After the Gold Rush

Twenty-one Twenty-five

**Audio Version**

We buried the old lady this morning. Not really buried. She asked that we take her high up onto the mountain and leave her on a flat rock. Her last wish was to feed the eagles, their scraggly nest high in the branches of a dead gumtree away downslope. More likely she will feed the foxes, but there was little of her anyway. We carried her on a litter made of poles and precious old rope, there were four of us carrying, but two could have done it easy. Up that fire-scarred mountain, bristling with dead trees, themselves regrowth from an earlier time when people came here and cut every tree off this mountain to roast quartz for the gold hidden inside. We pass by the great stumps as we climb the rough slope. Weathered and sun-bleached, deeply textured in swirls, wrinkled like the skin of a great beast. Or blackened, scorched by a passing fire.

She was the last of them. The last of the people who lived ‘before’. That’s what she always told us. She told us that even though we have never known anything different, that there was a time when people had everything. Anything they wanted. They had machines called cars that took them anywhere they wanted to go, and fast. We know about cars. We see their rusty carcasses and painstakingly cut steel for to make new tools. We melt their wheels to make cooking pots¹. They had machines that made water cold. They had machines to make their houses cool. Everyone could talk to everyone else, even a long way away. She said people had enough to eat back then. In her last days, she showed us pictures in a book. She called them photos. All the people were fat. You could see the old lady, young and pretty, but fat. We all looked at each other and laughed. Our thin faces. Our rows of ribs. You couldn’t see whether the people in the photos had rib-bones, cos they all wore fancy new clothes. We looked down at our own clothes: rough, stained, brown, patched again and again.

The old lady, she never stopped being sad I don’t think. She said the world was beautiful when she was little. She said that the trees used to be huge and green; that the kangaroos hopped around by the hundred; that the mornings were noisy with birds. If we had hundreds of kangaroos, we would not be hungry. I think the world is beautiful now. When the day gets cool enough to go outside, and the sun is getting low in the west, the sky goes all red like blood. Then the night comes, and I get to go out.

We lay the old lady down on the rock, and we sang a song to the mountain and the sky. We called to the eagles that she had come for them, that in this hard-rock place that the least she could do was give herself back. Some of us cried a bit. We will go back up in half a year and gather her bones and put them in a crevice nearby. We sat and remembered what she told us: that her parents had seen the changes coming, and that, though they could not do anything to stop the change, they did what they could. She told us that the underground houses we retreat to when it gets too hot to breathe were cut into the rock by her family. How did they do that? For part of the year we can be outside in the daytime, and we take our bows and hunt on the mountain, or down on the plains. We have a few old rifles, but only a few bullets. We can’t use them for hunting. We have to save them.

The ground does not hurt our feet in the cool months. At other times, the rocks and sand burn you, and if we have to go out, we have to wear shoes made of some of the old black rubber things that their cars used to go on. We find them sometimes. Your feet still get hot, but at least you can walk. We mostly go out at dusk, nighttime or in the early morning. That’s when the animals are about. The hot ground hurts them too.

The underground houses are dark and cool. You enter through a courtyard full of green. Beds full of vegetables and a few fruit trees. Grape vines growing over the top for most of the year. The goats sit quietly in a pen in one corner, chewing their cud and sleeping, waiting for the day to cool enough to go out and graze. I like to take the goats, but sometimes we have to stay out all night, and walk a very long way to find them enough food. Usually we try to use the bright of the moon for grazing, and that can mean getting up way after midnight, but it’s nice, going out into the cool. As you walk, you can feel the warmer air on the rises, and the cool air in the valleys. There are not so many stars when the moon is out, but still it is very beautiful. In the hot times the courtyards are full of tiny birds. Pretty little wrens, honeyeaters and silver-eyes flit about in the shade. We love to see them, and sing songs to them. Mostly they live with us, and most of them have names. They make nests every year. Sometimes a kangaroo or an echidna comes in looking for cool or water. We have a rule. No matter how hungry we are, we never hurt such a visitor. We know that sometimes spirits disguise themselves as animals, and it would be very foolish to hurt such a one. We always leave out water for the birds and other visiting creatures. The old people say it is the purpose of our lives.

There are spirits around that you don’t want coming inside. We keep a couple of dogs because they can see them coming, and bark to warn us. Don’t try to sneak up on us, or our skinny, snarly dogs might take a piece out of you! The dogs are friendly though, and they keep the place clean, taking away the bones of our meals, and cleaning up after the little children.

The old people told us that they used to live in houses built above the ground. I’ve seen a few like that. And I’ve seen a lot of ruins too, over where the town used to be. Brick chimneys still standing, concrete posts. A few strange trees. That’s all that’s left there. Most got burned by fires. But they get too hot to live in anyway, unbearable on those glowering days when you can hardly breath and the wind feels like it will dry you to a crisp. Those are the days we dread fire. It might be cool again tomorrow, but we might not survive today. When you live underground, it’s always cool, and the fires, when they come, just sweep over the top of you. That happens every few years. You get good rain in the winter, and lots of grass. We try to get the animals to eat it down, but they never eat enough, and then there is lightning somewhere, and it all burns. There’s nothing we can do but hide somewhere safe, and make sure our animals are safe. Some of the old people made places for the wild creatures too. Sort of stone shelters where they could be in the shade and escape the flames. No-one could save the grass though. The creatures just have to starve or move until the rain comes again.

It’s cool as soon as you go inside the underground house, but even cooler further in, where we live, sleeping away long hours when it’s hot outside. Some of us make music or sing. When we are tired of sleeping, we make things. Clothes from camel wool or kangaroo skins. Some people make fancy clothes from the stalks of stinging nettle, painstakingly stripping the fibres out and twisting them into threads by rubbing along a bare thigh and then weaving them on a small loom.

When it rains, water runs through the houses and into a cistern cut into the rock, covered over with heavy wooden beams and slabs of stone. Sometimes it rains a lot, and our house gets flooded for a while, but that just makes us happy cos we know there will be lots of water out on the land and that we can travel further out to graze the goats or hunt. If it’s early in the cool time of year, we might be able to plant some barley, lentils or faba beans. Sometimes it rains all cool season and we can all work together, singing, to gather in the crop. Sometimes the rain stops too soon, and the plants wither. Then they are only good for the camels or the goats. We have never quite run out of water, but we have had to stop watering the courtyard plants, even though that means we might not have much to eat later. Down the hill there is a well. The water is a bit salty, but it’s alright for the animals. We never stop giving the goats water – they give most of it back in milk, and without the goats, I don’t know how we would live. Sometimes we have to send some young goats to another family who have lost theirs for some reason. Maybe they were stolen, or ate something poisonous, or were killed by a wild dog. We do this happily, not just because we get to go visiting, but because we know that one day we might need their help in return.

We live in a forest of food trees that the old people planted. There are olives, pistachios, walnuts, almonds, pomegranates, apricots, pears, nectarines and feijoas. And figs. Oh, the figs are good, and we dry them and dry them. More than once they have seen us through a bad year. In a good year, all the trees yield well, and we are able to live well. When the season is good, we go out early mornings and late evenings to check and harvest, gathering in as much as we can. The older people work back home to process the bounty, making pickles and dried fruit, wine and cider – we drink some of that, but mainly we make vinegar for pickles. Some of this we store in ancient glass jars from before. Some of it we store in fired clay pots that a neighbor makes. When the season is bad, we have to work too, making sure that we get everything we can, even if it’s only a tiny basketful. If it’s a really bad year we have to bring water from the well in pots and give it to the trees. The salt is bad for them, but what can we do? Without the water they might die. And then what would become of us?

The old people spent many years making dams of rock and logs on every little creek². The dams hold water back for a while after rain, and the birds and animals come to drink. Silt collects behind the dams, and every few years they had to build the dam up more. Behind these dams, the land is greener, and the trees are bigger. Some of the creeks run all year now. They never used to, not since the gold miners dug all the soil and caused it to wash away down the rivers. You can see the deep gullies here and there between the dams. If you fell in, you might break your neck. These running creeks the old people made are good. We can drink, and water the animals, and cool ourselves down as we roam out.

Away down by the river – half a day’s walk – they have more water, and better. We carry a load of fruit or olives down for them, and bring back wheat and maize. And sometimes fish. But their crops get washed away when a big storm hits somewhere upstream. We give them what we can. Just like they give us help when we need it.

When I was little, I sometimes heard the old people talking, late at night, when the campfire was burned down to glowing coals. There used to be a lot of people, back in the easy times. They said that there used to be ten times as many people. Not just here, but everywhere. But most of them died. Lots died in terrible heat, when the humidity rose too high and their sweat could not make them cool anymore³. They tried to work, but they just dropped dead. They died in their houses cos it was too hot. Millions of them in some places. The bodies just lay around. There were not even any dogs to eat them, because they were dead too. That’s what we heard. People died of hunger in other places. The rain didn’t come and the crops didn’t grow⁴. The people with food refused to share with the people who had none. We know all about crops failing: sometimes there’s just no rain; sometimes the crops are growing really well, but then a really hot day comes – a foot burning hot day – and they just die in one day. Or sometimes it’s a crazy-cold frost that burns off the blossoms on the fruit and nut trees, and makes the grain crops wilt like they have been cooked. But we have goats or camels to keep us alive. And the plants in the courtyard. Or we can hunt. Maybe in the old days people didn’t have enough goats? The old people survived of course, or none of us would be here, but they always felt a bit broken, like a part of them did really die back in those times. The old people told us we must always help a hungry person. But we know that they didn’t always do that. The old people talked about battles to protect these underground houses and forests of ours. I once saw a place with three human skulls lying on the ground so it’s true. No-one comes around trying to steal our food now. Anyway, we share what we have if someone comes.

Now that we have buried the old lady, all the old people are gone. It’s just us. The old people were funny. They were always running around trying to fix things. Trying to make things better. They told us that the Goddess lives in all things, but then they always wanted to change things. Like they didn’t think the Goddess is good enough. Maybe they all felt some sort of guilt about the changes? Like maybe if they worked hard enough, and worried enough, they might be able to bring back the good times. But they couldn’t. Except for the food forest and the houses. They did make things better for us. But we young people just know how to let the World be. Sure, we work hard when we need to, and we spend long days or nights out with the animals. We walk a long way to hunt, and then, if we are granted a kill, we struggle home carrying the gift to share. But we don’t want the World to be different. We have heard about all the animals and birds that are gone. All the people that are gone. But that was long ago. Now we care for our fellow creatures as best we can. We care for each other as best we can. We look after our trees and the seeds of our crops. We know that we owe that to our children.

1. Even now it is common to see alloy car parts melted down and cast into cooking pots in Africa.

2. The work of Peter Andrews and the Mulloon Institute. www.mullooninstitute.org

There are also some wonderful examples in Tigray, Ethiopia.

3. When humidity reaches 100 percent, and the air temperature approaches 35 degrees, humans (and most other mammals) are no longer able to cool themselves. Death can occur in only 20 minutes. The potential for such catastrophic events exists on the Sub-continent, Parts of Iran and the Arabian Peninsula, Lowland Mexico, parts of Brazil and Northern Australia. It is not just possible, but highly likely that mass casualty events will occur within the next decade in one or more of these places.

4. The global food system is a lot more fragile than it seems. Especially if you are poor. More on that soon.