Hollow air, p.4
Hollow Air, page 4
‘Didn’t expect you back so soon. Five days is a quick turnaround. Must’ve spent more time on the plane than home.’
‘You’re telling me. Nick hired some new guys. They’ll be here in a couple of days. Got some things to get done before they arrive. I’ll grab the generator when I do the airport run to Cairns to pick them up.’
‘Good to hear it won’t be so lonely out here for you. Give us a yell if you need anything. I’ll hit the frog and toad.’
‘Drive safe.’
‘Always do.’ He grinned. They both knew this was untrue.
The thump of the ute door closing, the engine growling to life, trail of dust disappearing into the distance, and Sarah was alone again.
She sat and watched the last sun spreading ripples across the tailings dam. Sarah did need something, but she wasn’t sure what. Was it Scott? The fight they’d had when she told him she was finishing her break early had tired her out more than the long drive to camp.
It had been a relief to leave. To sit through all those hours of transit, her surroundings in stasis while the world was transplanted beneath her, out of reach, and all Sarah had were her thoughts.
Once she was on the ground again, her phone kept chiming with his messages each time she came back into reception. Sarah was glad it didn’t work here. With the sun sinking to the horizon and the generator broken, he wouldn’t even be able to reach her on the office phone.
When daylight was done, she switched on her torch and took her cup to the kitchen. The camp became a huddle of hulking metal surrounded by shadow trees stretching towards the stars. The gravel was noisy beneath her feet, the torch beam a wobble through the dark. Sarah was used to the angry hum of the generator as a foundation for the night. Without it, the bush sounds were louder.
Down in the bathroom there was a dank dripping, and the toilet flush seemed thunderous; even brushing her teeth felt loud. A screech and a rustle from the undergrowth made her quicken her pace as she walked back to her room.
Silly. Nothing different out there. Night creatures, noses to the ground, rooting around for worms and beetles. Birds ruffling their feathers and settling into nests, calling out their day’s stories. The moan of cows in the herd, warm bodies leaning against one another.
In her room she lit a candle. The flame trembled in a warm draught that came in through the flyscreen. Sarah got out a book to read. The words blurred and ran together. She couldn’t concentrate. It unsettled her, the idea that this one flame was the only thing keeping the darkness at bay for miles and miles. Her little room sending light flowing out into the gloom, and anyone, anything, could look in and see Sarah. Even the mill was dark, clinging to the cliffside above like an enormous, angular insect. She got up and shut the curtains, her window now a rectangle of soft light to anything stalking through the night.
Down at the bathroom, one of the toilets flushed.
She went still, very still, listening. Nothing. Breath in and out. Creatures making wet sounds down at the dam. The last call of a bird winging its way home.
She had imagined it. She must have. No one was down there. It was just some bird stirring through the shallows of the dam. It had been a long day, and she was on edge.
Sarah undressed to her singlet and underwear, aware of the rustle her clothing made as she pulled it off, the thud when she accidentally dropped a boot on the floor, the wretched squeak of the bed. She went over to the door and checked it was still locked.
When she blew out the candle, the night rushed in and turned the room to shadows—the moon somewhere above but smothered by clouds. The curtains billowed in the breeze like tethered ghosts.
She tried to sleep, but it was no use. She needed to pee. Fumbling around, her hand found the torch and she switched it on, the room now painfully bright.
Sarah put on her pants and boots and went outside. It was stupid, but she didn’t want to go down to the bathroom. She’d just go here, beside the rainwater tank. She turned the torch off—felt watched with it on—pulled her pants down and squatted, hoping there weren’t any snakes.
Then she heard something. A rustling. The crackle of leaves. Sarah froze, pants still around her ankles. It was coming closer.
The moon out from behind the clouds and there were gleaming eyes, and they were close to her now. The smell of crushed eucalyptus leaves.
She reached for the torch and switched it on. A furry body springing away into the undergrowth. Wallaby. More scared than her. She finished and went back to her room.
Sarah sat on the deck outside the kitchen with her coffee. At least the gas still worked. No communications for the safety meeting. No communications at all until the sun breached the horizon. The solar panels were worn out—the batteries barely held charge, certainly not overnight. As with everything else, there wasn’t enough money for replacements.
It was always hard to sleep the first night: her body had to settle back into the habit of a single bed. Sometimes, when she lay here, she longed to be beside Scott. Sometimes, when she lay beside Scott, she longed for her steel-framed bed at camp with its thin blankets and stiff sheets.
Scott would still be asleep. Sarah wondered if he missed her solid warmth beside him. Or was he stretched diagonally across the bed, glad to have the sheets to himself?
On the mornings when he left for work early, Sarah never strayed to his side of the bed. For her there was an invisible line of demarcation over what was his and what was hers. Everything in the apartment felt like that. Her books sat on their own shelf, and Sarah felt unease at the thought of them mingling with his. Most of the furniture in the apartment was his. Sarah’s was mostly second-hand, none of it fancy—what was the point when she was away so much. She’d brought almost nothing with her into his life.
Safety sheet filled in. Green, no incidents. She shuffled back through the previous days. They were blank—Des had forgotten. Sarah hated to get on his case, but she’d have to, once again. It wasn’t easy getting some of the older guys to follow the safety rules. Des had lived his life out bush. He’d killed King Browns with a shovel and a prayer, sewed up his own face when a branch had ripped it open through the ute window, lost a finger and been back to muster cattle before the wound healed. You lot want me to fill in a safety assessment every time I jump a barbed-wire fence or take a shit behind a tree. It’s a waste of time, he’d told her.
He was right. It was a waste of time. Until it wasn’t. You only had to look at the alerts from the Department to know that. The limbs mangled in machines. Trucks rolled. Rig accidents.
Rockfalls.
She’d remind Des again when she saw him.
Sarah grabbed the set of keys from the office. Unlocking the rooms felt like an excavation. In Terry’s there was still a picture of his kids pinned to the wall above his bed. Sarah gently pulled it down and tucked it into her pocket. Here was Peggy’s room, her stack of Women’s Weekly magazines in a pile by the bed. Peggy had been the cook when camp was full; she liked to fry a steak until it was grey and took half an hour to eat for chewing—but it had been nice to have another woman on site. Next, Joe’s room covered in Playboy centrefolds. A brunette with spread legs eyed her. Sarah tore the picture from the wall and crumpled it into a ball. She hoped they wouldn’t get Joe back, but he was the son of one of the landholders. If things got up and running again, Nick would be sure to give him a job, no matter what Sarah said.
She knew Joe hadn’t left town. She’d seen him there sometimes, knocking back schooners at the pub in the middle of the day. Hey boss lady, why don’t you join me? Patting the seat beside him. One for the road. Ah, you’re no fun anymore.
The sheets had been put away clean, but now they were damp and had a musty smell to them. Sarah shovelled them into the washing machine—the day was sunny, should be able to manage a load or two. With the sun came the phone, and she wasn’t surprised to hear it ringing up at the office. Scott?
It was.
‘I’ve been worrying myself sick. Why didn’t you answer the phone?’
‘Sorry, generator’s kaput. Phone’s just come back on. Keep telling the board these wireless phones are useless as a—’
‘I thought you must have wrapped yourself around a tree. I’ve been imagining the most awful things . . .’
‘I’m fine. I was just—’
‘Look . . . I’m . . . I’m sorry, okay. I said some terrible things. How’s it your fault the boss is on your case? It’s just’—his voice cracked—‘I just miss you so fucking much when you’re up there. We never get enough time. It feels like we’re starting over whenever you’re back. But you shouldn’t have walked out on me like that. Don’t you know how that makes me feel?’
‘It . . . got too much for me.’
‘It really gets to me when you shut me down like that.’ He paused and she knew he was waiting for her response. She didn’t have one. ‘Hang on, does that mean you’re out there at night with no light? That doesn’t sound safe.’
‘It’s fine. Des left me candles, I’ve got the torch, I’ll be right. But listen, I’ve got a lot to get done before the guys arrive tomorrow. Better go.’
There was silence on the other end of the phone.
‘Alright,’ he said finally. ‘Talk later?’
‘Tomorrow if I can. It’ll be radio silence again tonight.’
‘Stay safe. Please.’
‘Always do.’ She hung up before he could say anything else.
In the office Sarah went through the information she wanted to show the others when they arrived. She pulled out the detailed map of the Dulcie Ada geology she’d been working on, drill sections from the programs they’d done before the money dried up, results from the ground magnetics survey and the soil sampling.
The land was a patchwork quilt of conflicting and intersecting interests. Or, at least, that’s how Sarah viewed it, could see it in her head—the cartographic layers draped over one another. She knew the mining lease so well she could follow the invisible survey lines that marked its edges and at each corner find the metal peg jutting from the ground, mining lease number engraved into its side.
Walk along the fence line, that was the landholding LOT14/SP432—Des and his wife, Clem, easy to deal with, the kind to invite you in for tea if you happened past their homestead, though she almost never did, as it was more than sixty kilometres west of the mining lease. On the other side of the fence was LOT11/OL907—the Burtons, not so congenial, such huge landholdings in the Tablelands that they got about by chopper. There was LOT03/FL433—Patrick ‘Paddy’ Brown, who lived in town and held the small pocket of land over Dulcie Ada. And LOT07/SP537, of course—one of Joe’s father’s leaseholds; he had small tracts of land that dotted the bush from the mining lease all the way to Rutile and beyond. She often came across him driving his cattle along the highway in search of any patch of green among the puzzle pieces of his parched leaseholds.
It was a complicated dance. The landholders were obliged to let the company explore—minerals found on their land were legally owned and managed by the Queensland Government, who leased out the rights to mineral companies. But landholders weren’t always going to make it easy, and compensation and conduct agreements had to be negotiated individually. The type of compensation varied widely. Some were happy to let exploration go ahead at no cost in the hope that the company would find something big; then they’d knuckle out an agreement for a portion of the mining profit. Others asked for a fee per drillhole. Some, like Des or Joe, just wanted a job. There were conduct requirements: one landholder might instruct that vehicles arriving be washed for seeds, others would ask them to avoid visiting at certain times of the year so as not to disturb muster.
Or they could ask you to ‘mind the bodies’.
Underlying this complex tapestry of leases and claims and landholdings was Native Title, the result of a long and ongoing struggle by the Traditional Custodians to have their connection to the land acknowledged and respected. The lines on the map before her couldn’t convey the profound spiritual and cultural significance of this land to the people who had cared for it for centuries.
She knew some companies were happier when a lease wasn’t covered by Native Title, but Sarah felt most comfortable working where an agreement was in place. Just because there had been no successful claim didn’t mean the contours of those lands held no history of the people who had long been deeply intertwined with it. It only meant that they had not been able to prove it within the labyrinth of bureaucracy. Huge and awful gaps existed from centuries of policies and practices, many of them violent, that had deliberately suppressed First Nations culture and knowledge. This coupled with a legal system that tended to measure value by what could be written on a page, rather than other forms of knowledge like oral histories, meant that a group’s path to achieving recognition of their culture and connection to their land could be almost impossible.
The agreements made here were supposed to protect significant places and safeguard the cultural knowledge associated with them. But Sarah knew that enforcing these protections was often a challenge—many Indigenous communities continued to push for stronger measures.
She went into the stifling heat of the shipping container. The rock chips and drill core from the drilling programs were stored here. She wanted to pick out some sections of the core where they’d had the best tin results to help the new geos get a better understanding of the deposit and the fractured sandstone that carried the tin.
As she squatted beside one of the core trays and reached out her hand, she noticed the gleam of her engagement ring. Shit. She’d forgotten to take it off.
When Sarah was up at site, she never wore it. She was often working with the core or rock chips, and with a gold ring on, you ran the risk of accidentally salting the core. The scrape of ring on rock could cause incorrect results from a lab analysis and make it look like you were on to a good deposit when there was nothing there. People had done it on purpose before, filing gold flakes from jewellery to make it seem they’d hit the jackpot. Fortunes lost when the frauds were discovered.
Sarah slipped the ring from her finger and pocketed it.
She marked out the sections of drill core until the sweat trickled down her back and she couldn’t bear it another second.
It was cooler in the office. Among the maps were historical ones, some of them yellowed with age and stuck together with sticky tape where they’d torn. The tape was old too, peeling in places where the glue had deteriorated. Sarah carefully spread out the old level plan of the Dulcie Ada mine. The paper felt soft and greasy from all the hands that had held it. A faded coffee ring in the top left-hand corner. Pencil marks where someone had made their own additions. A muddy thumbprint. How many other geologists had looked at this map over the years?
That was the thing about exploration. Every bit of ground had been picked over by countless companies until all that was left were the bony ribs of the land. Fortunes sunk into the earth with nothing to show for it. It wasn’t easy to find something these days. The Tablelands had been worked since the 1800s. When Sarah had read about the history of the area, she couldn’t help but be shocked; it was hard to believe the abundance there had been but also the voraciousness with which it had been consumed. Back then you could stumble over seventy per cent tin grade ore at the surface, and if you weren’t stubbing your toe on it, you could erase a whole mountainside to get at it without a moment’s thought.
The landscape was pockmarked with tiny holes, one-man mines, where someone had toiled to scrape together a living for their family. There were bigger ones too, like the old Minotaur tin mine, monstering its way into the depths. The men of the time had chewed up the land, spat out the bits they didn’t want and left them there, still leaching poison a century later. There were environmental disasters from those times hidden away in the bush; a company that didn’t do their due diligence might unearth one on their lease and find it was now their problem.
Back then there was no accountability, no legislation to ensure that companies were held responsible.
But regulations didn’t mean nothing ever went wrong. Mistakes could still be made, rules could be ignored. Sarah was in a position where she could do her utmost to ensure that everything was done correctly.
It didn’t change what was at the heart of it: you couldn’t extract something of value without taking things apart. You could try to put it back together when you were done, but it would never be exactly the same.
Sarah preferred re-exploring historical mines. At Dulcie Ada the damage had already been done a century ago—the original owners departing without a second glance, leaving a scar on the landscape. Old mines were also the best place to look if you hoped to find something: new technology could unearth what had been missed.
Her fingers traced the lowest level of the mine. This was where the cave-in had happened. This was where the men had died.
Her chest felt tight. She imagined the weight crushing down in the claustrophobic darkness. Skulls split open like eggs knocked against the side of a pan. Bodies full of brittle bones; bones ground into dust, fractured to the marrow. Hundreds of bones in a body, how many were broken when the earth collapsed in on them?
It was an awful way to die.
Sarah thought of those bones, their structure, the way they were woven together; she’d seen one under the scanning electron microscope at university, porous like honeycomb, billions of tiny spaces each housing their own cell and waiting to be compressed by the weight of the rock. Lacuna. That was what they called those spaces. It came from Latin, meaning a hole or a pit, but also a gap, a void, a want—she’d looked it up. Something in the sound of that word had stuck with her and she’d find herself silently rolling it over her tongue.
Lacuna.
Maybe it was the comfort in finding herself a mineral being at her core—it pleased her to think of the hydroxyapatite suturing her bones. Or maybe it was the sense of unease that had stayed with Sarah. The realisation that like the ground left behind when the ore was removed, she too was riddled with holes.
