to drink warm, brown water every few minutes. The evaporation is terrific, and no man can live in this desert without drinking for more than 24 hours.
Two men and a bogged truck in the mulga in the Murchison 1930 – Photo SLWA
So monotonous was the trip from this stage that we welcomed the sight of naked warriors at Ponna Ponna soak, better known as Archibald’s. They left their spears in the spinifex and enjoyed a chew of tobacco and a few sweets. They had never seen sweets, before, and until Madigan put one in his own mouth, they did not know what to do with their handful. However, they enjoyed the sweets vastly after that. That night’s camp was glorious. The temperature fell to 90 at 7 o’clock and dropped much further during the night, all of which meant sleep and relief from the ghastly heat. Then off over the desert, by McDiarmid Hill seen away to the west, past Thompson’s Rockhole, a huge granite outcrop with water 12ft deep in the cleft, sweet and only coffee brown, up to the east of the Gibbes Murray hills, and the long trek was over. The trip to the Granites is a hardship even to well-equipped parties. How much more terrible must it have been for the hard old prospectors who drove their camels till they killed them, summer or winter, to what is actually the loneliest gold mine in the world?
Every ounce of gold earned out here is earned in sweat and flies and sickness.
Let the rigors of the journey alone warn inexperienced men from attempting the desert crossing, out, far out from the overland telegraph line and civilisation. What then, is this lonely place, The Granites? What manner of men live in it, 380 miles northwest of Alice Springs, and what is their daily life? Away to the west as a traveller approaches, a low ridge of cruelly red stone rises a few feet from the open spinifex plain. Look at the map of the Northern Territory. If it is fairly modern, it will bear the words ‘Granite H’ right over the borders of Western Australia. That low, red, stony patch, with streaks of gibbers radiating from it, is the beginning of ‘The Granites,’ the loneliest goldfield in the world. Even in South Africa where distances are great the most remote field is but a stone’s throw away compared with this horrible place in a horrible desert. The first hill vanishes. A jagged ridge springs into being.
As I write it is to the right of my tent, curiously low, serrated by the fires and the elements of ages, seemingly rock piled carefully on rock by a forgotten human agency, yet fashioned by primeval force and standing as a reminder of the old, old earth. Not a plant growth appears on it, not a streak of natural relief to its granite deadness. It is the second and biggest of the Granite Hills, from which the tiny mining settlement has taken its name. Today the sky is overcast, and the Granite hill does not leer redly into the desert, its five lilliputian peaks welcoming the scorching sun. But it dominates the settlement like some evil genius, and as the day goes on and men grow restless with desert nerve strain, it seems to live and jeer and laugh at those who seek gold in its very entrails.
The Tree of Knowledge – Behind it is a camp of aborigines. A woman appears in a bright red dress, obtained from heaven knows where, to shield her figure from the inquiring gaze that in itself shows the march of civilisation. To the west the plain stretches out towards Tanami and the Schist Hills, an almost treeless sweep of sinister olive green broken by reddish patches which mean red sand and gibbers of granite and of quartzite. So runs the desert to its sandy corridor east of Wyndham and the Kimberley Ranges, where tropic trees grow lush on the Western Australian coast. To the right of the Granite Hill is a tin shanty as yet unoccupied. This is the property of his Majesty and it will house Trooper Anthony Lynch of the Mounted Police. He is not yet in occupation but is camped at the well four miles out with the Deputy Administrator of the Northern Territory, who is inspecting his outpost.
Police Party on Camels – Photo SLWA
Soon Lynch’s camels will arrive, with his two police trackers Sid and Ned, and then woe betide the myall native who presents himself with his spear and his yam sticks within ten miles of the granites. Looking out towards Lynch’s hut and breathing too deeply I have just swallowed a fly. I have been at the Granites for a day, but already I see no harm in swallowing a fly. The reason is this, the flies are the local boys of the Granites, and they get their way in any case whether they want to give you barcoo rot, dysentery or ptomaine. Because they mean business, no one here takes any notice of them. Which is Australian, typically, and quite by the way.
To the left of the police hut camp Pally O’Neill and Paddy Ryan — Black Paddy, whose claim at Bunker’s Hill was bought by the Chapman syndicate at a good figure. They arrived back only yesterday from an extended holiday at Alice Springs merely to peg out more claims forty miles southeast. They are men of the Granites temperament — the temperament which holds money as dross and a whisper of gold as manna. ‘We saw gold to the south a year ago,’ they say. And, says another: ‘The natives showed me alluvial two years ago and promised to tell me where to get it next day. But they had a big talk at night and left camp before I woke up.’ Thus men go out on camels to the dull sands southward and stagger back with a perish near. Then when they can walk again they leave again on the path to gold — and back to the campfire at the Granites.
Modern Antidote – On a little hummock bare and sandy stands the modern antidote to desert sickness and melancholy. Under a scanty bough shelter this wireless outfit, brought by the Chapman expedition from Queensland, sends and receives from 8 until half-past 9 every morning. Two poles rise 30ft. from end to end of the hummock, and between them, young David Laws speaks to Sinclair of the Government station at Wave Hill. Sinclair, by the way, is the young man who remained steadily on duty during the awful days when Anderson and Hitchcock were missing in the desert. Messages received from Laws Granites station are sent on to Queensland by Wave Hill and thence to the relatives of the handful of men still at the Granites. The wireless power is obtained from a generator attached to one of the Chapman trucks. Below that radio station is the main Chapman camp, practically the only outfit doing developmental work at present, for we are waiting now for the arrival of the Granite1 Gold party with their men from Melbourne. For the Chapman Syndicate Captain Billington, of Roma, commands his little regiment at present costeening and driving on Bunker’s Hill, the mine purchased from ‘Black Paddy’ Ryan.
The Chapman men first syndicate on the desert field after a long motor trek from Queensland, have organised themselves into a regular community. Stevo and Rufus Dawes, who share the cooking make yeast bread, plenty of stew and even jam tarts. And outside the four tents that house the expedition Blue, the Billington dog keeps such a watch that many ankles have teeth marks on them nowadays. Store Hotel Far down from the Chapman camp, to the west of Bunker’s Hill and not so far from the Madigan expedition camp, is the tin hut which is store and hotel combined. Here on a boiling afternoon or in the first cool of a prayed for evening,
beer can be bought for four shillings a bottle. It is warm, but it is beer,
and when the glasses are poised the desert does not exist for those who are searching for her treasure. Some there are even at Alice Springs, who say that a licence should not have been granted before the Granites gained the distinction of being a ‘proclaimed’ mining field. Let them come out into the desert then.
So you have the Granites. Three miles out there is the well, being worked on at present by the Government. For 40 miles or more in the gibber desert and spinifex green, wherever reddish stones force their way through the dry brilliance of the earth, poles that look like wind indicators at an aerodrome tell of claims staked out with many a sigh of hope and a prayer for the future. Such is the Granites – As night blankets down light on the desert, a stray lantern flickers once, twice, three times perhaps in different quarters. A catch of song comes from a cookhouse where dishes are being washed. Somewhere a bird calls and night insects clatter. A man laughs. And like a grim sentinel, Granite Hill turns purple and black as the sun sinks over this ‘Place of Loneliness’.
Moya Sharp
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Quite a number of prospectors used the Canning Stock Route, completed in 1910, to get to the Granites gold find.
Quite a number of prospectors used the Canning Stock Route, which was completed in 1910, to get to the Granites gold find.