the first thing I had to do after breakfast was get some meat for the starving multitude – like before the heat really got going. When the kids went off to play in the creek I grabbed the rifle and legged it in the opposite direction; up toward some flat-topped flint ridges a couple miles away, to try and get a kangaroo.
“Now as you know, flint topped hills are not the sort of place you'd go looking for mica, because the rocks are all wrong. And I wasn’t prospecting anyway; I was looking for a roo. Up the eastern side I went, and once on top I saw that it wasn’t a ridge at all. It was more like an elongated mesa, with a series of gullies cutting across its flat top in a westerly direction.
“Anyhow, as luck would have it, just as I reached the top I saw a big male kangaroo hopping leisurely away from me toward the nearest gully. He hadn't seen me, so I followed him to the edge and watched from behind a bush as he hopped slowly along the sloping side of the gully. He then stopped in the shade of a bush about half way down from the bottom. It was too far away for a shot, however. I needed to get closer.
“He was having a good look around, too, before settling down, but then suddenly turned in my direction and began testing the air. He couldn't see me of course but he'd become wary. Then I realised: the breeze was carrying my scent down into the gully. At the same moment he turned to clear out so I took a quick shot at him.
“I hit him too, but it was a real fluke. And the poor bugger was dead when I arrived there, except that I couldn't find him; he'd tumbled forward down the slope a couple of metres and finished up amongst some conkaberry bushes.”
“And so instead of bully beef and damper you and your family had roast leg of kangaroo for Christmas dinner,” I said. “That would have been wonderful, especially for the kids.”
“Yeah, and as much as they could eat, too. Mum’d knocked up a crook old feed and it was just delicious. So our first day on the mica field – Christmas day nineteen fifty – turned out to be pretty good.”
“The kangaroo was a mighty good present then.”
“Yeah. But that wasn’t the main thing. See while I was trying to find what had happened to him I noticed some big flakes of mica in the bottom of the gully, and soon as I'd found him I went back and tracked up to where it was coming from. It turned out to be in the clayey bank, where the gully had cut deep into the rocks beneath the flint. And it was good quality mica, too, even the surface stuff was not too bad, and some of the books were huge.
“Before I went back to collect the roo I walked down the gully to where it flooded out onto the grassland country and tied me handkerchief to a dead mulga tree. That was so I’d know which gully I had to follow up when we came back later see, when we drove in there around the back way.
“Anyway that was the end of me prospecting career. First day on the field and I'd hit the jackpot. Next morning we moved our gear around to there and pegged a claim, and then started setting up a little donga – you know, bush timber posts and rails and corrugated iron, near a couple of healthy looking bloodwood trees. A couple days after that we went back to the Harts Range Police Station to register our claim.
“‘The Silver Jubilee’ we called it. Well, nineteen fifty-one was Australia’s Silver Jubilee and it was only a few days until New Year, so it seemed the right thing to do.
“Later I used to think about how it all worked out for us, too, because the mica field had already been fairly well prospected. Course a bloke could still find himself a show somewhere if he tried, but all the good ones had been found and no one in their right mind would have gone prospecting in the flint hills country. Yet that’s where the best show of all turned out to be, waiting for a real newchum like me to turn up.
“But it wasn’t just the best show on the field because of the mica. The rock that it came in made it good too. In all the other mines the mica was in hard rock and had to be blasted out, and that can spoil a lot of the mica. But at the Silver Jubilee the rock was so weathered I could dig it out with a pick. In fact the whole time we were there I never used a single stick of jelly.
“Later we brought some more iron and timber out from town and Mum and I made a proper house there. It was just a couple of rooms with a fly-wire veranda each side, but it was plenty for us. She got a garden going, too, and built a little chook house. Later she got the girls started on correspondence school.
“Ahh yeah; they were great days.”
The rain had eased slightly while Jack had been telling me all this. He moved to the rear of the tip tray then pulled the flap back and looked out again at the slowly moving brown inland sea. “Course we never saw anything like this,” he added.
“And that was your best Christmas present ever, was it? Finding the mica mine.”
“Well, just about. I mean we couldn’t have done much better, me and Mum. But that wasn’t the main thing. There was a joker used to come out from town every so often with a load of clothes and stuff to sell to the miners and station ringers and everyone – a hawker bloke. Anyway, from time to time one or two of the miners would drop in with a few beers to say g'day, and often while they were there they'd try and buy the Silver Jubilee off me.
“I always told them it was no good even thinking about it because it was not for sale, and mostly they'd just leave it at that. But this hawker bloke – Frank Lorman was his name – he wouldn’t take no for an answer. Every time he came by he’d put the acid on me to sell it, and each time his offer would be higher.
“Then, just before Christmas nineteen fifty-two, Barney – he’s the youngest – he had some sort of turn, and by hell it sure put the wind up us. Asthma, the doctor told me later, but I'd never seen anything like it. I mean the poor little tyke was gasping for breath and turning blue. I had the old Dodge going flat out, too, and by the time we got to the Police Station he was still hanging on and fighting for every bit of air he could get.
“Quick as he could the copper got on the wireless and called up the Flying Doctor. We were on the veranda with Barney and could hear everything. Alice Springs said the plane was on its way. It had just taken off to go to Tennant Creek with a doctor on board but was diverting to here instead. And all this time Mum was hanging on to Barney and just willing him to keep breathing.
“The plane seemed to take forever, but after a while we went down to the air strip and a short time later they landed and the doctor took charge. Then they loaded Barney into the plane and took him and Mum back to town.
“After that we returned to the mine to get some things, and the next day we drove in to Alice. Barney was all right thank heavens, and when he came out of hospital we got a load of supplies and went back to the Silver Jubilee. The kids all wanted to have Christmas at home, see.
“But all this got me thinking, and when Frank Lorman came around a month or so later I had a whole different slant on things. He must’ve known something had changed, too, because he really started to put the pressure on; upping his offer, then pretending to get angry and threatening to pull out.
“Eventually I said: ‘All right. You get the transfer papers and the money or a bank cheque and the Silver Jubilee is yours.’ Bugger me if he didn’t have the papers right there; all they needed was the signatures and the amount filled in. And he had the cash in a bank bag.
“So that was it. Mum and the kids were a bit disappointed that we were going back to Alice Springs, but now we had Barney to think about – and the others needed to go to a proper school anyway. So the day after Christmas nineteen fifty-two we packed all our belongings onto the old Dodge and set off back to Alice Springs.
“The money we’d saved from our mica sales was enough to pay cash for a decent house there and to buy a car, and later we had the old Dodge truck done up. But the money Lorman paid us went straight into the bank. ‘Sale of a mining lease by a bona fide prospector’, it was, and at that particular time such a sale was deemed free of tax.
“I got sick of mowing the lawn pretty quick, though, and before long started looking for a job. In the end I fi
nished up driving a truck for the Government – the 'Works and Jerks' as the locals called it – delivering fuel and tucker out to the grader drivers working in the bush.
“Anyhow, three or four weeks later I was heading out towards Harts Range when I came across old Spurio on the road. His young feller's changing a flat tyre on his old Chev', see, and behind him is a whole convoy of trucks pulled up.
“Then I noticed how they were all loaded to the heavens with gear, much like the old Dodge when we went back to town. There’s blokes from all over the mica field, too, and when I got out to have a yarn it was like joining a funeral – except that it was more sombre, what with all the long faces.
“Course naturally I asked the question and, by hell, I couldn't believe our luck. It only turned out that the Government mica-buying subsidy had been terminated. No notice; no warnings. Not even any rumours. On Monday morning the office was shut. Pinned on the door was a typewritten proclamation in official-ese, with the general gist of it being that it was all over.
“See the Government had been propping up the whole mica mining business by buying all the mica. This had started during the war when mica was a strategic material, and it continued on for a number of years after the war ended. As the real price went