Early Years

I was born in 1950 in a small hamlet called Ravensthorpe, in the south east of Western Australia. I was the second child to Norman and Rose Dunbar. I was christened Mortimer after a family friend who had his left arm blown off in France during WW1.and who took up dairy farming in Denmark WA until he died. I had an elder brother, Ross, who I didn't really like. He was taller and stronger than I was, so he beat me at every sport, this included boxing, tennis, and football, until I had a really bad inferiority complex. He left home when he had finished Primary School and went off to Albany to start Secondary School, living with his Aunt Dolly, my father's sister. I never saw him again, since he did well and later moved to Perth to attend University. He was killed in an air crash whilst training to become a pilot. I think that he was only seventeen or so years old.

I went through a few years of depression. Each day was for me a struggle to get to school, which was a single room, catering for six years of Primary School. There was only one teacher, a Miss Bessie Higgins, who every day rode her pony about ten miles to the school, tying the pony up under a largish ghost gum, until three thirty when we all went home. In my grade there were only two other students, Gary Wooden and Fishy Taylor.

My mother seemed to like Ross more than me, and she herself went into a deep depression after he was killed, as I think both my mother and my father expected great things from Ross. If my mother was distant, my father was the opposite, and became my best friend. Often we walked into the surrounding bush tracking kangaroos, only to come home disappointed, as we weren't quick enough to catch one.

One day when I was about twelve or thirteen, my father took me away for a weekend of camping. He explained that he had a very strong feeling that in the small hills that surrounded the town, there were minerals to be discovered. So we searched and searched, walking miles over very rough ground. Dad explained that he had a book on minerals in Western Australia, and he read this almost every day. Later, in the local pub he befriended an old wizened man, Macca Jordan, I think it was, who also had a strong feeling about possible minerals in the surrounding hills, but he hadn't been successful in finding anything worthwhile after years of trying. He told my father that he had dug a small mine but was now dying from lung cancer after a life of heavy smoking, and he wanted to sell the mine in order to pay off some of his debts. Apparently they came to some agreement, exchanged titles and so Dad became the owner of this small mine. I think that my father was successful at getting a bank loan, as soon after he bought a utility and the two of us set out to find this mine.

This turned out to be quite difficult as we had no reliable maps, and the tracks were few and far between. After two days we found a hole in the ground, about ten feet in diameter, with a windlass sitting above it together with the drum, wire rope and bucket. We assumed that this was the mine. Together we peered into the blackness, trying to see the bottom. We threw stones in and by counting the time it took to return the sound of it hitting the bottom we tried to work out the depth. We agreed on about thirty feet deep.

Dad explained that our first job was to set up camp, get a dinner going, then get a good night's sleep, for in the morning, with a different angle of the sun, it might make it easier to see just what was at the bottom of that mine. Next day we waited until the sun was almost directly overhead at lunchtime before we could see the bottom of the mine, and quite clearly an old rusted bicycle with a damaged front wheel. Also we could see two tunnels coming off to the side of the main shaft. Dad wasn't in favour of going down in the bucket before we had secured an escape route, that is, a ladder. So we went back to Ravensthorpe, to the small general store to buy three lengths of aluminium ladder, each about ten feet long, which we bolted together when we got back to the mine. There had been a wooden ladder placed in the western corner, but now it was too dangerous to use since the wood had long been affected by dry rot and white ants. However we placed the aluminium ladder over the top of the old wooden one and we chained the top to a small but solid rock, hoping that it would hold firm and give us an escape route if anything went wrong.

Having secured the aluminium ladder, all was in place to explore what was in those tunnels. Dad said that I could have the honour of being the first down into the mine, so I climbed across the windlass and lowered myself into the bucket, holding onto the wire rope. Dad lifted the huge handle so as to release the brake, and ever so slowly I descended into the unknown. At the bottom it was so dark that Dad unscrewed one of the utility's front lights and attached it to a length of wire, then on to the battery, so that we had now a strong light shining onto the walls of the first tunnel.

Dad was so excited he couldn't wait any longer, so he gingerly came down the ladder and joined me in the tunnel. We scanned the walls with our light until we saw beads of a black metal oozing out from the softer sandstone. Then to our excitement we picked up an even larger vein of the same black metal, at least fourteen millimetres, about the width of a fifth finger wide and running upwards at least five or six feet towards the ceiling.

`'its black gold" Dad muttered, slightly overcome, "It's cassiterite, sonny, stannous oxide, or tin, "My God, we've found what the old fella missed, probably on account of his poor eyesight. What a shame! Now let's go and tell your mother and come back tomorrow with some tools so that we can start to mine this stuff"

I think the year was about 1960, I was about ten, maybe eleven. Dad had been searching all those years, without having a real job or a regular income so he wasn't very popular with mum.

When we arrived home mum was nowhere to be found. Dad called "Rosie, Rosie" time after time, so he went off to the dairy to see if she had started milking our only cow, Daisy, and eventually finding her feeding the chooks and collecting some eggs. Mum greeted us icily, she was not impressed. She had years of disappointment and hardship, always trying to feed us on the smell of an oil rag. At least Dad was never bibulous and what little money he did earn, he shared it with her. What drove him on was his dreams. Dreams of finding the source of money in the dusty desert that surrounded our little hamlet. Most of the people had slowly moved away since there was no regular employment. I had not seen Garry or Fishy for months, so didn't know if they still lived around here or not.

Dad was obviously disappointed with the way Mum took the news, but he was never down for long. After dinner he showed her a piece of rock which he had secreted in his pocket. He had wrapped it carefully in some lunch paper. So he placed it carefully on the table and unwrapped it slowly, until it was exposed to the meagre light above the dining room table. "Look my dear, this is what Mort and have found at the bottom of the mine, see here that's called a seam and its tin. At the time of the Korean War it was worth a pound a pound, it's down a bit now but for us, with few overheads it is still a viable proposition"

Mum made a slight grunt, because she wasn't interested, got up from the table, collected some plates then left for the sink in the kitchen. She was about six inches taller than my father, and slightly thicker built. She was a Daikenhart and she came from Lutheran stock in South Australia, near Nuriootpa, I believe. She had joined a touring party for the first time and that's how she met Dad, The bus broke down just outside Ravensthorpe and Dad helped the bloke at the garage to tow it into the town and then fix the problem. All in all the party needed to remain in the town for over a week, which gave Dad plenty of time to see and talk to Rosie my mum. So their interest in one another blossomed. They were married in the Lutheran Church in Nuriootpa about two years later, although Dad had never been to church before, then they moved back to Ravensthorpe to live.

Since Dad stayed away from home for long intervals, Mum had to become self-reliant. That's why she had a cow and an extensive vegetable garden which was a good way to fill in her time. She even sold some vegetables to the local grocer. However deep down she was lonely, she missed speaking German, missed the local Lutheran Church, and the people who shared similar interests. I think she always saw Dad as a dreamer, a drifter and a no hoper. All her sisters were good singers, and so in the early years she kept up her practise, each day setting up her music stand and singing elegiacally to herself or practising her scales. Slowly over the years her interest waned, until when I was about eleven or twelve I never ever heard her sing again. She too was becoming a dreamer, lost in a past world, never to return to, never to see her family again, locked in a time warp with no way to escape.

But she never lost her Faith. Each day she prayed, for over half an hour in the morning after breakfast. I am sure she prayed for her family, so far away. The letters from there getting fewer and far between. First her parents passed away, then her two sisters. She never knew her nieces or nephews, just fading photos on the side wall in the kitchen was all she had to remind her of a past life. When Ross was killed in a light aircraft accident, the news was devastating for her. She sobbed continually, while doing the dishes and looking wistfully out through the only window over the sink, out across the window box of purple petunias and beetle green geraniums, far, far, away with her thoughts.

Dad never lost his urge to mine the cassiterite. We collected some more bins, and we made a trolley on which to move the loaded bins of ore to the tray of the utility. It took about a week to fill ten bins, about three hours to load them onto the tray, and then Dad would be off, heading north towards the Battery in Kalgoorlie, about four hours away. There the ore was crushed, the dry blower separated the tin, which was weighed and Dad given a receipt which he took to an agent who paid him cash. Then he took this further down the main Street to the R&I Bank Manager who deposited half in my account, the other half in Dad's.

He always bought Mum a present, once a new frock, once a modern hat, with a wide brim and flowers in the front, another time some perfume, so he was always thinking about her. I usually stayed at the mine working, since I had no transport, but also keeping a watch out for any spivs or thugs who paid us a visit every so often, stealing our tools, or mucking them up in some way. We had a 5Kva set which provided our lighting and also powered some booby traps which we set at night time, to deter any interlopers. At least once a week it was set off, maybe by some marauding kangaroo, or other animal, but we used to think it provided us security.

I helped Dad for about ten years having no other interests than picking away at the walls, using a pickaxe or crowbar, of either number one tunnel or number two tunnel which were, by now, both three times their original length, then shovelling the debris into the bucket ready to be hauled up to ground level and onto the tray of the utility.

When I did get home for a break, which was about every three months, I noticed Mum was more morose than before. Nothing now would get her out of her deep depression. Her memory was definitely getting worse, she would forget even the simplest of things. She used to knit, because she liked it and she was very good at it. Now however, she displayed little interest in anything, and when she did try knitting again, she made mistakes, and became very agitated. Both Dad and I tried to get her to come to the mine, but she was as stubborn as a mule, and never did.

Within a year Dad, however had succeeded in getting her to live with Aunty Dolly, his sister who lived in a modest house behind the main Street in Albany. I was really sad at seeing her go, the house was now quieter than ever. Daisy, the cow had contracted Johne's disease of the joints and had to be put down, the chooks were moulting and had stick fast flees around their head and eyes and needed Vaseline which we didn't have, so Dad and I screwed their necks and burnt them and that was that. The vegetables hadn't been looked after, so we missed the fresh leaves of the spinach and celery. There was a patch, about ten feet by ten feet, which Mum had been working on recently, cleanly raked and dibbled, ready for transplanting. Most of the remaining area was now full of seeding heads of wild oats or etiolated leaves of celery and spinach. We left soon after and returned to the mine.

After about a year, Dad allowed me to travel up to Kalgoorlie, teaching me to drive, until I was thought good enough to be tested for a license in Kalgoorlie. I passed on the first try, the only certificate I had ever earned, so I felt a warm pride in myself. Also my bank account had passed one hundred thousand pounds. Dad sent money to his sister, Aunty Dolly to help her pay for mum, how much I don't know.

Back at Matilda, the name which we decided to call the mine, things went on much as they had thus far. Each day the work didn't vary much. I was now quite strong and taller than Dad, who seemed to be slowing down a little. One night after having had intruders for over a week, Dad was out patrolling the hot wire which we had erected around the perimeter, with Garry Wooden, who we found in Ravensthorpe, doing nothing as usual, so Dad offered him a job, as a security officer, which he carried out sufficiently well as to get a good wage from Dad each week.

Unknown to me Dad had a revolver. In the darkness, there was a scuffle, the gun went off and in the slight moonlight they apparently saw that Fishy Taylor was dead. Together they lugged his body over to some low bushes, and I suppose they didn't want him to be discovered. I knew nothing about this incident until one day a policeman arrived on his bicycle and started asking questions.

Two days previous, Dad said he was going to go down the main shaft in the bucket, so we swapped roles for the shift. When he was ready, I pulled on the handle to release the brake cog which fitted in between the larger main cog and the smaller one, but this time something happened, it either broke or there was something more serious inside the windlass. Alas I couldn't hold on to the handle which whorled uncontrollably, until the bucket whooshed away and smashed into the ground. At first there was silence, I was quailed, then I shouted and shouted to Dad, until at last he replied. "Legs, sonny, it's me legs, broken, both of them, and me hips, Gawd! go get help, fire brigade'' I raced off to the utility, shouting out to Garry, but never seeing him.

It took about ten minutes until I reached the main road. In the haze of the distance I saw a motor cycle. The rider was wearing a yellow jacket of the police force. I stood in the middle of the road holding my arms as high as I could get them until he stopped. I screamed at him to get ropes, ladders, windlass, and he was off, so I returned to the scene.

In that short time Garry had climbed down the aluminium ladder with a rope, had tied Dad onto his back and was climbing up the ladder ever so slowly, but carefully and determinedly. I helped him climb over the top and onto safe ground. Dad had passed away. He looked so thin, so wizened, and so pale. I closed his eyes. There was blood everywhere. I held his hands, so gnarled from hard work, arthritis and old age. He had been my closest mate, my soul mate, for all these years, and now he was lifeless. I was all alone and had the job of telling mum. The firemen arrived, put Dad onto a stretcher, covered him with a tarpaulin, and that was the last I ever saw of him.

Slobbering and wiping floods of tears from my eyes, I made a statement to the police. They found Fishy Taylor's body, and took Garry into custody. I headed off to Albany. Aunty Dolly greeted me at the front door. She was instantly bereft for her brother. Mum was on the veranda, wrapped up in a knitted rug, she asked who I was, gazed aimlessly around, so I kissed her on the forehead and said goodbye. I was never to see her again.

I stayed in the house in Ravensthorpe for about a month, until the court case was convened in Albany. Garry was charged with the murder of Fishy Taylor, but he was never convicted for lack of specific evidence from that night and the charge was withdrawn. In fact the constable who took down my statement at the mine, asked the court to commend Garry for the heroic rescue of my father, Norman John Dunbar, pulling him thirty feet up the aluminium ladder, in order to be ready when the rescue team arrived. A resounding cheer went up, until the presiding Judge restored order by banging his gavel loudly on the bench.

I withdrew to the local, and found an old timer sitting quietly in the corner, and who was willing to buy Matilda from me. He got the lot, except for the utility, for a modest sum. I was relieved to get rid of it, bush map and all. I never returned there again, but drove out of town, found the Norseman Highway and headed north for a new start in Kalgoorlie. I was about twenty five years old, single and sober. German blood pulsed in my veins. I was a man.