HAND-DRAWN MAP

X marks the spot on the map
where the treasure was found.
A glint of brilliance when we all
started to dig underground.
(‘Full circle’, Descendents)

In my father’s deceased estate I found a hand-drawn map with a vague location where something valuable lies, letters written to mining companies seeking an assay test, and mining lease notices. The information in these documents perhaps isn’t worth the paper they are written on but what if one could fulfil the father’s preoccupation by turning these documents into gold? To realise the prospect of a better future. To make what he said and promised, true.

DENTURES

The voices talking somewhere
in the house, late spring,
And you’re drifting off to sleep
with your teeth in your mouth.
(‘You are the everything’, R.E.M)

Speaking of gold, it was in his mouth the whole time. A crown in the upper central incisor on the left, in his dentures. This was a dental restoration for damage to the false teeth. How it was damaged, I don’t know.

PISS BUCKET

Golden stream. In the cold. It turns to ice. Runs down my knees
in fright. Golden stream. Turns from warm to cold. In frightful
time. In the frozen dead of night.
('Golden streams', The Hidden Cameras)

My father lived for eighty-six years and I never saw him sick or go to the doctor. Not to fix his hernia nor to enquire about the frequent urination during the night, which made him keep a plastic bucket in his room to save the trip through the other bedrooms to the toilet on the other side of the house. I never questioned this, as I assumed that maybe all old men keep a bucket in their room. Sometimes he would expose the lump in his groin and warn us about lifting heavy objects in the wrong way. This hernia was only fixed during the hospitalisation for stage C carcinoma of the prostate. ‘Too much sex’ was what caused the cancer, he told me from his hospital bed.

HEART OF GOLD

I want to live, I want to give, I’ve been a miner for a heart of gold. It’s these expressions I never give. That keep me searchin’ for a heart of gold. And I’m getting old.
(‘Heart of gold’, Neil Young)

The idiom ‘heart of gold’ is of unknown origin but was popularised by Shakespeare’s war play Henry V, written around 1599. On the eve of the Battle of Agincourt, King Henry disguises himself as a commoner and under the cover of night talks with soldiers to uncover their morale. When he asks Pistol if he considers himself ‘better than the king’, Pistol says, ‘The king’s a bawcock, and a heart of gold, a lad of life, an imp of fame …’ (Act 4, Scene 1), suggesting his admiration for the king.

My father’s father was William Henry Moore – the fourth William Moore and third to live in Australia, with the first arriving as a convict. In 1900 in a land ballot for closer settlements, he won 2267 acres of Kamilaroi land, situated off Agincourt Road near Coolatai. One day, defeated by this land, he threw the branches used for severe lashings against my father to the ground and said to my father, ‘Damn it. I can’t break you.’

My father’s mother, Margaret Lily, was also ‘tough’ but a ‘good woman’, according to my father. Someone who possessed a heart of gold. This is the view of my father by those who would keep him up to the wee hours pouring their drunken hearts out in our kitchen. One such person was ‘Echo’. My father named him that because he would repeat the same thing several times. I remember Echo Evans being so hurt by a person coughing at my father’s funeral, thereby disrupting the solemn occasion, that he told him, ‘I hope you die ya bastard!’

POSSESSION

I’ve worked hard all my life. Money slips through my hands. My face in the mirror tells me, It’s no surprise that I am, Pushing the stone up the hill of failure.
(‘Failure’, Swans)

My father said that, one day when looking for a viable water source with a bore drilling rig, he had uncovered a quartz rock with traces of gold. This may have been the moment he abandoned his musical pursuits for earthmoving and ‘boring contracts’, with the hope of discovering more underneath the earth. It doesn’t appear that the rest of the farming family were convinced by the viability of the discovery as they remained focused on the financial certainty of the ‘Golden Fleece’.

This possession – or delusion – driven by hope, quiet desperation and irrational decision-making, was what ‘drove him broke’, an exasperated brother told me when I asked about the gold. I don’t remember anyone taking this promise of riches seriously. I didn’t, but it did remain in the back of my mind as some hope of getting out of our straitened situation.

Many stories later came as excuses for why the exploration of the site never eventuated: some mining representative pulled a gun on him; a lady linked to an exploration company tried to seduce him to reveal the precise location of the mother lode; and others were wary of financially losing out on joint venture in an area not known for precious metals.

GOLD LEAVES

When money grows on trees. People live in peace. Everyone agrees. When happiness is free. Love can guarantee, you’ll come back to me, that’s when.
(‘When’, Shania Twain)

In 2013 the CSIRO published a paper in Nature Communications, which explains how eucalyptus trees in the Kalgoorlie region draw up gold particles to their leaves and branches from as deep down in the earth as fifty metres. The trees are searching for water and are expelling the toxic heavy metals to their leaves, where it can be shed to the ground. These traces are one-fifth the diameter of a human hair and are only visible by using an elemental imaging tool called a Synchrotron. This discovery confirms a correlation old prospectors saw between trees and minerals: that blackbutt trees indicate a potential deposit of gold in the area.

Of course Aboriginal peoples were aware of the gold deposits that lay on the ground’s surface but lacked a reason to utilise the material. Aboriginal peoples were instrumental in discoveries in Victoria, acting as guides to early prospectors in an unfamiliar landscape. Directing these miners to the goldfields led to further dispossession of Aboriginal land.

The impression that gold leaves in my father’s mind for four decades or more is of a promise of things being better, which refutes his often-made statement to us that ‘money is the root of all evil’; sometimes clarified by ‘the love of money is the root of all evil’.

WAR MEDALS

Five metres! Four, three, two, one! Gold to Australia! Gold to Australia! Gold to Australia! Gold to Australia! Gold! Gold!
(‘Give Up For Australia’, TISM)

When applying for a mining lease, my father used the same acronym as his military unit – AMEC (2nd/1st Australian Mechanical Equipment Company) – for his business name, the initials now standing for Australian Mineral Exploration Company. The unit was used for plant operations like bulldozing, grading roads and airstrips. My father’s medals, the most common medals for Australian Army service – the War Medal 1939–1945, the 1939–1945 Star, the Pacific Star, and the Australian Service Medal 1939–1945 – were delivered to an address of another soldier’s mother: c/o ‘Mrs Cooper’ of Kallangur. These medals ended up in the bin because my father rejected the idea of war and said it was ‘stupid’ and a ‘waste of time’. He especially denounced the jingoism leading up to the commemorative national day and was greatly offended by how some would revere the national flag, telling me, ‘It’s just a piece of cloth.’

PYRITE

I’m standing alone, I’m watching you all. I’m seeing you sinking. I’m standing alone, you’re weighing the gold. I’m watching you sinking. Fool’s gold.
(‘Fools gold’, The Stone Roses)

I remember being handed a lump of quartz with traces of gold, and on another occasion pyrite – once by my father and another time by someone working for my father. I also remember people using ‘heart of gold’ as a sarcastic and disparaging remark towards someone, either for their naivety or for their insincerity.

All of my father’s possessions fitted into a not-very-large suitcase; he only wore second-hand clothes and he would put everyone else’s concerns before his own. He would say on many occasions that society needs to be more socialist. At times he would spruik the virtues of communism but would back down on that and confirm that socialism was a better political system – as if to say communism was a step too far.

Some days part of his pay would be a live sheep, which he would kill in the back shed and then butcher into food that would keep us fed for a few weeks. Everything he did seemed to be not the easiest way to do things and later in life I wondered if it was about necessary hard work, kindness and care – or a penance he felt he needed to pay. When he scalded the cups, plates and cutlery with boiling water to kill germs, was he protecting all of us or first and foremost himself?

Whether true or false I’ll never know – very much as though there really is something of great worth buried under the dirt, waiting to be brought to the surface!