Forget the Yukon, Remember Bulolo

It is many years since I was promoted to short pants—maybe around 1925–26. But it is one of the rites de passages I can remember quite well. The earlier embarrassments and indignities of nappies, rompers and the like have passed beyond recall, but the arrival of short pants coincided with the onset of my passion for words, a disease for which no cure has so far been discovered.

The compulsion seemed to arise quite spontaneously: new words; variant forms and spellings (a pear as distinct from a pair); tricky plurals (goose becoming geese). Part of this basic stuff I taught myself by the original Hoover method, sucking it all up from floor level while lying doggo behind the sofa, or beneath the dining table.

Even now, I pay daily tribute to the patience of my mother, and that of two of her unmarried sisters who spent endless hours sorting me out with meanings, spellings, derivations and the infinite subtleties of usage: “We can say that at home between family, dear, but not to Mr Jennings”—(the local Methodist minister).

The extraordinary latent power of usage (and of intonation) struck me first in connection with “imported”, which (on the surface) must be one of the least emotionally charged words in the dictionary.

“Mum. What’s imported?”

“Imported, dear, means something we can buy in our shops, but which hasn’t been grown or made in Australia; it’s been brought here by ship from overseas.”

“Thanks, Mum. Yes. I see.”

But I didn’t see—not by half—as approaching Christmas shortly proved.

It had long been the rule that presents were exchanged at a general gathering of the extended family at my grandfather’s house. That year, I noticed for the first time that certain gifts drew an additional note of pleasure and esteem: “Thank you for those lovely gloves! And imported, too!” Even after eighty years, I recall with perfect clarity two of the other gifts which drew that special accolade: a bright bottle of perfume (from France) and a richly coloured package of crystallised fruit jellies (from Switzerland).

I expect that readers are already tired of hearing all about the early education of a pedantic little prig, but it was precious knowledge early gained, that a single ordinary English word could bear a steady meaning equally acceptable to the dictionary and to my mum, and yet at the same time mean almost anything else the user liked to load it with. (Soon after making this discovery, I was miffed to learn that Lewis Carroll had famously been there years earlier.)

The snooty tones of “imported” cast a long shadow over Australia, falling not only on the realm of material things, but on the whole range and apparatus of our culture. A sparkling painting by an Australian Impressionist master would be even more esteemed if it had been signed “R.A.” Our novels either measured up to (or failed to measure up to) Joseph Conrad or Thomas Hardy. Nellie Melba, who clearly knocked the socks off the competition of all the world, was an awkward anomaly. In 1950 our lively critic A.A. Phillips dragged all this out for closer consideration, with his essay “The Cultural Cringe”. The next ten years fizzed with the ensuing debate. It added immensely to Australians’ sense of how much they might justly weigh themselves in the literary scales of the globe.

But what, you may well ask, set at large again these long-buried lucubrations from last century?

I was recently given a privileged early peep at the manuscript of a book scheduled for publication later this year. It is the story of the huge goldfields of the old Australian Mandated Territory of New Guinea. Centred on Wau and Bulolo, they flourished and enriched us from the late 1920s, until ravaged by the Japanese in 1942 during the Second World War; they were reconstructed and revived after war’s end.

If ever an Australian story “had everything”, this surely is it—from romance to finance. Entitled Not a Poor Man’s Field, it tells of almost unbelievably tough and resourceful lone white prospectors like “Shark-Eye” Park, who pursued gold traces in their wash dishes ever higher into the freezing New Guinea mountains. Sometimes a single shovelful of gravel would yield an ounce of gold; at other times nothing, for desperate weeks on end. In 1927, six miners won for themselves over three tons of gold.

There were bloody clashes with cannibals on the jungle frontiers. (Later, I got to know two of the District Officers who, at different times, had been borne in litters into the little hospital at coastal Salamaua; they had so many arrows sticking out of them they looked like dartboards.)

I mentioned casually to sundry friends that I was deeply absorbed in a ripping yarn of gold-seeking in the raw wilderness. Mostly, the responses went something like this:

“Ah! The Yukon still rates, does it?”

“By God! Those miners were tough! I’ve read Robert Service’s Songs of a Sourdough.”

“I wonder if you’d find a single speck of gold today in Bonanza Creek.”

And there were certain more or less jocular references to Klondike Kate and to Dangerous Dan McGrew.

It seemed that my cryptic references to “gold” and “wilderness” had sufficed to trigger instant identification with Canada’s frozen North, but nothing spontaneous about Australia. Had I just been unlucky with my random sample? I don’t think so. No resonance rang from murmurs of the names of Wau and Bulolo. So here we were, back to short pants and the unquiet ghost of Arthur Phillips and the cultural cringe.

The story told in Not a Poor Man’s Field is by no means confined to raw tales from the jungle—indeed, far from it. For example, in this remote tropical area of almost total technological backwardness, the world’s heavy airfreight industry was not merely developed, but virtually invented. In 1931, in a single month, 581 tons were freighted from the coast, over the mountains inland to the goldfields. That was more than the whole of the rest of the world’s airfreight industry lifted in twelve months.

“Serious” mining companies, heavily capitalised in Australia and North America, soon replaced the “small man” with his dish and his sluice box. Immense—almost battleship-sized—mechanical dredges of original design took over the extraction of the millions of ounces of gold lying buried in the gravels of the Bulolo River.

The Territory of New Guinea was able to finance a strikingly more modern and effective apparatus of administration than its older Cinderella sister colony Papua. How? From gold, which for years provided alone more than a quarter of all government revenues.

As settled townships such as Bulolo and Wau began to offer gentler ways of life than the bush camp, white women came to the field, and a wholly new milieu developed, not only for expatriates, but for the astonished indigenes, who watched, and helped, and learned.

Contrary to the old tradition whereby, when the precious metal faltered, gold towns became ghost towns, Bulolo provided in advance for its old age with a self-sustaining timber and plywood industry, based on the superb pine forests which clothed the surrounding mountains.

All this (and much more) is recreated and explained for us by author Michael Waterhouse’s awaited book. But, until we can read it, and study its fine original illustrations, why have only such faint recollections remained in Australian minds? The story was never a secret. In 1933, journalist Ion Idriess topped all the best-sellers with his Gold Dust and Ashes, which within a few years went through an astounding nineteen editions. In 1963, Australia’s literary master craftsman, Gavin Souter, included a penetrating account of the goldfields in his New Guinea: The Last Unknown. (This distinguished book still endures as the best general introduction to New Guinea we shall ever have.)

The Yukon was minor and short-lived compared with Bulolo. It was on the other side of the world, not just across narrow Torres Strait. Yet wild scenes of the Mounties keeping order in Dawson City come more readily to the minds of many of us.