GRIPPING HOLIDAY READING

GET RICH QUICK

Spinifex lets rip with another tale of misses,
fortunes and misfortunes.

He slumped miserably across our cracked laminex table, the setting just a few days before for merry Christmas hats and jolly party crackers that you pulled to make loud bangs and that gave you happy messages of joy and contentment, of peace on earth and goodwill to all men. Messages of brightness and prospects and a rich and fulfilling future. His chin was jammed dejectedly in his hands, his face a picture of wretchedness. No millennium joy for him, no gay young blade here stepping confidently into a new century-Boof was in a slough of despond and there was nothing I could do to help him, nothing at all. Because I felt even worse, devastated by welt schmerz and angst and a failing malady of loss sure to see me shuttle off this mortal coil.
"I feel about as popular as a bastard on Father's Day!" he blurted out, tears creasing his once plump cheeks, hollowed now into ravines of sadness. He'd just received an e-mail from his long-term cyber-bunny saying that he was a cheap and miserable cad for not sending her a suitable Christmas present to demonstrate his true and unfailing love (she mentioned a Cartier diamond watch or a black Ferrarri as being about up to speed) and as far as she was concerned, the generous gentleman from Taiwan (the words oozed unctuously from the screen) was far more deserving of her affections and she had no desire to dirty-chatroom-talk with him again. So sign off, loser!
And as for me, well my new-found love, Miss Kitty, of the lithesome, lubricious long black-stockinged legs had run off and left me, taking instead to her heart a retired marine biologist now selling, at huge profit, sections of the Great Barrier Reef to Japanese entrepeneurs to establish dubious whale-harvesting farms. Was nothing sacred, were no values left as we charged into a new century?
"Then there's nothing left for it," he cried, slamming a white-knuckled fist into a chubby palm. "Witness the grand transmogrification" (where did he get that word from I wondered abstractedly?) "Observe the great phoenix of fortune rise from the ashes of poverty!" (and chastity now as well? I wondered vaguely) "I am going to sell out and become that most contemptible of creatures, a stove-pipe hatted capitalist!" Eyes rolling in expectation of impending immensities of wealth, he panted and cried "We gunna get rich quick!"
Now, just how I came to be involved in his little mercenary scheme, just like that, wasn't entirely certain, but what the hell, anything was better than this current petty little existence. Why not exploit a few peasants and peons, rip off a bit of the Third World, burn down a rainforest to grow a few miserable methane farting cows for scabby hamburger meat, maybe even rip off the wallowingly rich upper-middle class in Australia, their trotters sunk deep in the trough of greed? Nothing like a broken heart to strip away a lifetime of standards and values and the good old high moral ground.
"We'll form a grunge thrash band from, of all places, here, and we'll thrill young audiences who'll crowd the mosh pit and dance until they drop and buy our albums on the internet at inflated prices and we'll call ourselves thruSH or LEProsy or something clever like that but our songs will be about pioneering Tennant Creek days only you won't be able to tell because like all modern tasteless rubbish grunge thrash music you won't be able to understand it anyway and..."
All out of breath he paused. Deflation time.
"You broke the strings on your baby banjo three nights ago. Remember?"
Said as gently as a doctor could deliver a death sentence. But there was no Canute to stem this tide. Ideas ran rampant around inside his empty head, colliding willy-nilly with one another and unreality.
"Then we'll run tours for callow tourists and foreigners out onto the old minefield and show them where the gold really came from in the good old days. We'll wear hardhats and take them down some of the old mines, abseiling down shafts with them perched happily on our backs, yodelling merrily as we descend and find flecks of the beautiful ore that drew us all here!" Excitedly he pumped out a project for profit.
"Idiot." Not hard-said, just a despondent recognition of imminent failure. "That fellow, what's his name, Ted, Fred, Gormie, Henry, I can't remember, you know the one with the ears that stick out and the quick wit, he's got the lawn grub painted on the side of his mini-bus, he's got that tied up already and anyway he goes down to the Marbles too. Got a monopoly on all of that trade."
"I've got it then!" he cried, not to be outdone. "A road-trip like we used to do when we were young and free. But this time it's different.
We'll call it 'Piss-Up Tours'. We pick up filthy rich Japs and Yanks and Ockers and all the rest. We pick 'em up in the Alice and drive 'em up here in a flash car full of eskies with fine beers and wines and spirits and we drive real fast up to the Creek and give 'em some pate and salmon and things on the way". His eyes were glazing over, face shining at the prospect of prosperity. "Drive 'em up real fast, fill 'em up with piss, tell all sorts of bullshit stories about the ruggedeering pioneering Territorian and charge so much much money they won't be able to catch their breath for a week! Show them Native Gap and Prowse Gap and that lovely land around Aileron and then Central Mount Stuart and let them marvel at all the beaut Barrow Creek mesas and the rest of the grouse road trip scenery! And they'll love it!"
"Where's the stretch limo coming from, idiot? And anyway, you lost your licence. Remember?"I enquired gently. # I couldn't be cruel and I'm glad I wasn't because his face deflated and he saw the prospect of the bailiff and a long stretch in Debtor's Prison looming closer and closer.
"Then go and dig the gold!" came an officious and stuffy roar of a voice. "It's there for all you poor, wretched impoverisheds! That way and that way only will bring you riches greater than your wildest dreams!"
"Professor, oh Professor, it's you!" Boof fell into a position of servile submission, almost to the extent of rolling onto his back and baring his throat. "You're back! We thought you'd fallen down a shaft and broken a leg at best or been killed at worst and that chap from Normandy, what's his name, oh well doesn't matter, would have to save you and we didn't know where to look for you so we didn't really try when you went missing but we were really worried but...oh golly, it's good you're back!" I reached for his Serapax-and thought about giving him an unnecessary but vengeful forced enema just to divert his mind for a while.
"Yes", the Professor trumpeted triumphantly. "I've found it and it's richer on the surface than the Rising Sun or the Pinnacles or the Black Princess or any of the other early prospects that delivered stunning wealth to disbelieving leaseholders. I have crushed up devilishly hard ironstone in my trusty dollypot and taken many looms, finding all of them to be more than satisfying-so much so in fact," he paused dramatically and swung around revealing a shabby plastic bag stuffed full of happily chinking bottles, "that I decided to celebrate my great good fortune with you!" At the same time he spilled an innocuous handfull of ironstone lumps onto the already littered table.
Now, poverty is a great leveller but neither Boof nor I had had any inclination to draw upon the old swaggies' concoction of metho and bootpolish of the depression years-the old Diamantina Cocktail-to satisfy our raging thirsts. We'd been a while without a drink and we were thirsty, so we fell with considerable energy to drawing corks from bottles with satisying 'plonks' and rejoicing at the throaty gurgle that filled our expectant glasses. We badly needed that drink.
"There were many of the old shows that were first revealed by an unmistakable colour on the surface," he intoned. We already knew, but the courtsey of the cork maintained our silence and he went pedantically on, strutting and striding along Boof's minefield-relic-littered verandah like a fluffy bantam. We followed with our eyes, clutching all the while our giant tumblers full of ruby-red rapture.
"Obviously," he lectured us, "the Rising Sun group is the best example.
Kevin Weaber states that when first discovered, one could see flecks of gold as big as match heads liberally sprinkled through the ironstone chunks which were literally scattered across the surface of the ground.
It was, he said, so prominent as to resemble the rising sun itself, hence the name for that venerable mine." He drew breath and I jumped quickly in.
"And yet the Rising Sun itself was never a spectacular producer!"
"Fool, fool!" He roared at me and I immediately remembered the true story and realised my knee-trembling error, remembering that in fact the Rising Sun had done pretty well, producing some fourteen thousand ounces of fine gold over the years.
"A crushing of selected ore at Peterborough, South Australia, in 1934 saw 315 ozs returned from 55 tons. This was valued at around 2,530 pounds then-around a hundred thousand lovely smackaroonies these days." His love of figures and statistics was well-known and his memory was as long as an elephant's. "Ore treated averaged 5 ozs 15 dwt per ton. In 1935 Mr Weaber employed a number of men on wages and sunk a shaft on each of his leases-the Rising Sun had a return of 522 ozs from 402 tons. This crushing was carried out at both Fazal Deen's and Schmidt's batteries. It continued as a lucrative find in 1936 when large returns eventuated-1,331 tons saw 1,694 ozs of gold valued at 14,370 pounds returned to Messers Weaber and Noble. And today that little treasure would be worth about one half of a million dollars!" He was on a roll and facts and figures drizzled from his tongue, for me cheap dressing on a bitter salad.
"Bill Weaber, Owen Weaber and Cosmo Gregg operated their own battery at the mine successfully in 1938 when 2,600 ozs were won from the brutally hard ironstone. Schmidt of Central Milling also crushed ore for gold from the Rising Sun that year (80 ozs from 140 tons) and the product from the mine was further assisted by the Rising Sun cyanide plant which had an output of some 280 ozs. Again, the richness continued in 1939 when around 2,000 ozs were gained by amalgamation and cyanide treatment."
Though red in the face and becoming quite puffed, he would have gone on forever so when he paused for breath I interrupted.
"The Blue Moon also showed well on the surface..." I started and he cut in pompously. "The Wards got rich on it, from that little initial show of dull-ochre colour. Fourteen thousand two hundred and thirty nine ounces of the lovely shiny stuff eventually. And they bought Banka Banka station from the profits, paying out some nineteen thousand pounds for the property.
Just another example of Tennant Creek gold subsidising other business enterprises in the Centre."
Not so silly, Boof clapped his hands and called for the story, heading at the same time for the Bin 707 and conquering its cork as the Professor droned on, lost in a world of figures, hopefully betokening future success to his new find.
"On the 28th of April 1935, 17.5 tons of ore from the Blue Moon were crushed at Fazal Deen's Battery. The owners, the Wards and Stuart McIntyre received 36.15 ozs of gold for their pains. The following year saw a recording of 68.5 tons crushed for a return of 56.35 ozs valued at 464.9 pounds. 1938 saw saw 61.25 tons crushed for 67.92 ozs. Blue Moon's fabulous reputation becomes obvious from the mine warden's 1940 records; approximately 6100 ozs of gold were gained from 1000 tons of high grade ore." He himself gasped and drew breath at the brilliance of this haul. "He reported this ore pod was found in an incline shaft only 30' from the surface. He further reported that the limits of the hard hematite ore body hadn't yet been exposed."
And as we all knew, there was sufficient colour on the surface when it was first stumbled upon, out there on the eastern fringes of the goldfield, to excite even the greenest of miners. And lots of them in those early days were really green when it came to finding gold around Tennant Creek. They might've been able to find it in the gold laden quartz-fields in other parts of Australia, but here, where it was trapped in the ironstone, well it often enough was just hit and miss.
And the biggest mugs could stumble across it just as likely as someone who really did know their way around. Witness the Professor's purported success. We'd see about this new-found colour, I thought grimly as I dug into my own memory banks for facts to counter his rant and put him into his place.
"Well then, what about Red Ned, the Southern Cross, I.M.O.-all of them up there on Mount Samuel and they all showed great surface colour and there was nothing from them really, nothing at all!" And it was true.
Bob Ridley, 1934, showing splendid values from costeans initially and produced nothing. It became a name and nothing more. And Red Ned? Red Ned was going to be a winner of a mine, it showed good values in costeans in 1934 and the syndicate chose to crush at Schmidt's battery and won 47 ozs from 92 tons of ore. There were a reasonable return in 1937, with middle-of-the-year returns producing 231 ozs from 160 tons crushed. The returns were not nearly as good the following year when 58 ozs were the product of 112 tons crushed. Eventually, over all the years, they got 360 ozs from 386 tons. Piddling amount of gold for all the so-called promise!
And the I.M.O. might just as well be a name on a map with a lease number and nothing else because it produced not a bit after showing good surface colour. And then there was the Black Princess, about 23 miles west from the Old Telegraph Station, where a shaft was sunk to a depth of about 60' in a lode formation which on the surface was about 120' wide. A cross cut from the bottom of the shaft was put in but it was reported that the promising values found on the surface did not exist at the shaft bottom. A complete waste of time!
The Southern Cross produced 298 ounces, hardly worth the effort, I scoffed, and then what about the redoubtable Peter Pan, the centre of a frenzied rush to peg leases in 1933, returned a trifling eighty two ounces.
"They all showed surface colour. Bah! So much for your rich surface colour that's going to make us dig until our hands are blistered washrags!" The Professor squirmed and glared at me, death daggers winking behind his grubby pinz nez glasses.
"Alright then" he snapped, "the Southern Cross-about three hundred dollars an ounce, two hundred and ninety eight ounces-ninety thousand dollars or so? Trifling indeed?" Everything in his current state of mind had to be a success so, despite the fine lubricants so generously provided, there were some realities of the old mining days that had to come out.
"O.K., O.K.. The colour on the surface sometimes indicated some excellent prospects but cop this. These are details about old mines, the ones mainly picked at by the old pioneers. Listen to these figures." The Professor didn't want to but he had no choice. I read the details from a prepared list.
"Rio Grande-18 ozs from 51 tons; The Nipples-23 ozs from 113 tons; Tasman-21 ozs from 57 tons; Rosebud-2 ozs from 20 tons; Rosemary-97 ozs from 178 tons; Wizard-15 ozs from 10 tons; Valhalla-15 ozs from 12 tons; Two Chances-4 ozs from 11 tons; The Plank-11 ozs from 4 tons; Destiny Star-6 ozs from 25 tons; Bobbie Burns-6 ozs from 12 tons. What about that, then. They found the little pod, exploited it and then-nothing!"
He knew what was coming next and slipped in quickly. "Ah, so what, you moron. So they were small shows, all of them, they gave up some gold and that's better than a kick in the arse, which is exactly what you two have got at the moment Try this list on for size if you reckon there was a bit of disappointment around-none of these produced a thing, not a brass razoo, to all accounts." And he seriously intoned a list, not from a piece of paper like me but rather from his formidable memory:
"Woggaridgee, not successful; The Falcon, no mention in any of the available records, although its existence is noted in different references; Lone Hand, Spotted Wonder, Spotted Dawg, Dingo-all unrecorded returns; Golden Dingo, unrecorded, no known workings; West, Hidden Treasure-unrecorded; Troy, unrecorded, prospect, no mine; Black Sheep, unrecorded; The Hawk, unrecorded, no mine workings; Katherine Star unrecorded; Kestral, unrecorded, no mine workings; Little Tramp, unrecorded, some mine workings; New Blood, survey and prospect only; Marathon, prospect only."
"And there's more," Boof added seriously, nodding his big woolly head. The idiot finished the last of the claret in one tremendous slurp. Some of it dribbled unattractively down his chin from the corner of his mouth. Wastrel! I thought bitterly. "Look at the mine lease map of 1937 and there are heaps of names on leases that never, ever appear again anywhere in the records!" A child, a child, I despaired, casually fingering the small pile of ironstone that the Professor had dropped onto the table what seemed like hours before.
"Saaaay, these are very promising," I burst out, tumbling the jet black stones almost honeycombed with yellow through my excited fingers. "Where, where? Out with it, you fool. We're onto a fortune here.
Quick man!" and I grabbed the Professor by his dirty workshirt and lifted him fully from the ground. His feet feebly scrabbled after the security of the floor but these were desperate times. I held him high.
"Well, it was the third day out and...no, wait, was it the fourth day out, and if it was that means it was out around the...but no, I think, I hope, I mean I know it was near to ... because that was the day I had to have a little drink because I missed you fellows so much and I was alone and lonely and I went for a walk," more like a stumble I furiously thought, this was getting bad, "and it was really hard climbing and I just stumbled across it just lying around in great piles and I left most of it there to surprise you both and then I stumbled away because it was getting dark and I had a little sleep and when I woke up I wandered in the wilderness for ever so long and I seem to remember a bush bursting into flames and talking to me and lecturing me about greed and, and, well..." His face had assumed a panicky look and he quickly glanced at both Boof and me, nervous and bewildered. "Well, the upshot of it is, I just don't know, I can't be sure, it could, well it could be anywhere really" he weakly concluded as he waved a thin arm vaguely in an easterly direction.
Snarling, I hurled them both into the executive car and roared off down to the pub, an unslaked thirst rapidly turning into drought conditions by the thought of the lost prospect. I was broke but not that broke and I needed the company of the odd old prospector or gouger who got down there from time to time. Pulling up at the front, I reflected on the sobering fact that Boof had done it to me before, found a promising prospect* and lost it, and now the bloody Professor had compounded that stupidity by his own little culpability.
"Stay here, you pair of disgusting old coprolites and think hard, try very hard to remember just where our fortune lies!" I locked the car on them and clammering desperately they pressed their pathetic faces and hands against the vehicle's window and began crying. They knew I was serious.
"I'll be back in a while."

* Editor's note: 'Old Gold' by Spinifex, Barkly News Pictorial #3, May 1998.
# Editor's note: 'You'll Never Catch Me Alive, Copper! ' by Spinifex, Barkly News Pictorial #12, July/August 1999.

GET RICH QUICK Spinifex lets rip with another tale of misses, fortunes and misfortunes. He slumped miserably across our cracked laminex table, the setting just a few days before for merry Christmas hats and jolly party crackers that you pulled to make loud bangs and that gave you happy messages of joy and contentment, of peace on earth and goodwill to all men. Messages of brightness and prospects and a rich and fulfilling future. His chin was jammed dejectedly in his hands, his face a picture of wretchedness. No millennium joy for him, no gay young blade here stepping confidently into a new century-Boof was in a slough of despond and there was nothing I could do to help him, nothing at all. Because I felt even worse, devastated by welt schmerz and angst and a failing malady of loss sure to see me shuttle off this mortal coil. "I feel about as popular as a bastard on Father's Day!" he blurted out, tears creasing his once plump cheeks, hollowed now into ravines of sadness. He'd just received an e-mail from his long-term cyber-bunny saying that he was a cheap and miserable cad for not sending her a suitable Christmas present to demonstrate his true and unfailing love (she mentioned a Cartier diamond watch or a black Ferrarri as being about up to speed) and as far as she was concerned, the generous gentleman from Taiwan (the words oozed unctuously from the screen) was far more deserving of her affections and she had no desire to dirty-chatroom-talk with him again. So sign off, loser! And as for me, well my new-found love, Miss Kitty, of the lithesome, lubricious long black-stockinged legs had run off and left me, taking instead to her heart a retired marine biologist now selling, at huge profit, sections of the Great Barrier Reef to Japanese entrepeneurs to establish dubious whale-harvesting farms. Was nothing sacred, were no values left as we charged into a new century? "Then there's nothing left for it," he cried, slamming a white-knuckled fist into a chubby palm. "Witness the grand transmogrification" (where did he get that word from I wondered abstractedly?) "Observe the great phoenix of fortune rise from the ashes of poverty!" (and chastity now as well? I wondered vaguely) "I am going to sell out and become that most contemptible of creatures, a stove-pipe hatted capitalist!" Eyes rolling in expectation of impending immensities of wealth, he panted and cried "We gunna get rich quick!" Now, just how I came to be involved in his little mercenary scheme, just like that, wasn't entirely certain, but what the hell, anything was better than this current petty little existence. Why not exploit a few peasants and peons, rip off a bit of the Third World, burn down a rainforest to grow a few miserable methane farting cows for scabby hamburger meat, maybe even rip off the wallowingly rich upper-middle class in Australia, their trotters sunk deep in the trough of greed? Nothing like a broken heart to strip away a lifetime of standards and values and the good old high moral ground. "We'll form a grunge thrash band from, of all places, here, and we'll thrill young audiences who'll crowd the mosh pit and dance until they drop and buy our albums on the internet at inflated prices and we'll call ourselves thruSH or LEProsy or something clever like that but our songs will be about pioneering Tennant Creek days only you won't be able to tell because like all modern tasteless rubbish grunge thrash music you won't be able to understand it anyway and..." All out of breath he paused. Deflation time. "You broke the strings on your baby banjo three nights ago. Remember?" Said as gently as a doctor could deliver a death sentence. But there was no Canute to stem this tide. Ideas ran rampant around inside his empty head, colliding willy-nilly with one another and unreality. "Then we'll run tours for callow tourists and foreigners out onto the old minefield and show them where the gold really came from in the good old days. We'll wear hardhats and take them down some of the old mines, abseiling down shafts with them perched happily on our backs, yodelling merrily as we descend and find flecks of the beautiful ore that drew us all here!" Excitedly he pumped out a project for profit. "Idiot." Not hard-said, just a despondent recognition of imminent failure. "That fellow, what's his name, Ted, Fred, Gormie, Henry, I can't remember, you know the one with the ears that stick out and the quick wit, he's got the lawn grub painted on the side of his mini-bus, he's got that tied up already and anyway he goes down to the Marbles too. Got a monopoly on all of that trade." "I've got it then!" he cried, not to be outdone. "A road-trip like we used to do when we were young and free. But this time it's different. We'll call it 'Piss-Up Tours'. We pick up filthy rich Japs and Yanks and Ockers and all the rest. We pick 'em up in the Alice and drive 'em up here in a flash car full of eskies with fine beers and wines and spirits and we drive real fast up to the Creek and give 'em some pate and salmon and things on the way". His eyes were glazing over, face shining at the prospect of prosperity. "Drive 'em up real fast, fill 'em up with piss, tell all sorts of bullshit stories about the ruggedeering pioneering Territorian and charge so much much money they won't be able to catch their breath for a week! Show them Native Gap and Prowse Gap and that lovely land around Aileron and then Central Mount Stuart and let them marvel at all the beaut Barrow Creek mesas and the rest of the grouse road trip scenery! And they'll love it!" "Where's the stretch limo coming from, idiot? And anyway, you lost your licence. Remember?"I enquired gently. # I couldn't be cruel and I'm glad I wasn't because his face deflated and he saw the prospect of the bailiff and a long stretch in Debtor's Prison looming closer and closer. "Then go and dig the gold!" came an officious and stuffy roar of a voice. "It's there for all you poor, wretched impoverisheds! That way and that way only will bring you riches greater than your wildest dreams!" "Professor, oh Professor, it's you!" Boof fell into a position of servile submission, almost to the extent of rolling onto his back and baring his throat. "You're back! We thought you'd fallen down a shaft and broken a leg at best or been killed at worst and that chap from Normandy, what's his name, oh well doesn't matter, would have to save you and we didn't know where to look for you so we didn't really try when you went missing but we were really worried but...oh golly, it's good you're back!" I reached for his Serapax-and thought about giving him an unnecessary but vengeful forced enema just to divert his mind for a while. "Yes", the Professor trumpeted triumphantly. "I've found it and it's richer on the surface than the Rising Sun or the Pinnacles or the Black Princess or any of the other early prospects that delivered stunning wealth to disbelieving leaseholders. I have crushed up devilishly hard ironstone in my trusty dollypot and taken many looms, finding all of them to be more than satisfying-so much so in fact," he paused dramatically and swung around revealing a shabby plastic bag stuffed full of happily chinking bottles, "that I decided to celebrate my great good fortune with you!" At the same time he spilled an innocuous handfull of ironstone lumps onto the already littered table. Now, poverty is a great leveller but neither Boof nor I had had any inclination to draw upon the old swaggies' concoction of metho and bootpolish of the depression years-the old Diamantina Cocktail-to satisfy our raging thirsts. We'd been a while without a drink and we were thirsty, so we fell with considerable energy to drawing corks from bottles with satisying 'plonks' and rejoicing at the throaty gurgle that filled our expectant glasses. We badly needed that drink. "There were many of the old shows that were first revealed by an unmistakable colour on the surface," he intoned. We already knew, but the courtsey of the cork maintained our silence and he went pedantically on, strutting and striding along Boof's minefield-relic-littered verandah like a fluffy bantam. We followed with our eyes, clutching all the while our giant tumblers full of ruby-red rapture. "Obviously," he lectured us, "the Rising Sun group is the best example. Kevin Weaber states that when first discovered, one could see flecks of gold as big as match heads liberally sprinkled through the ironstone chunks which were literally scattered across the surface of the ground. It was, he said, so prominent as to resemble the rising sun itself, hence the name for that venerable mine." He drew breath and I jumped quickly in. "And yet the Rising Sun itself was never a spectacular producer!" "Fool, fool!" He roared at me and I immediately remembered the true story and realised my knee-trembling error, remembering that in fact the Rising Sun had done pretty well, producing some fourteen thousand ounces of fine gold over the years. "A crushing of selected ore at Peterborough, South Australia, in 1934 saw 315 ozs returned from 55 tons. This was valued at around 2,530 pounds then-around a hundred thousand lovely smackaroonies these days." His love of figures and statistics was well-known and his memory was as long as an elephant's. "Ore treated averaged 5 ozs 15 dwt per ton. In 1935 Mr Weaber employed a number of men on wages and sunk a shaft on each of his leases-the Rising Sun had a return of 522 ozs from 402 tons. This crushing was carried out at both Fazal Deen's and Schmidt's batteries. It continued as a lucrative find in 1936 when large returns eventuated-1,331 tons saw 1,694 ozs of gold valued at 14,370 pounds returned to Messers Weaber and Noble. And today that little treasure would be worth about one half of a million dollars!" He was on a roll and facts and figures drizzled from his tongue, for me cheap dressing on a bitter salad. "Bill Weaber, Owen Weaber and Cosmo Gregg operated their own battery at the mine successfully in 1938 when 2,600 ozs were won from the brutally hard ironstone. Schmidt of Central Milling also crushed ore for gold from the Rising Sun that year (80 ozs from 140 tons) and the product from the mine was further assisted by the Rising Sun cyanide plant which had an output of some 280 ozs. Again, the richness continued in 1939 when around 2,000 ozs were gained by amalgamation and cyanide treatment." Though red in the face and becoming quite puffed, he would have gone on forever so when he paused for breath I interrupted. "The Blue Moon also showed well on the surface..." I started and he cut in pompously. "The Wards got rich on it, from that little initial show of dull-ochre colour. Fourteen thousand two hundred and thirty nine ounces of the lovely shiny stuff eventually. And they bought Banka Banka station from the profits, paying out some nineteen thousand pounds for the property. Just another example of Tennant Creek gold subsidising other business enterprises in the Centre." Not so silly, Boof clapped his hands and called for the story, heading at the same time for the Bin 707 and conquering its cork as the Professor droned on, lost in a world of figures, hopefully betokening future success to his new find. "On the 28th of April 1935, 17.5 tons of ore from the Blue Moon were crushed at Fazal Deen's Battery. The owners, the Wards and Stuart McIntyre received 36.15 ozs of gold for their pains. The following year saw a recording of 68.5 tons crushed for a return of 56.35 ozs valued at 464.9 pounds. 1938 saw saw 61.25 tons crushed for 67.92 ozs. Blue Moon's fabulous reputation becomes obvious from the mine warden's 1940 records; approximately 6100 ozs of gold were gained from 1000 tons of high grade ore." He himself gasped and drew breath at the brilliance of this haul. "He reported this ore pod was found in an incline shaft only 30' from the surface. He further reported that the limits of the hard hematite ore body hadn't yet been exposed." And as we all knew, there was sufficient colour on the surface when it was first stumbled upon, out there on the eastern fringes of the goldfield, to excite even the greenest of miners. And lots of them in those early days were really green when it came to finding gold around Tennant Creek. They might've been able to find it in the gold laden quartz-fields in other parts of Australia, but here, where it was trapped in the ironstone, well it often enough was just hit and miss. And the biggest mugs could stumble across it just as likely as someone who really did know their way around. Witness the Professor's purported success. We'd see about this new-found colour, I thought grimly as I dug into my own memory banks for facts to counter his rant and put him into his place. "Well then, what about Red Ned, the Southern Cross, I.M.O.-all of them up there on Mount Samuel and they all showed great surface colour and there was nothing from them really, nothing at all!" And it was true. Bob Ridley, 1934, showing splendid values from costeans initially and produced nothing. It became a name and nothing more. And Red Ned? Red Ned was going to be a winner of a mine, it showed good values in costeans in 1934 and the syndicate chose to crush at Schmidt's battery and won 47 ozs from 92 tons of ore. There were a reasonable return in 1937, with middle-of-the-year returns producing 231 ozs from 160 tons crushed. The returns were not nearly as good the following year when 58 ozs were the product of 112 tons crushed. Eventually, over all the years, they got 360 ozs from 386 tons. Piddling amount of gold for all the so-called promise! And the I.M.O. might just as well be a name on a map with a lease number and nothing else because it produced not a bit after showing good surface colour. And then there was the Black Princess, about 23 miles west from the Old Telegraph Station, where a shaft was sunk to a depth of about 60' in a lode formation which on the surface was about 120' wide. A cross cut from the bottom of the shaft was put in but it was reported that the promising values found on the surface did not exist at the shaft bottom. A complete waste of time! The Southern Cross produced 298 ounces, hardly worth the effort, I scoffed, and then what about the redoubtable Peter Pan, the centre of a frenzied rush to peg leases in 1933, returned a trifling eighty two ounces. "They all showed surface colour. Bah! So much for your rich surface colour that's going to make us dig until our hands are blistered washrags!" The Professor squirmed and glared at me, death daggers winking behind his grubby pinz nez glasses. "Alright then" he snapped, "the Southern Cross-about three hundred dollars an ounce, two hundred and ninety eight ounces-ninety thousand dollars or so? Trifling indeed?" Everything in his current state of mind had to be a success so, despite the fine lubricants so generously provided, there were some realities of the old mining days that had to come out. "O.K., O.K.. The colour on the surface sometimes indicated some excellent prospects but cop this. These are details about old mines, the ones mainly picked at by the old pioneers. Listen to these figures." The Professor didn't want to but he had no choice. I read the details from a prepared list. "Rio Grande-18 ozs from 51 tons; The Nipples-23 ozs from 113 tons; Tasman-21 ozs from 57 tons; Rosebud-2 ozs from 20 tons; Rosemary-97 ozs from 178 tons; Wizard-15 ozs from 10 tons; Valhalla-15 ozs from 12 tons; Two Chances-4 ozs from 11 tons; The Plank-11 ozs from 4 tons; Destiny Star-6 ozs from 25 tons; Bobbie Burns-6 ozs from 12 tons. What about that, then. They found the little pod, exploited it and then-nothing!" He knew what was coming next and slipped in quickly. "Ah, so what, you moron. So they were small shows, all of them, they gave up some gold and that's better than a kick in the arse, which is exactly what you two have got at the moment Try this list on for size if you reckon there was a bit of disappointment around-none of these produced a thing, not a brass razoo, to all accounts." And he seriously intoned a list, not from a piece of paper like me but rather from his formidable memory: "Woggaridgee, not successful; The Falcon, no mention in any of the available records, although its existence is noted in different references; Lone Hand, Spotted Wonder, Spotted Dawg, Dingo-all unrecorded returns; Golden Dingo, unrecorded, no known workings; West, Hidden Treasure-unrecorded; Troy, unrecorded, prospect, no mine; Black Sheep, unrecorded; The Hawk, unrecorded, no mine workings; Katherine Star unrecorded; Kestral, unrecorded, no mine workings; Little Tramp, unrecorded, some mine workings; New Blood, survey and prospect only; Marathon, prospect only." "And there's more," Boof added seriously, nodding his big woolly head. The idiot finished the last of the claret in one tremendous slurp. Some of it dribbled unattractively down his chin from the corner of his mouth. Wastrel! I thought bitterly. "Look at the mine lease map of 1937 and there are heaps of names on leases that never, ever appear again anywhere in the records!" A child, a child, I despaired, casually fingering the small pile of ironstone that the Professor had dropped onto the table what seemed like hours before. "Saaaay, these are very promising," I burst out, tumbling the jet black stones almost honeycombed with yellow through my excited fingers. "Where, where? Out with it, you fool. We're onto a fortune here. Quick man!" and I grabbed the Professor by his dirty workshirt and lifted him fully from the ground. His feet feebly scrabbled after the security of the floor but these were desperate times. I held him high. "Well, it was the third day out and...no, wait, was it the fourth day out, and if it was that means it was out around the...but no, I think, I hope, I mean I know it was near to ... because that was the day I had to have a little drink because I missed you fellows so much and I was alone and lonely and I went for a walk," more like a stumble I furiously thought, this was getting bad, "and it was really hard climbing and I just stumbled across it just lying around in great piles and I left most of it there to surprise you both and then I stumbled away because it was getting dark and I had a little sleep and when I woke up I wandered in the wilderness for ever so long and I seem to remember a bush bursting into flames and talking to me and lecturing me about greed and, and, well..." His face had assumed a panicky look and he quickly glanced at both Boof and me, nervous and bewildered. "Well, the upshot of it is, I just don't know, I can't be sure, it could, well it could be anywhere really" he weakly concluded as he waved a thin arm vaguely in an easterly direction. Snarling, I hurled them both into the executive car and roared off down to the pub, an unslaked thirst rapidly turning into drought conditions by the thought of the lost prospect. I was broke but not that broke and I needed the company of the odd old prospector or gouger who got down there from time to time. Pulling up at the front, I reflected on the sobering fact that Boof had done it to me before, found a promising prospect* and lost it, and now the bloody Professor had compounded that stupidity by his own little culpability. "Stay here, you pair of disgusting old coprolites and think hard, try very hard to remember just where our fortune lies!" I locked the car on them and clammering desperately they pressed their pathetic faces and hands against the vehicle's window and began crying. They knew I was serious. "I'll be back in a while." * Editor's note: 'Old Gold' by Spinifex, Barkly News Pictorial #3, May 1998. # Editor's note: 'You'll Never Catch Me Alive, Copper! ' by Spinifex, Barkly News Pictorial #12, July/August 1999.