Water / hole

Dja Dja Wurrung Country

Castlemaine Diggings National Heritage List Place

“The (Castlemaine Diggings) Park is the most outstanding gold rush era site in Australia in terms of the diversity of types, integrity and time-depth of its collection of mining sites … Gold and the search for this precious metal, has played a major role in how our nation has developed. Its influence has left us with the enduring legacy of exploration, immigration, research, and industrial booms” *

A story is told here as if it is old, as if it can be said to constitute something that we call “the past”. The story of the Victorian Goldfields that seems like history. Stone buildings and other monumental erections of wealth presenting a façade of a past that is so recent and superficial that it should be almost meaningless, a tiny blip in the fabric of time, if it weren’t for the fact that this tiny blip tore a landscape apart. A nuclear level event in which the forceful collision of unimaginably small things resulted in devastation. In death, the destruction of worlds.

Gold formed beneath the Castlemaine Diggings when people were a concept not yet made manifest, elements in a story yet to be woven into the main narrative. 440 million years ago in veins of quartz and alluvial deposits borne by millennia of the movement of water through bedrock. 440 million years all but undone in the course of a century, the Gold Rush.      

“In 1851 in a tranquil wooded valley, in a far corner of the world, gold was found. Within a year, tens of thousands of people flocked to the Mount Alexander area. They came from all the distant reaches of the earth to the ‘bank till free to all’: the richest shallow alluvial gold diggings the world would see. Australia would never be the same again.”

A body has been dumped on the Castlemaine Diggings, raped and violated, still breathing, barely yet able to move, screaming a scream that it seems people can’t hear. She is nothing extraordinary. A waterhole, if that is the right word for it, maybe just a hole with water in it. It is hard to tell on the diggings what is natural and what was made. But the body is nonetheless there in this uninterpretable landform. You can feel and hear it, her skin rising and falling. Inhalation. Expiration. Spines of blood red shale and shining clay tendons spread out across the ground.

The waterhole / hole with water is haunted by the ghosts of the ordinary, half hidden by a glittering veil of Golden Wattle. A single rusted ring from a corrugated iron tank. Abandoned car tyres. A string of barbed wire. Broken glass. The comfortable burgundy of a colourbond roof and the peak of a prefabricated bird aviary. Cars hum and the train thuds past with a helicopter-like resonance. What can be imagined as a glorious wetland is now choked with pampas grass and the dusty corpses of chemically treated gorse. A solitary oak tree, barely hanging on in the rocky soils and a fence post act as signs of abandoned optimism. Frogs call, and it is possible to be transported to a vision of how the place could be. But then a new sound intrudes, either the baying of dogs or the howling of cheers from the oval, its impossible to tell. Dark mirror. Australian gothic.

“The ground has been turned over and over again, and now the whole of the alluvium found in the gullies is being put through the puddling machines, and excellent wages is the result.  There is no doubt but the present process will be continued until the whole of the known auriferous gullies will be entirely washed away in the shape of sludge, leaving nothing behind but the bare bed rock and sundry heaps of stones to show where the gold has been taken from”.

The Diggings are a crime scene, thrumming with violence, disrespect and disregard. She has been reached into and torn apart from the inside out. Beaten, shat on and thrown aside, her body left in the roadway behind the houses. I think, how can people live here when they have to hear all her screaming? And I think, stupidly, is that what the omnipresent lawnmowers are for? To drive out the noise?

I press my face into the exposed gully which is a conglomeration of tiny rocks, fragments of mudstone packed so tightly together that they resemble the rind of a fruit or the hide of a goanna. Tree roots push and twine their way through, merging with the rocks. The soil smells cool and golden brown, speckled with the memory ghosts of gold dust. It is nearly spring and dry fungi still scatter the edge of the water / hole. Baubles of tadpoles swirl among the rushes.

My cheeks are slick with tears and mud. I feel like my chest has been pulled open and the landscape is entering directly into my lungs. I have been opened up and my heart is swelling and falling out of my chest. I should have come with a gift. Why didn’t I bring a gift?  I put my face to the earth and breathe the forest (my forest, the dark wet forests of the Otways) out of my lungs that are no longer lungs but part of the soil. I breathe directly into her and I say “I’m sorry”.  

And she says, look. See me. I am still here. I am still beautiful. I am still worthy of love. My pain and my injuries are not me. Pick me up. Touch me. Stroke me. Hold me. Love me.

“There are many relics and traces of gold-mining, ruins of gold-rush settlement throughout towns like Castlemaine and Chewton which still bear, in the buildings and streetscapes, the heritage and magic of their golden past”

I put my sunglasses back on and pull my coat around my shoulders. Dirty tears are itching down my neck and under my collar. The sky is clear blue and the wattles shatter light around me. There is so much air pouring into my lungs that I feel they will burst.

Grey box are scattered amongst the Box Ironbark, their filigreed silver bark a gentle rococo to the Ironbark’s magnificent dark baroque. Multiple stems of the grey box twine out from a single base and dance around each other like lovers in a slow caress of approach and retreat.  The tree opens up like a gate on the side of the track, large enough for me to just pass through her three stems. My breathing is almost impossible now, ragged and gasping, and sobs are heaving and lurching out of me. I crouch down beneath the tree. Before me hang two orbs of dodder laurel, pendulous breast wombs against the blue sky and copper soil. They are clearly vessels, and been woven by something, for something. It seems as if something will be born from them.  I wonder if maybe it’s me.

Eventually the tears stop and my breathing slows. I can’t have walked more than a kilometre and all that’s left now is to follow the yellow arrows that mark the Goldields Track back to the house.

.* All quotes come from the website of Friends of the Mount Alexander Diggings. This post should not be interpreted as criticism of the work of this group. http://www.fomad.org.au/history-overview.html