|
||
|
|
||
| PAPERBACK BOOKS | ||
ABOUT THE AUTHOR Robert Whittle lives on the Gold Coast. Sunk three times in the North Atlantic Convoys, he then saw active service in the Mediterranean, Burma and Pacific theatres of war. At the end of World War 2 he was not yet 21 years of age and sailed a 20-ton ketch to the South Pacific. As a Master Mariner he traded copra, and then became a Royal Air Force Navigator, and later an administrator. First at Australia’s Commonwealth Scientific & Industrial Research Organisation and then at the Australian National University’s Research School of Physical Sciences. In recent years he has travelled overseas extensively with his second wife, Karen. PrologueNew Gold Mountain is the third novel in my saga of an Australian Colonial family. First Book One Skin for an Overlander
In 1846 Governor Sir George Gipps said, ‘The single persons who travel out on their own initiative are the real discoverers of the Country, and they may be said to be in Australia what the Backwoodsmen are in America, the Pioneers of Australia.’ When pioneering Australian overlanding cattlemen moved into the vast western plains of New South Wales during the late 1830s, the native inhabitants of New South Wales, the Aborigines, in their determination to defend their land, proved every bit as militant and heroic as the North American Indian when the American pioneers entered the western plains. This first novel, in dealing with Australia’s colonial frontier, reveals the hitherto secret history of Australia, the interaction across the racial divide. Eleven Overlanders are indicted for murder for killing tribal Aborigines in a fight for white survival against great odds. Four of them escape but seven are hanged; the first public hanging in the Colony of seven white men for killing Aborigines. The Sydney mob is enraged and calls for democracy. White cattlemen flock in from the Interior demanding the ending of governor’s rule and a republic. The English soldiery’s attempt to re-establish the governor’s authority fails, and the Overlanders decide to take even more Aboriginal lands. The tribes hit back killing white settlers, their wives and children. A frontier war erupts, Governor Gipps is recalled to England and the Overlanders’ possession of immense grasslands is established. This first novel is a story of love and determination…Finbar Warre is New South Wales’ foremost overlanding scout. He has blazed a trail to the never-ending western grasslands and encountered the fierce Karakara warriors. Coolethe, a Karakara girl, captivates Finbar…Biraban the Karakara fight-leader swears never to let the white land-thieves come into his country. War erupts between black and white. Caroline a white well-to-do girl from Sydney Town sets out for the frontier determined to make Finbar her husband despite the incredible obstacles in her path. The title of this first novel One Skin for an Overlander ...refers to the plan of my overlanding Colonial hero that through marriage to an Aboriginal girl he could become “one-skin” with her tribe and that they would accept him, and permit him to bring his herds of horned cattle onto their lands.
Firewood of the Gods This second novel in my Colonial saga is set in Australia’s second frontier; the Pacific Islands during the late 1840s, a world ruled by BETRAYAL, GREED, LUST and REVENGE; a time of abduction, slavery, and where murder by poisoning is still readily accepted as suicide in the Colony. The genesis of this tale is when Captain Richard Warre steals an ancient Spanish chart of King Solomon’s Mine, the chart depicting the Solomon Islands and what is possibly the Queen of Sheba’s Gold of Ophir and the Sandalwood Tree…the firewood of the gods…worth its weight in gold bullion by the Buddhists of China for offerings in their temples. The subsequent impact of this booty in Colonial Australia, climaxes with the interplay of all those base human emotions in a time that offered no mercy. Meanwhile, in the Colony Dymphna Warre is kidnapped by bushrangers, and is immediately impressed by his horsemanship and bushcraft. Over the many weeks of her captivity she finds herself seriously attracted by the leader of the bushrangers, and learns of a magistrate’s dealing with her abductors. Her brother Finbar organizes her release and on Dymphna’s return to Sydney Town she connives with the magistrate’s wife to murder him in a way that is undetectable. The inquest returns a verdict of suicide.
Foreword
February 1851, west of Sydney Town, in the harsh Australian bush, a small boy finds an eleven-ounce nugget lying amongst the pebbles of a creek, triggering an avalanche of events that comes close to destroying the social order of the new Colony. That a thing in itself so rich, so capable of immediately producing all that men can desire… should lie buried in the ground beneath their feet…loose amongst the worthless pebbles of a creek, raised such a fury in the minds of men that they began saying ‘It is our turn to be masters now, and you masters will be our servants yet.’ Within days…risk what it may…every citizen of Sydney who wanted to make a new start began packing his bags.
The white settlers of the Colony of New South Wales firmly believed that the Bible imposed on them to …‘Go forth and subdue the earth. Make the earth productive so that all mankind may enjoy its fruits’, and the days when the Aboriginal tribes could wander over the land hunting the kangaroo and the emus were doomed.
Colonial ship-owners had long wanted to build a deep-water port on the Arafura Sea and so radically reduce the time it took for their cargoes to reach the markets in India and China. The quickest method was a road across the continent. They must discover whether the Interior was a desert of shifting sands. Was there an inland sea, or the immense lake of Aboriginal folklore?
Sir Joseph Banks who accompanied Captain James Cook on the Endeavour, had claimed ‘It is impossible to conceive that such a body of land, as large as all Europe, does not produce vast rivers, capable of being navigated into the heart of the Interior.’ The brilliant young navigator, Mathew Flinders, had speculated that Australia ‘might be composed of two or more islands.’ Surveyor-General Sir Thomas Mitchell, had discovered, up near the Tropic of Capricorn, ‘the finest and most extensive pastoral regions I have ever seen, with a new river running north-easterly to the remotest verge of the horizon.’ Ludwig Leichhardt led an expedition from Brisbane to Port Essington on the Arafura Sea, but he took the long way round, avoiding the Interior. Academics claimed that, ‘Australia, as large as all Europe, must have large rivers in the heart of the Interior, one that will become her main artery as the Nile is for Africa.’
For the nation’s overlanding cattlemen, wise in the way of the bush, the vast Interior was no more than a great blank on the map…‘There is nothing in which an opinion might be found of its nature,’ and in their own way continued to unlock the door, dispossessing the native Aborigines of their customary lands as they pushed further and further from the settled districts. The Colonial ship-owners decided that a small group of well-equipped bush-riders with trail-breaking experience should be put ashore on the Arafura coast with instructions to take the shortest route to Sydney.
From the beginning of settlement convicts working as shepherds or labouring on the roads had found up gold nuggets lying on the ground, but such discoveries were not welcome in a penal settlement and the finders were silenced. When in 1839 Count Paul Edmund de Strzelecki gave it as his considered opinion that Australia was auriferous Governor Sir George Gipps told him to ‘Put it away or we shall all have our throats cut,’ but Strzelecki talked to others as well. It was not the want of a gold find but the strength of the squatting interest, together with the high convict population of New South Wales that had quashed any chance of a gold rush. In 1850, ten years after transportation to NSW had ceased, the wealthy squattocracy and the Botany Bay Tories still wielded their power and Governor FitzRoy told the Legislature that a gold discovery would ‘agitate the public mind and divert the labouring classes from their proper and more certain avocations.’
But this influential elite lost their power when, on 12th February 1851, wearing a well-brushed top hat and dress coat for the occasion, Edward Hargreaves, announced that he had discovered gold in one of the sweetest little valleys in New South Wales. Then, when the boy found an eleven-ounce nugget of gold beneath his feet… GOLD the treasure of all treasures that is dealt out in tiny morsels as the recognized reward of the sweat of many hours…the “Yellow Sorceress” took such possession of the heart and brain that within a fortnight six hundred men were on the Lewis Pond Creek, and hundreds more at Summer Hill Creek, and outward bound passengers at Circular Quay walked back down the gangway, forfeiting their passage money… and the crews of American whale ships deserting to join the rush were swiftly followed by the crew of every sailing vessel in the harbour. A detachment of mounted police dispatched to comb the straggling line of gold-seekers for deserting sailors, spurred on by rewards offered by ship’s captains, were themselves filled with both hope and avarice, and joined the seventy kilted Scots with bagpipes skirling leading men pushing their belongings in wheelbarrows, with children harnessed back and front and wife walking behind with another child on her back. The haughty swells of Sydney’s elite galloped through this crowd with ‘bright spurs, kid gloves, and opera ties, and smelling sweet in hair oil and eau de Cologne.’
Hardly a person was properly equipped for prospecting. Some thought that gold went by the greenness of the turf. Others favoured searching under stones, the bigger the better, and heaved rocks all day long. Many stood all day up to the waist in water panning for gold with their saucepans and hats. Soon the winter rains began and the discomforts of the diggings intensified. Diggers were cursing their luck and ready to give up when there came news of an amazing strike on Dr Kerr’s cattle station where an aboriginal shepherd cracked open a quartz rock with his tomahawk and discovered a nugget with gold weighing 106 pounds, the largest nugget in the world. Soon Cricket Clubs closed down, Town Bands disappeared, Temperance Meetings discontinued, and even the Birthday Ball for Queen Victoria was abandoned.
Aborigines, in Rolf Boldrewood’s, description were ‘grandly-formed specimens of humanity, dignified in manner, and possessing an intelligence by no means to be despised.’ Charles Darwin admired the Aborigines’ manual dexterity, writing that they were far from being such ‘utterly degraded beings’ as they were usually represented. ‘The varieties of man seem to act on each other in the same way as different species of animals – the stronger always extirpating the weaker.’ The gold-rush chased them from the country where they hunted the kangaroo and the emus. ‘Go away, whitefella. Leave us alone,’ some said. When this plea was ignored, they attacked lonely homesteads, and they in their turn were set upon. Chinese labourers had been brought to the Colony long before the gold-rush began. Indentured to employers as cheap labour for a fixed number of years with no provision for repatriation to China, when news of the gold strikes reached them many simply absconded and never returned. But when the Chinese showed up on the gold fields their industry, their frugal habit of life and their unwillingness to take any part in the community, all offended the diggers. When one of these immigrants struck it rich he wrote excitedly to his brother in Canton to emigrate to this Hsin Chin Shan, a great country where kind Englishmen allowed foreigners to come, dig, and take away the wealth without hindrance. Thousands of Chinese clamoured for passages from every port on the South China Sea. The merchant navies of the world were glad to cram them into their ships and soon one in every nine diggers was a Chinaman. Though the white diggers accused them of wasting precious water they were often glad to call on the services of Chinese doctors where their own physicians had failed. But when white women who could not get jobs were glad to find Chinese ‘protectors’ the massacre of ‘the Chinese hordes’ by white miners erupted. The Gold rush transformed Australia from a mere sheep walk tended by nomadic burglars to a land that was to experience the greatest mass movement of human beings from every corner of the earth since the Crusades to the Holy Land. Chapter 1As shafts of early morning sunlight pierced the clouds above the mountains, Caroline Warre, watching her saddle-horses drinking the clear water of the creek, noticed that specks of gold glistened in the mud on her Blucher boots. Caroline climbed back up the steep bank to get a better view into the water of the creek and saw glints of gold where her horse’s hooves had scooped out big holes in the mud. She jumped down from the bank and pulled her way through the clinging, stinking mud. ‘Oh! My dear Lord,’ Caroline whispered as she picked up a few of the golden peas. ‘It really is gold.’ ‘Our own goldfield,’ she told herself, although still not really believing the evidence of her own eyes. ‘We’re rich,’ and Caroline knew that she had discovered a hedge against her family’s strange poverty. ‘Our troubles are over,’ she told herself. ‘Over…over.’ The treasure that was sweetest to the heart of man had Caroline in a madness of greed as she went down on her knees and dug into the mud with her bare hands. ‘Mama.’ The warning cry from six-year-old Evan made the ever-wary Caroline pull herself back up through the mud. She raised her head above the top of the river bank and looked to where Mooala, her house-lubra, was holding Evan’s hand. ‘Mama,’ her young son said, pointing towards the forest. Half concealed amongst the early morning shadows of the mountain gums was a handful of Aborigines armed with long spears, bark shields, and waddies. As Caroline climbed over the bank a stark-naked, powerful looking, bearded blackfella with hair tossed up on top of his head walked into the open, his body painted with bars of red ochre. Never taking her eyes from the Aboriginal warrior, Caroline slowly walked towards Mooala and young Evan where her carbine and ball-shot bandolier were ready inside the tent. ‘No worry, Missus,’ Mooala said in a voice tinged with awe. ‘This Myall, ‘im ‘e Ghipuggerah.’ Recognising Big Ghippy from her husband, Finbar’s description, Caroline sent a silent prayer to Heaven that she hadn’t brought Emma and Charlotte, her young daughters, out with her. ‘Go away, whitefella,’ Ghipuggerah snarled in the local Aboriginal dialect that Caroline understood well. She had no fear of Myalls, the wild Aborigines of the Interior of New South Wales. When she had arrived in the district her husband-to-be, Finbar Warre, was fighting a native war against the full might of the Karakara. Caroline fought alongside Finbar and his stock riders until the Karakara were dispersed. This was the first time Caroline had seen this small mob and she was alert for treachery. ‘This is not your country anymore,’ Caroline said fiercely, making sure she kept any disdain from her voice. ‘You have chased us from the country where we hunted the kangaroo and the emus,’ Big Ghippy said. ‘Now you come to our mountains. Go away, whitefella. Leave us alone.’ At one time, Caroline would have agreed with this blackfella that the best thing white settlers could do for the blacks was to leave them and their vast country alone. Some squatters, when faced with fierce Aboriginal attacks, had backed away. But that was long in the past. The whites only had the one chance. They could remain in the wilderness only as long as they could hold it against all-comers. Finbar’s best breeding cattle, kept apart from the fattening bullocks on the grasslands, used the rough country of these mountains and there was no way Caroline would be intimidated by a blackfellow, even if he had a few warriors with him. ‘The days are long gone when you can just wander over the land doing nothing useful,’ Caroline said, facing the tall warrior. As a devout Christian, she truly believed that the Bible had told the white man to... “Go forth and subdue the earth. Make the earth productive so that all mankind may enjoy its fruits”. These few selfish black men did no more than hunt the kangaroo and emu – nothing that was at all useful to mankind as a whole. Big Ghippy had not expected this whitefella-lubra to do as he demanded. He could easily have killed her but he knew that when a blackfella killed a white, other whites would come on their horses and kill a whole tribe in retribution, even the old people and the children. ‘Maybe you don’t want me,’ Caroline said, ‘but you speak only for your own mob. You don’t speak for the station-blacks. They can’t do without us whitefellas.’ Big Ghippy, his black eyes filled with savage loathing, glared at Caroline, as ignoring him, she slid down the steep bank to catch the horses, thinking all the while how much she missed her husband at times like this. Finbar and Caroline owned tens of millions of acres of valuable land, but after thirty-seven consecutive months of drought that had not yet run its course, there was a serious lack of the means to meet the running costs. Other cattlemen in this remote district had taken their bullocks on the road, but finding no water or feed, every head had perished. Finbar and Caroline Warre had taken a battering but, being financed for the moment by Finbar’s parents in Sydney Town, they were able to pay the stockriders and children’s Governess with cash money and maintain credit with the storekeepers in Bathurst, the nearest town over one hundred miles away. Caroline’s mind returned to two months previous when a few bush-rider friends had arrived from distant cattle stations. The message sent down the cattle trails was that the get-together was to plan for access to limitless grazing lands beyond the reach of neighbours and the Colonial Government’s Inspectors of Land Tax. Caroline was party to the secret from the word go. An expedition financed by Finbar’s father, Alexander Warre, the wealthiest man in the Colony of New South Wales, planned to unlock the door of the vast continent. Alexander Warre believed that the time had come to make the great push. The Interior he said was a great blank. ‘There is nothing,’ Alexander said, ‘in which an opinion might be found of its nature’. Click on the cart below to purchase this book: |
||||||||||||
| All
Prices in Australian Dollars CURRENCY
CONVERTER
(c)2008 Zeus Publications All rights reserved. |
