Having enjoyed a comfortable upper middle-class upbringing in Adelaide and a lower in Melbourne, Arthur Ashwin had played truant from school to the point where his father, by then a Ballarat auditor, had him apprenticed as a coach builder. Unprepared to bow to authority, the fourteen-year-old took to the bush in the mid 1860s and roamed around Australia for decades thereafter.

 

 

Gold to Grass: The Reminiscences of Arthur C. Ashwin, 1850-1930, Prospector and Pastoralist

© 2002

Carlisle, W.A: Hesperian Press.

 

p 87. Hell’s Gate was a gap in the Great Dividing Range used as a shortcut from Cooktown to the Palmer River goldfields. Apart from being difficult to negotiate for laden horses and men, it afforded Aborigines and gold thieves – including Christie Palmerston, according to George Farwell – an ideal opportunity to ambush the prospectors; George Farwell, Ghost Towns of Australia, Seal Books (Adelaide: Rigby, 1969).

AA/43

AA and Bill Lamb found “large black” plums on Red Lily Lagoon which served as the only substitute for fresh vegetables. They didn’t succumb to scurvy so the fruit obviously saved the day. AA says the plumbs were similar to “the Burdekin Plum … near Charters Towers.”

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The Milner droving expedition was finally able to leave Red Lily Lagoon in March 1872 and found their way to a camp of 100 others near the Strangways where

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Todd the PMG took one look at them in their sorry state and had them re-clothed at the “Government Store”.

AA says that the “alligator [crocodile] will not come near a mob of men bathing, they are frightened of splashing and noise.”

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Story of Hume the confidence man who claimed to know the whereabouts of Classen from Leichhardt’s ill-fated 1848 expedition. Classen was said to be living with “blacks in the Newcastle Waters country …”

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Left Port Darwin September 1873 [the month gold was discovered on the Palmer River] for Adelaide along the WA coast in the schooner Mary King.

2 weeks becalmed in Cambridge Gulf (Wyndham Port) and ran out of water in (what was later to become – [it already was, I think]) Roebourne.

6 weeks in all to reach Fremantle, October 1873

Jack Masson had been with Francis Cadell in the NT [Victoria River, according to Ashwin and the ANU, the Liverpool River according to Wikipedia and the ANU as well as the Roper, ANU in 1867 when leading a SA gov’t expedition to locate a suitable site for the NT capital. Cadell suggested a site on the Liverpool River (West Arhhem Land)].

Ashwin teamed up with Masson in a gold prospecting endeavour and they were advised by Cadell that the squatters and WA gov’t would fit them out with the necessary supplies.

Ashwin and 3 other (Masson could not abide John Wheelan so pulled out) set off from Perth in Nov 1873 and reached Bishop Salvado’s mission in New Norcia, WA four days later.

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Prospecting the “granite country for tin” and camped at a station he can’t recall the name of

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and John Forrest came to the Ashwin camp seeking members of his planned 1874 expedition across the Kimberley to SA [Alexander Forrest went to the NT in 1879]. Ashwin declined, preferring to continue prospecting for gold.

“Sir John” told them about his exploring trip to Adelaide and Arthur recounted the Milner droving expedition when they followed the telegraph to Mount Stuart and from there “cut our own road to the Roper River” and met a group of whites “on the Port Darwin side” heading down the Roper to the Roper Landing for provisions. “Packard was in charge and he told us that 200 men were nearly starving on the line at the head of the Roper near the Bitter Springs.” Milner sold them 2000 sheep and saved their bacon, as it were, because “Packard could not get back with provisions till the wet season broke up.”

He goes on to tell the Red Lily Lagoon tale and John Forrest tells him that he should call to his Perth house when next in town.

They went to Peterwongy [Yalgoo https://www.legislation.wa.gov.au/legislation/prod/gazettestore.nsf/FileURL/gg1896_049.pdf/$FILE/Gg1896_049.pdf?OpenElement] on the Irwin River and bought beef from head stockman of the station there, Flash Harry, moving closer to Dongara [not far north of Port Denison] after Christmas Day at the Peterwongy camp.

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While in Dongara Joe Pettit went into Dongara for newspapers and provisions. Ashwin and his mates read in the papers that gold had been discovered on the Palmer River [i.e., just as Ashwin steamed out of Darwin the previous September, 1873].

So they returned to Perth via Mingenew, Coorow, a squatter’s wheat field and

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scrub fire that came close to killing them then back to the New Norcia mission where they returned the horses, walking via Guildford to “the Freemasons” in Perth during New Year celebrations after which Ashwin, without his two mates, took “Georgette mail steamer for Adelaide” en route to Cooktown.

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The mail steamer was laid up for repairs for a fortnight and during that time Ashwin played billiards with Walter James (later to be Sir Walter) and visited John Forrest who asked about gold on the Irwin and who then travelled from “the head of the Gasgoyne River” to Adelaide in that year, 1874.

He also caught up with Captain Cadell in Perth.

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[Prior to Mulligan finding gold on the Palmer in September 1873] William Hann “was taking 500 cows to Cape York for Jardine at Somerset, the Port there.” Jardine was establishing a station. Frank Hann was with William and “they camped on the Palmer River”. Frank “told his black boys” that he’d give a pound of tobacco to the first one to find gold and one of them did. Once they’d delivered the cattle William returned to Townsville (“Cleveland Bay at that time”) and told Mulligan that they’d found gold on the Palmer, and at where. It was at that place that “Mulligan found the first payable gold.”

Ashwin then changes horses and says Mulligan’s gold find was in March 1873 but wasn’t payable. Still, it was enough for entrepreneurs to establish businesses at Cooktown and

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from where they cut a road “to the lower Palmer.”

“After a few months a lot of Chinamen arrived and wanted to start gardens” at Palmerville, the town on the Palmer with Warden St George as the registered government authority. The warden had the local white diggers vote as to whether the Chinese could establish gardens there and they agreed. So, says Ashwin, the whites had only themselves to blame for the presence of the Chinese and the “Chinamen Warden.”

Initially, says Ashwin, the aborigines were not hostile as the prospectors moved further up the river in search of gold but when one lot helped themselves to fish cooking at an aboriginal encampment a white man was speared and trouble started with “a few blacks shot and after that the blacks were outlaws and murdered a white man whenever he got a chance. The Palmer natives were never civilised and bad to the present day [1929], what’s left of them.”

The best deposits of gold to be found on the Palmer were at Revolver Point which became Maytown (initially named Edwardstown, the warden then named it after his daughter) with with a butchery established by Leslie, Tupp and Edwards.

May 1874 – Ashwin arrived in Cooktown where he “bought an old horse and pack saddle and loaded up nearly two hundred of tucker and started out with a party from Goolgon [Gulgong?] and Home Rule.” They came to “Tom O’Shanicy”’s pub and store and Ashwin later encountered this “O’Shanicy” and his wife (“the Black Cockatoo, a splendid business woman and a good woman”) at Normanton in 1886-or-7 and met the couple again at Coolgardie, WA, in 1893.

Pressing on alone after his party mates German Jack and Joe Archer set up a store and shanty on the river, he came upon Bill and Tom Masters whom he’d known in Darwin (prior to leaving in Sep 1873) and, his old horse having died, joined them.

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At Hell’s Gates they were anxious about Ashwin having seen an aborigine, anxious because the climb through the gap would leave them vulnerable to attack because “it’s here that the niggers speared a lot of diggers from the top of the rocks. … they speared a lot of Chinamen here, after the Chows got in the country thick. The niggers used to take them away prisoners and tie them up like we would sheep, and kill and eat them as they wanted [when they] run out of meat. … I remember one time after the niggers made a raid on a lot of Chinamen and murdered a few, they took three prisoners away alive. The black trackers got on to them in two or three days after the raid and they got one Chinaman alive who told the leader that they made him eat some of his brother.”

Ashwin goes on to detail the smell of dead horses on a steep narrow part of the track, horses that’d fallen down the steep incline and the smell of two diggers who’d died as well.

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They found some gold, lost a good quality horse purchased in Cooktown over a precipice and went to Maytown for provisions only to find it deserted because of a gold find at Oaky Creek. Then three of their remaining horses died from eating poison bush, “Turpentine grass”.

They had one old horse left and loaded it up with supplies and went to Oaky Creek where they found “three thousand men camped on three miles of the creek.”

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“The big majority of the men on Oaky Creek on gold were Irishmen”. A friend of Bill Masters told them that “Jessop, Bill Smith and Black Bill” had something going in a gully 7 odd mile away so they went there, subsequently known as “Jessop’s Creek”. Ashwin, a day behind his two mates because he’d gone to fetch the horse and had trouble locating it, was offered a tip by someone doing well at Jessop’s Creek but he opted to stay with the Masters brothers and that proved his downfall. The site he’d been offered proved much more successful for those who worked it but he’d not staked a claim.

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Jessop made a lot of money and went to Cooktown where he “killed himself with drink and was buried there.”

See the anecdote about Bill Smith and Jessop’s funeral.

News of gold finds came in regularly, including that at Pine Creek.

“The butchering businesses were the best gold mines on the Palmer.” The Maytown butchers also opened a butchery at Oaky Creek.

See the description of how Jones went about the business, making a success of it until, a pastoralist on the “next river up past the Normanby” he

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“got a little black boy from the police …” This, said matter-of-factly, makes clear just how uncontroversial such practices were, the boy being “about six years old” and from a tribe that the black-trackers of the Native Police had been amongst.

More stories of gold diggers being killed by the Palmer River aborigines and reprisals from the “black trackers and a few diggers … [such as] Christy Palmerston” “gave that tribe a severe punishing. Christy Palmerston … was a terror to the blacks in his day all over the Palmer.”

The story of a mob of Irishmen who sought to bully Ashwin and the Masters brothers from their Jessop Creek claim.

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The area around Jessop’s Creek yielded good gold “all the way up the creek to the head and well manned. 92

The butcher was killing two and three bullocks a day.” The “niggers speared a lot … speared twelve horses one night, all belonged to one packer …[at] the head of Sandy Creek …”

Ashwin “was one of the first to see the dead horses.” The aborigines were apparently killing, gutting and eating them.

“Two diggers … out prospecting” came upon an aborigines’ camp with about 50 natives there and raced back to their own camp to report the fact. Ashwin and Bill Masters were all for ‘dispersing’ the blacks there and then but when the others wanted to wait until morning Ashwin and his mate weren’t interested, assuming the natives would have de-camped by then.

[Packers are those who packed supplies on horses and sold them to diggers on the goldfield.]

“The packer that owned the twelve horses did not hear about them until three o’clock, it was a hard knock to him, things like this makes the white man hard on the blacks.”

Thieves haunted the diggers’ camps, digging up their tents in search of buried gold while they were out prospecting.

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“There are a lot of bad characters at all the main camps at all the creeks and a two-up school going every day.”

Sunday’s “the main day for business at all the butchers shops … and the speilers have their day.” One had to be wary of being mugged. Ashwin relates having been followed by two men while he walked with “about three pound weight of gold on my belt.”

To break even a digger had to earn one pound (in money, presumably) a day for tea, flour, sugar, painkillers and horse-shoe nails (whether he wanted them or not because the packer would not sell flour unless one purchased horseshoe nails that he needed to offload because of weight).

Three weeks before Christmas [1874 – six months after Charco was renamed Cooktown from Cook’s Town] they headed for “Cooktown to have a month’s spell and recruit our health on good tucker, fish and vegetables and see all the sport and a few glasses of beer.” The three of them shared out their gold, amounting to 80 ounces each and squared any debts (eg., the loss of horses on the turpentine grass, their packs which had been stored at Maytown having gone missing) with one another. The Chinese had more or less taken over “the Palmer River for forty miles down to the lower Palmer and started working the river for a long way below the township Palmerville.”

Plenty of other diggers were heading to Cooktown for a Christmas break and they fell in with the Macquarie brothers, formerly shearers from NSW who now had “twenty pack horses and two riding horses. … The blacks murdered them both on their last trip at Hell’s Gates,

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they had been packing so long up and down that they got careless and the blacks got on to them in their camp coming up with their last load.”

Cooktown had its first race meeting on New Year’s Day 1875. “There was a good market for horses in Cooktown and every week a lot came in by boats.”

Rather than purchase stores in Cooktown and run the risk and expense of transporting them, Ashwin and the Masters brothers decided to purchase from packers on the goldfield upon their return.

They met up with men they’d known in Darwin in 1872 and returned to the goldfields, calling at “Tom O’ Shanicy’s” public house and store en route. “O’Shanicy” built a pub at Normanton to exploit the Croydon gold rush of 1886.

After O’Shanicy left Coolgardie after misfortune and Ashwin never heard or what became of him again.

Compare the final paragraph’s description of the Chinese with heavy loads and Astley’s remark at the top of p24.

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After returning to the Palmer River goldfields via Hell’s Gate (see the bookmarked web pages) Ashwin and the Masters brothers ran into D’arcy Uhr at Sandy Creek. They had known him in Darwin. Uhr, broke, was sub-contracting to the packers, selling their wares on “good commission so as they can get back for another load.” He’d set up a “bough shed” store with a large tent behind, which tent he’d borrowed from a packer and was doing a good trade in horseshoes and horseshoe nails.

“Uhr had a lot of go in him. He went to Jones the butcher and got him to let him have ten bullocks on time payment to start on Limestone Creek.” According to Uhr, he soon outdid the existing butcher, the Duffs, and was doing well. D’arcy’s brother, Bill, died of fever [malaria?] at Palmerville.

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Many died of fever on the Palmer goldfields.

Ashwin and the Masters left “Uhr on Sandy Creek” [and] went on to Fine Gold Creek” where they encountered a poor sod who’d been incapacitated by dysentery and was lying in his own filth for three weeks. They cleaned up and fed and watered him, noting that a couple of Irishmen nearby had done nothing to help the poor blighter. He died within days and his mate told Ashwin that the fellow had 200 ounces of gold when he left Pine Creek. The “Warden and police got the lot and nothing said about it.” Thieves took his four horses.

“There was a lot of horse stealing and horse planting going on all over the field, around Cooktown was the worst. Lots of packers had to watch their horses half the night when down for a load.”

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Few diggers were working Fine Gold Creek – most were at Limestone Creek [which makes one wonder why D’arcy Uhr was at Sandy Creek when he claimed to have been doing a roaring trade at Limestone Creek? Answer is on p99; i.e., “He kept the Limestone shop going as well.”]

Ashwin met the Galloper, a delusional fantasising digger known to many, about a mile up a tributary creek to Fine Gold Creek. He too was suffering from the fever and had taken too much quinine.

Jack Edwards the butcher was looking after the Galloper’s gold and, according to Ashwin was honest, acting in the Galloper’s interest.

Tom Masters had the fever and when recovered somewhat had nursed his brother Bill and then Ashwin who both went down with it.

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A horseman rode up and over dinner told them about finding gold in a gully “coming out of the Pinnacle hill at the head of White Horse Creek.” He then headed for Fine Gold Creek and Bill said he knew the fellow, Martin, to be a horse thief and didn’t believe the Pinnacle hill tale. Martin went on a drinking binge at Fine Gold Creek, had the DTs and suicided.

Too ill to dig, Ashwin made for Palmerville and stayed at a pub run by a Chinaman. A Chinese doctor lived next door. Other boarders at the pub also had the fever and the Chinese publican said customers with fever ate too much and Ashwin notes that he did in fact eat a lot more when ill with fever.

The “Chinese doctor put me right in a few weeks.” He stayed 6 weeks and then set about returning to the upper Palmer. His horse bucked and shook him and he went down with fever again.

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The horse was sick, “very bad” with “wind”. [Colic?] Jack Edwards helped him “drench the mare” with saltpetre and gin “and in ten minutes the mare blew the wind off and was all right again.”

Mulligan was rumoured to have struck a rich vein of gold on the quiet so D’arcy Uhr set off to find him, convincing 100 men to accompany him. He took bullocks and made good money keeping the accompanying diggers in meat. So it was dubbed the Beef rush. The diggers found a relatively rich vein of gold on one branch of a creek and Mulligan was on the other, where there was little gold.

“Mulligan’s party had had a pitched battle with the blacks when they started to prospect the they were in. The blacks showed fight and stood their ground till a few of them were shot. One of Mulligan’s men or mates got speared and three horses.” Byerstown was formed further up the creek after Johnny Little and Johnny Byers opened a butcher shop there.

D’arcy Uhr returned to the more prosperous branch of the creek and set up a more permanent camp, bringing in more bullocks. “He kept the Limestone shop going as well.”

Ashwin’s other horse, Happy Jack, then went down with the wind gripes and he administered the saltpetre and gin remedy.

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He took up with a party of five and paid for the meat for all of them but only the African American among them was a capable fossicker. He “was as black as a sloe and the whitest man in the camp.”

Then he went looking for the Pinnacle that Martin the horse thief had claimed to be likely to yield plenty.

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He’d given up but decided to try the deep gully and there struck it rich. Old Ned the African American did well

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Ashwin met up with a good group of co-operative men and they took on another fellow who turned out to be thieving their gold so they moved him on and continued to work together, heading to Cooktown for stores at one point. They took the Byerstown route and came upon D’arcy Uhr and his brother Ned at their butcher’s shop. Ned had gone blind at the Normanby River. He had a Kanaka and an Aboriginal boy working for him.

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They continued down from Byerstown to Cooktown and in a “twelve mile” stretch of “basalt tableland … the road was stinking with dead Chinamen carried off the road and left to rot.” They’d died from fever that carried of a great number of them.

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On the return journey Ashwin called in to see D’arcy Uhr again. A town was forming around his shop. Ashwin then gives an account of why smoking cigarettes is good for the health, keeping plague (like that which carried off the Chinese diggers) away.

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“Ashwin’s mate, telling him there was a snake on his forehead, lay still until it droped off and Ashwin killed it. It had been a foot long death adder which, had the mate, J Cairns, tried to knock it off would have bitten and killed him.

They heard gunfire and it turned out to be an aboriginal camp of 100 or more who’d been fired upon by black trackers. [Native Police]

“There were two large fires still alight where the trackers had burnt the dead bodies. We heard afterwards that the blacks had murdered and eaten three Chinamen packers and the police had tracked the niggers up and got onto them here on the Mitchell River fall We were very lucky the trackers were ahead of Cairns and I, and cleaned this bit of country of the blacks.”

After they “got a fair bit of gold” from the gullies in the vicinity, they “then went back down the river to Uhr’s butcher’s shop … [and] pitched our camp. Darcy Uhr told us a yarn, he had been out shooting niggers and was only back a couple of days. Darcy’s account of his trip: ‘There was a Chinaman murdered on the main Palmer River just above the junction of the right hand branch and the niggers cut his head off and stuck the head on a broken spear and stuck it up on a rocky bar on the

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river. They carried his body away to eat. The murdered man’s brother came to D’arcy Uhr and offered him 50 [pound sterling] to follow the niggers up and shoot a lot of them. The Chinaman offered to go with him. Uhr got another good nigger man to go with him.”

They shot a number of aborigines but the Maytown Warden heard of it “through the Chinaman and some of the police made enquiries about it and tried Darcy Uhr for taking the law in his own hands and punishing the natives for the murder without permission from him, the Warden. It all fell through and Uhr was acquitted.”

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Christy Palmerston, leading a party of diggers, passed Ashwin and his mates en route to the Hodgkinson goldfield which Mulligan had reported after Billy McLeod said the field (which he’d found) wasn’t worth the effort to report. Gunshots were heard and then Ashwin’s group saw dead aborigines and realised “Palmerston’s party had come on a camp of niggers and dispersed them.”

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More on Darcy Uhr’s money making in butcher’s shops, including undercutting competitors. Ashwin believed Uhr had made a lot of money from his butcher shop enterprise.

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Ashwin’s mates went south but Ashwin chose to stay another year on the Palmer goldfields. Lambing Flat Bill was a dubious loner whom Ashwin was convinced was waiting for Ashwin to die so as to get his gold when Ashwin was deliriously ill with fever [malaria]

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A ‘hatter’ on the goldfields is “being without mates”.

With Ottaway, Cairns and his other mates down south, Ashwin took up with Cairns’ Aramac mate, Ted Bolger and also illiterate but honest Jimmy Power (and Irishman) on the Hodgkinson [west of Mt Molloy] about 15 miles from Byerstown.

They used gunpowder to blast “a race” and this brought a Canadian, Bill Rogers, to see what was afoot. Ashwin knew Rogers from elsewhere.

A “lot of Chinamen” turned up with a couple of English-speaking overseers and a civil conversation ensured whereby the Chinese team agreed to a boundary beyond which they might not encroach on the Ashwin claim.

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Ashwin employed some Chinamen from a makeshift Chinese town where the butcher was the go-to person for English speakers. The Chinese labourers “knew more about the game [of baling water from an enclosure] than we did.”

Once the Chinese labourers were no longer required by Ashwin they set up a fishing successful enterprise for diggers to purchase fresh fish.

That attracted increasing numbers of Chinese diggers whom Ashwin had to bluff to prevent them moving in on his territory.

At one stage it came to a showdown with an English speaking overseer in charge of a large group of Chinese diggers demanded Ashwin relinquish some of his claim.

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Ashwin’s group brought out their rifles and revolvers, threatened the overseer that anyone trespassing on the claim would be shot but relinquished about “a quarter of a mile” further up the creek.

Ashwin went to Byerstown seeking police protection from Warden Hill [p 114] but was told none was available and to “take the law into your own hands” if the Chinese encroached. In time Warden Hill and the police arrived at Ashwin’s camp and “rolled the Chinaman up in their China town. Warden Hill was very hard on the Chow and made every Chow take out a miners right that could not produce one on demand.”

Within a two weeks the Canadian had packed up and gone to Byerstown and a short time after that so did Ashwin and his mates.

They then went to Hurricane Gorge and Deadman’s Creek “which I and Cairns had named, where the trackers got onto the niggers.”

They decided to share out their gold, accounting for expenses, and “it panned out thirty-seven ounces each” for 4 month’s work. “[W]e ran a big risk of losing our lives getting it, with the Chow, for two-thirds of them were the scum of China and nearly all criminals before they left China.”

[Watson (p 135) quotes Ashwin, here, as do I, but it might be read as referring only to those in the mob that threatened them at the site 15 mile from Byerstown. Whatever, the case, Ashwin must presumably have been told this by someone and took it at face value because he’d have no way of knowing about the members of one specific mob or of many mobs. It’d be goldfield talk.]

Which now turns out to be the case:

“Going into Byerstown one trip I rode alongside of a Chinaman, a well educated naturalised British subject. I travelled with him for about ten miles, he told me that most of the boss Chows had gone home from here with a lot of gold and had engaged tens and twenties of the scum of China at one shilling a week, their passage out and their poll tax and their rice, under agreements for twelve months all the gold they got belonged to the boss and after the twelve months was up they all went on their own. He said Australia had lost hundreds of thousands of ounces of gold that would have been spent in Australia which went to China, and nearly half of it smuggled there. He told me he was buying gold for a syndicate of wealthy Chinamen in Victoria.”

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Ashwin goes on with a report of returning to Fine Gold Creek only to find it overrun with “Chinamen”. They pushed them off and set up another boundary. When the Chinese objected Ashwin and his mates “burnt two of their tents” and sent them on their way.

But the gold they panned was “not worth fighting Chows over”. The Chinese had set up a town with a butchery and Ashwin went to purchase a cwt of the standard – boned and in 20 lb cuts. Instead of salting the beef as he normally did Ashwin headed back in very hot weather because “I did not feel too comfortable amongst two or three hundred Chows. My road was out along a lane about twenty feet wide of gambling dens and opium dens for about two hundred yards, all grass thatched walls and roofs.”

A bullet whizzed past his head and he reckoned to have seen the smoke from the firearm in question so he moved on quickly, leaving the goldfield to the Chinese and heading to Byerstown where he and Power took lodging in a pub run by Burr, a “Yankee” who mixed powerful cocktails that were too much for Power.

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Ashwin was done with the Palmer goldfields and prepared to head south. He stayed at Ned Uhr’s butcher shop on the way down and Uhr, too, was ready to sell and move south. Ashwin met tin miners at Granite Creek. Months earlier, Ashwin and the Masters brothers had told a pair of old diggers where they could get tons of tin and when he met up with them on the Croydon goldfield they were running a store and told Ashwin they’d followed his advice about the tin and had made “a lot of money out of it and sold out to their other two mates … [who] made a large fortune out of it”.

Ashwin notes that had he been more far-sighted he too could have been retired and on easy street.

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Ashwin camped with Darcy Uhr at his Oaky Creek butcher shop. Uhr was doing well with his butcher’s shop and a store.

Use the excellent information about D’arcy Uhr and his wife when relating the story of Jessica Olve in Port Douglas and also later when in East Kimberley for the Emanuel Forrest connection.

Ashwin’s story of Darcy Uhr then unfolds.

News of Bill Rogers the Canadian being arrested by the Warden’s police and charged with murder of a Chinese man. Rogers was to stand tgrial “in Cooktown for wilful murder.”

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Ashwin sells up and rides to Cooktown where he runs into Rogers, out on bail and assured by his lawyer that he’d been acquitted – which was the case.

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Rogers soon owned “the two best hotels in Cooktown turning in a good rent and four private houses, also two schooners on the pearling and Island trade …”

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Notebook Number Two

Second Book on the Experience of Hurst’s Party prospecting in WA from 1892 to 1902

Ashwin was leader. He left Port Adelaide in 1892 on an old steamer which he couldn’t recall the name of. Many on board “all bound for the Cue and [Mt] Magnet and Annean [Nannine, Meekatharra] goldfields. He teamed up with “William Hurst, Henry Fisher and William Sprowl” (an Orangeman) from Yancannia Station in NSW in “Wilcannia district on the Darling River” whom he met aboard the steamer and from Fremantle, WA, they took a boat to Bunbury and back “before leaving for Geraldton” where he arrived with only “£4 and went to a boarding house kept by the Dignans” while Hurst and Fisher “put up at the Club Hotel, it was run then by a widow woman and her two daughters with a manager I afterwards struck on Lake Darlot in 1897, by the name of

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Jack Wild.”

Sprowl “put up at some other boarding house in Geraldton.”

Martin Mulcahy, an illiterate Irishman who’d been a coal miner before working at the Broken Hill mine and prospecting there with Tom Masters, lent Ashwin £5 for the fare to Cue in order that Ashwin “go mates with him” so they might leave straight away rather than wait while Ashwin worked up the fare at Dongara (64 km south along the coast from Geraldton).

En route to Cue, Ashwin showed his mates how granite country suggested tin was to be found and went about panning to demonstrate. He found some “tannic iron and there is a lot of it in the tin wash around Herberton tin fields in Queensland” so reckoned there’d be tin in the vicinity. From there they went on to Mullewa [wildflower country where the wreath flower grows].

“The long drought had just broken up and the feed was just out of the ground two or three inches all along the Murchison.”

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While camped Ted Claudius (whom Ashwin had known in Normanton) appeared. A brumby stallion turned up and drove one of Claudius’ two packhorse mares away.

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Catholic-Protestant motif

Irish-Catholic Noonan and Scots-Irish Sprowl (a blacksmith) shared a bottle of whisky around the campfire and then took to fighting; they were best mates after sobering up the next morning.

Wild dogs force lone digger heading to Cue to retrace his steps and camp with Ashwin’s team.

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“There was a lot of gold got in the Day Dawn gully, the second workings.” Day Dawn was part of the Cue goldfield.

Ashwin tried to teach his mate how to ‘dryblow’, much to the amusement “of old dryblowers here from the north-west fields”.

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Tom Masters turned up at the Cue campsite near Ashwin. He’d missed the opportunity to become very wealthy when turning down the offer to continue with his mates Arthur Bayley and Ford when they left Geraldton for Southern Cross. Bayley and Ford struck it rich in Coolgardie after a naïve pair of prospectors who’d found it tipped them off before staking a claim. Bayley went and looked, found rich pickings, and pegged it.

Meanwhile, the Peak Hill goldrush began and Ashwin and his mates went there after Sprowl made their mining tools at Ned Heffernan’s Day Dawn forge. Heffernan had found gold at Day Dawn and was approached by two men, Fitzgerald and Tom Cue – the latter being the fellow who found the gold which became the field and then the town. But Fitzgerald took the gold they’d found and when Cue sued in Geraldton he lost and had to pay costs.

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Southern Cross “was lively, lots of people and teams travelling through for Coolgardie.”

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From Southern Cross to Coolgardie on a “spring dray” which had a dodgy axle. Many travellers (“teams and carts and trucks and wheel-barrows”, all heading for Coolgardie on a “single file” road. It being winter, there was enough water but in summer there wasn’t enough.

143

1892: Ashwin, Hurst, and Harry Fisher moved to Hannans (Kalgoorlie) and “started to look for a bit of gold.”

144

“There was only one store in Hannans and a party making galvanised tanks to buy water and sell again. … We had no way of storing water and could not buy a tank for love nor money.” So Hurst camped at Boulder’s red lake claypan “with the horses and dray and cart[ed] water to us.”

Ashwin fashioned a water barrel that “held two hundred gallons” from “hollow gum trees growing just below where the Town Hall is now at the bottom of Hannan Street “and another … which held seventy gallons.”