Field of Thunder

By John McGregor

Field of Thunder is a work of historical fiction and high adventure
based primarily on the exploits of Lewis Lasseter, a prospector and
explorer who in the early 1930s held Australia and much of the world
enthralled.
He had recounted the tale of having discovered a fabulous reef of near-
pure gold in the central australian desert some thirty years before and
thereby caught the attention of a nation.
Day by day the media of the period followed the progress of the best
equipped expedition ever to enter central australia as it sought to
relocate the reef. The unfolding gloom of the Great Depression was
briefly forgotten in favour of Lasseter, the Robin Hood of the day, as
he and the expedition sought to relocate this fabulous treasure.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Jul 20, 2015
• ISBN: 9781483557151

Book preview

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Chapter one

The night was cold, bitterly cold, and although the huge, crackling bonfire before them brought sweat to their brows, their backs, even draped as they were with the thick canvas of their swags, were chilled to the bone. Every few minutes they would reverse their positions, backs to the fire with swags up under their chins until their clothing began to scorch. It was hard to recall that just a few short hours ago, right up to the last of the fiery sunset, it had been unbearably hot; a hundred and twenty or more degrees in the shade. The sand and the gibbers kept their heat for an hour or so after the sun had gone but thereafter it was cold, bloody cold!

It’s no good, I’m going to have to turn in! This roundabout business isn’t doing my back any good at all. John Chambers was the older of the two mates who had spent the majority of the past ten years together in the bush, always in pursuit of the elusive yellow metal that fuelled their ‘gold fever’.

Yeah, might as well. It’s a bloody foolish tryin’ to keep warm this way.

George Fogden had far less staying power than his older companion and needed no convincing to take an easy way out.

Fully clad, the pair selected a spot on either side of the declining blaze and wriggled their way into the blanket-lined canvas envelopes that were their swags. As the fire settled down into a barely discernible glow the levels of consciousness of the two friends reduced to a steady snore, each lost in dreams of the El Dorado that awaited them ‘tomorrow’.

Beyond the furthest limits of the fire’s glow, clad only in the bands of wallaby skin about their foreheads and in waistbands woven from animal sinew and grass stems, the band of Myall renegades waited patiently for the white intruders to sleep. Each of the dozen or so young warriors were smeared from head to foot with putrid emu fat to ward off the cold and a handful of dust thrown over this to dull the glint of starlight reflected from their lithe bodies.

‘Myalls’, in the definition of the day, were nothing more sinister than young males, banished from their respective family groups in order to make their own way.

They roamed the country, always in search of a woman to make their own, whilst hunting and supporting each other meanwhile. Generally they were ignorant of the white man and of his ways and influences, but there were exceptions.

During the 1800s, throughout the north and northwest of the country, bands of such warriors, free of the influence of tribal laws and that of the Elders, mercilessly raided family groups and small tribes. They carried off the young women, having slaughtered other men, women and children in their wake.

The relatively few groups of white people who made their way into these remote lands proved easy prey to these same marauding bands, their few possessions a source of wonder beyond imagining.

Silent, unmoving, they watched the now-sleeping men. Poised on alternate legs, their weight balanced against the eight foot long spears that never left their hands, they sniffed the night breezes. Ornately carved waddies of mulga wood rested in their waistbands, ready to leap to their hands the instant the spears were launched.

For better than two hours now they had held their position, then, simultaneously They began their advance on the sleeping whites. There was no signal, no command for like a flock of wheeling birds, all moves were instinctive; there was no leader, no lieutenants. Step by cautious step, pausing only to listen and to sample the scents borne on the gentle desert breezes, they advanced in near total silence. A patch of unusually coarse sand creaked beneath their bare, calloused feet so they skirted it. One of the old prospectors groaned in his sleep – they froze immobile for fully twenty minutes before resuming the stealthy advance. Five yards from the soft glow of the campfires embers they paused momentarily then encircled the sleeping targets, intense hatred upon each of their ochre painted faces as they selected their mark. As one, the spears silently flew, burying the wicked barbs in the sleeping bodies. Fire hardened wood passed right through the recumbent bellies, pinning their owners to the ground. John Chalmers died instantly as a spear entered his right eye and exited near his spine.

His companion was not so fortunate and woke screaming to the agony of a half dozen spears quivering in his chest and abdomen. With blood curdling yells the attackers fell upon their victims with waddies swinging, reducing skulls to a bloody mess of bone and grey brain matter.

Fossicking briefly for anything that might be edible, the troupe ransacked the camp, ignoring those things that might have value to a white man, seeking only items of ornamentation and sustenance. They ignored such things as water bottles and firearms simply because they did not comprehend their purpose. The nearby jangle of a bell reminded them of the hobbled horses and pack mules grazing nearby. Failing to appreciate the working of hobbles, they turned their attention to stalking the animals with the same stealth they had employed against their fallen masters. The horses whinnied uneasily as the smell of the emu fat carried to them on a wind shift, unaware that they had only minutes to live.

*

Lewis and his father had been weeks without human contact when they cut across the tracks of two shod horses and three mules heading north. They had been prospecting the Collurabbie Hills area, fifty miles south of Lake Carnegie, when diminishing water supplies had driven them northwest where there was known to be good water in soaks along the Banjo Creek. The days had become stinking hot as summer moved ever closer, and Howard had already resolved to break for the southwest and Leonora once their water had been replenished. This was no place for man or beast during the summer months.

Howard had elected to follow the tracks for a day or two, as they were headed in more or less the same direction and the prospect of some human contact was appealing. Lewis quietly marvelled, not for the first time, at his easy familiarity with this land and his almost instinctive navigational ability. The boy had lost all sense of direction weeks ago.

Around midday of the second day of following the shod tracks, an hour or so short of putting down for a nap during the worst heat of the day, Howard became uneasy. Dismounting and bidding Lewis to do the same, he pointed out some footprints that, in honesty, the boy had not even noticed before.

You see, boy, the prints are all roughly the same size and depth into the sand. I’d reckon a party of aborigines of roughly the same weight and age. There are no prints of women, kids nor hint of older folk. The group is spread out in a ‘V’ formation, which is a hunting party’s ploy and I’ve noticed that they appear to be following the same course as our shod horse friends. They re-mounted and an hour or so later Howard again pulled up and pointed out a large spiralling flock of birds some distance ahead.

Crows and eagles, by the looks, well up ahead. Maybe they shot a ‘roo’ for lunch and left the remains for the birds but there’s too many of them! Looks like trouble, boy, I’d bet good money on it! Make sure your gun is fully loaded and have some spare cartridges at hand. Stay well behind me and keep your eyes wide open. Howard stood in his stirrups and urged his horse into a faster walk, gazing all about as he headed towards the birds’ point of interest.

An hour later they came across the bloated remains of two horses and three mules. All five animals were still hobbled and each had been killed by a multitude of spear wounds. The broken shafts of several spears protruded from two of the bodies, caught by the barbs that had defied their owner’s efforts to withdraw them. Two great wedge tailed eagles continued to feed, defiant of the approach of the newcomers.

The change that came over Howard was terrible to see. He quickly drew his shot gun from its scabbard and cocked it, shouting at Lewis to do the same. The boy complied, an icy knot gripping his bowels as curiosity turned to real fear. Howard’s eyes scanned urgently about.

Stay here! he shouted. Keep that bloody gun at the ready and don’t hesitate to use it! There’s been murder done here and the bastards that did it may still be about.

Lewis watched in uncertainty and fear as his father rode slowly towards a second group of haggling crows, their larger wedge tailed cousins maintaining surveillance from above. The older man dismounted in the distance and despite the heat of the day, removed his hat as he knelt on one knee beside an object on the ground. He stood, cupping his hands to his mouth and called for his son to join him.

Howard would have preferred to spare his son the dreadful, grizzly sight that lay before him, but the boy had to come to terms with the savagery of this land and these bodies needed to be buried.

Lewis rode up beside him and dismounted, still unaware of just what his father was looking at. He walked closer to one of the two swag-wrapped bundles, realisation suddenly flooding over him. He fled the awful scene and threw up until he thought he might die. He had never seen a dead person before and for so long as he lived, he prayed that he would never see another like these.

They buried the corpses where they lay, still in the canvas shrouds they died in. Howard found personal papers near the looted tuck box that might serve to identify the two men. He would later hand these to the troopers at Leonora. That night they sat silently back to back, freezing under the stars with guns at the ready, anxiously watching and listening for the murderer’s return. Lewis grimly reflected on his father’s teachings: The seemingly stupid daily ritual of selecting a secure camp site now made perfect sense. Men could be murdered in their beds out here! The extra miles of back-tracking in the heat, of reading the tracks in the sand, the deviating to higher ground for a bloody good look about, this was the real school of life and the lessons here were worth learning. For the first time in over a year, his thoughts returned to Adelaide.

Chapter two

Right, you goggle-eyed little bastard, hand it over…now! Lennie Rose, the bigger and heavier of the two, had taken hold of Lewis’s tie, screwed it tightly under his chin and lifted so that his feet barely touched the wet grass.

Now! he screamed again into the bloodied, grass-stained face as he twisted the knot even tighter. Lewis lowered his defiant gaze and allowed his body to relax, just as Marty had tutored him.

You’ve got ‘im now yelled one of the Form Five gallery.

Give ‘im one in the nuts for good luck yelled another.

The youthful bloodlust subsided as the victim was released and dropped to the ground, his nose streaming scarlet down the front of his torn shirt and muddied blazer. The aggressor stood over him, fists bunched threateningly as Lewis, unable to suppress the occasional sob, reached into his hip pocket and removed the shiny new wallet. He slowly stood before his tormentor and offered the prize, held high at arm’s length before him. As the bully reached forward, Lewis lashed out with his right foot, catching him full between the legs with the heavy boot, smashing the unprotected testicles. The older boy doubled up, the vomit already rising in his throat.

This was just the beginning of the plan. Lewis stood his ground. The now mute onlookers stared in disbelief as the stricken bully lurched forward, clutching his crushed organs with stars bursting all about him. Lewis grabbed a handful of hair with each of his hands and again, summoning all his strength, pulled the head down and brought his knee up into the bully’s face. The sound of snapping teeth is something the assembled pack would never forget. The toppled aggressor lay sobbing, retching and writhing in the mud, his blood and vomit adding colour and horror to the scene.

At that precise moment, even as Lewis returned his prized birthday present to his pocket, the senior sports master, ‘Killer’ Carney, rounded the corner.

Right, you chaps, stand where you are! What’s going on here?

Two days later, suitcase in hand, Lewis was again confronting his mother and attempting to explain this latest expulsion.

Lewis was not an aggressive person by nature, yet for all of his young life he had been required to defend himself against attack in one form or another. Until this latest episode, his naive fisticuffs had proved abortive and he invariably ended up the victim. Attracted by his small size and unusual looks, school bullies were drawn to him like flies to honey.

One of the Form Six boys, Martin Osborne, had taken an inexplicable deep and personal interest in young Lewis and among other extra curricular activities, had tutored him in defending himself in the manner of the streets.

The felling of the school bully was the best result of this tutoring. Deserving of less applause was his resultant expulsion from school and the threat of a civil damages suit from enraged parents who heard only their beloved’s side of the story.

The academic side of school was just too slow for a lad of Lewis’ intellect. The answers to questions posed by the Masters were so transparently obvious that he could scarce be bothered listening to them. This was not a deliberate act, but the unconscious result of having an I.Q. orbiting realms of which educators would be unaware for another fifty years.

Accordingly, his examination results were abysmal, whilst his comprehension was formidable. Lewis was, in short, a very clever young man, though a dreamer and impatient to a fault. His attributes would never be reflected in any sort of tertiary qualification, yet they, together with his character traits, would come to rule his life.

Science subjects, principally chemistry, geology and physics, were his very dear love. Perhaps this was a gift from his father, trained civil engineer and life long professional prospector, who he barely knew, yet loved dearly.

As expected, his mother ‘hit the roof’ at his sudden unscheduled return from boarding school. What was she to do with a child about the house? How could she have a life? There was just no room in her busy social sphere. His father would just have to make some other arrangement!

Howard Lasseter was at that moment a thousand miles away, blissfully unaware of any domestic discord concerning his son, and so remote he might well have been on the surface of the moon.

He had decided years ago in fact within weeks of having wed the lovely Margaret that a life of domesticity was not for him. Little Lewis was a wedding present that neither party planned nor wanted at the time.

The lure of the desert with its uncomplicated life style and the constant promise of fabulous riches had infected Howard badly. He was a fair geologist and better prospector. He worked alone and knew how to live off the land like the natives. More importantly, he knew how to find water where others would perish.

His discovery of gold in the Northern Territory in the early 1880s, followed by his immediate sale of the claim to an Adelaide syndicate, didn’t make him a millionaire but it did make him financially independent and therefore free to pursue prospecting more or less as a well paid hobby.

He believed emphatically that it was his Northern Territory windfall that had attracted Margaret and her impoverished upper crust family.

With the entry of British financiers into the Western Australian gold rush in 1894, Howard, with his proven credentials and prospecting expertise, was engaged by a London consortium to ‘locate, peg and register’ promising new gold finds on their behalf. He had named his own fee for this service, together with operating costs and a guaranteed five percent share of the profits arising from any of his discoveries. He couldn’t believe his good fortune - actually being paid to pursue his most precious hobby.

Howard was dis-inclined to worry about money matters these days, even though the rest of Australia at that time was plunging deeper and deeper into recession. News of Lewis’ transgressions did not reach Howard until several weeks after the event.

The letter from the school together with several emotional letters from Margaret, detailing the collapse of her social position, awaited him at the bank in Coolgardie on his return from the northern desert.

Later the next day he telegraphed his solicitor to make all the necessary arrangements for Lewis to travel by ship from Adelaide to Fremantle and thence by coach to Coolgardie. It was time for the lad to learn something of the father’s craft and past time for the bonding that he had come to yearn.

The next two years were the happiest of Lewis’ life. Until his surprise summons to Western Australia he had seen little of his father: The odd Christmas, sometimes a birthday, but never before the companionship and talks that was part of the father-son relationship that others took for granted.

Certainly his mother, though he loved her dearly, had never truly reciprocated his love. He had only ever been allowed home from one or other of his several boarding schools when vacations, or on two occasions, expulsions, had forced his departure. None of his mother’s family wanted to know him.

Even when home, mother insisted that he remain in his room, day or night, whenever one or other of the many ‘uncles’ came to pay mother a visit. Hour upon hour under brilliant desert stars, man and boy came to know each other from their discussion of topics ranging from Plato to the identification of minerals.

By day they travelled the desert wastes in search of the elusive yellow metal and almost as scarce, the water holes.

Lewis, like most Australians and people the world over, was fascinated by stories of fabulous gold discoveries and of the men who had made them. He was more fortunate than most, having a father who had met many of these folk heroes, notably in the Northern Territory and more recently, here in Western Australia. Side by side in their swags, a warming campfire emphasizing the darkness surrounding them, Howard would relate the most intricate details of the great Victorian discoveries and even of the first rushes in New South Wales. Best by Far, though, was his first hand knowledge of the people and circumstances of the Western Australian discoveries.

There is a common thread running through all of these great discoveries, Lewis, and that is luck mused the older man. Commonly, it’s been an untrained oaf who makes the discovery, or even a trained geologist, intent at the moment of discovery on some other matter.

A mere five years ago and less than two hundred miles southeast of here, Art Bayley and Billy Ford had made their accidental discovery of what is now the Coolgardie Gold Field, one of the richest on earth, save perhaps the Transvaal.

In the first year alone, Bayley’s mine gave up almost twenty six thousand ounces of gold from a mere fifty tons of ore. Howard had become a firm friend of Arthur Bayley’s some years before the Coolgardie find when they were both prospecting the Ashburton River area of the northwest. They were of a like age but ‘cheese and chalk’ in terms of physique, habits and most other characteristics.

He described Bayley, as the campfire fizzed and crackled under the dry mulga, as having a magnificent body and stamina. He was a prize fighter, athlete and one of the finest prospectors Howard had ever met. He was also a frequent drunk and brawler who enjoyed nothing better than ‘blowing’ his hard won wealth on a good party or turning his physique to a damned good fight. Howard doted on his memory.

"The man could smell gold he declared, The bastard picked up a sixty ounce nugget on the Ashburton from ground that I and many others had been over with a fine tooth comb. Experience, you see, Lewis, counts for everything. Except for Coolgardie, which was sheer bloody luck; I’ll tell you about that in a moment he said, pausing for effect. Arthur was born on the Loddon River in the heart of the Victorian Goldfields near a town called Newbridge he recalled. You could say he grew up playing with nuggets in his back yard! He sniffed gold off the beach at Nickol Bay and hit it rich with a mate up on the Murchison. But Coolgardie, even he admits, was nothing more than a bloody fortunate accident!

"He and a bloke by the name of Bill Ford, another experienced prospector, were convinced that there was gold to be found in the desert country to the east of Southern Cross. Anyway, Bayley spent up big with some of the gold he had won from the northwest and with a team of ten horses he provisioned an expedition that was designed to last him and Ford for several months. They left Southern Cross in the winter of ninety-two, rightly surmising that the summer would be too bloody hot and headed due east. After an unsuccessful hundred and sixty miles or so, they struck the problem that had kept the farmers and fossickers out of that area: they started to run out of water. All of their supplies and equipment were useless to them if they couldn’t water the horses and themselves, so they decided to turn back, empty-handed and with all hope of gold long since extinct. They took a more northerly route home in the hope of locating a more precious commodity, water.

"Right at the point of shooting the horses to conserve what little water they had, Bayley stumbled upon a small aboriginal rock pool, cleverly concealed under a large flat rock. They were, in fact, quite close to where Coolgardie now stands. The decision was made to camp right there for a few days to recover their senses and give the horses the chance to rest up and feed for a few days. Now, this is where luck, rather than skill, came into Bayley’s find. It was Bill Ford’s turn to fix breakfast and while he attended to it, Bayley noticed that one of the horses had thrown a hobble strap. Leaping out of his swag barefooted, he started off after the horse when all at once he doubled up, holding one of his feet and yowling his head off. Looking down he found he had crunched his heel on a rough, half-ounce nugget of gold. Well, they threw down their breakfast and walked around, eyes on the ground ‘specking’ and before the end of the day had collected better than twenty ounces of nuggets that had been washed from the dust by a recent and abrupt shower. They spent the next month camped at the rock hole while they skimmed the surrounding topsoil and by ‘dry blowing’ found another two hundred ounces.

The rest of the story is, of course, history now but you should know that Bayley and Ford pulled another two thousand ounces out of a single shallow trench before selling the whole claim to some speculators from Broken Hill. So you see, the combined prospecting skills of these chaps had bugger all to do with their finding gold; it was just pure bloody luck.

Tales such as these, together with his father’s easy familiarity with the heroes they evoked, had a huge impact on the adolescent Lewis. He hung on every word of his father’s training and left no rock unturned, quite literally, during their days in the field. He hoped upon hope that he might become one of the latest icons in gold discovery. He grew tougher, stronger and wiser in the ways of the bushman as well as a passably competent prospector in his own right.

His keen mind and brilliant I.Q. combined to give his father little peace.

Howard was delighted with his son and proud beyond belief.

Lewis eagerly revisited the various stories of discovery that had become a feature of their campfire hours.

Tell me again, Father, about the ‘Golden Hole’. Is it really true that its discovery was also an accident? Was it as rich as they say? Is the mine still in production? Howard had been deliberately trying to swing the evening’s conversation away from past discoveries and lean more toward the bushcraft that would keep the youngster alive if he were to follow in his father’s footsteps.

Most particularly he wanted Lewis to understand and appreciate the ways, customs and languages of the Aboriginal people. Many lives had been lost on both sides of the colour divide through simple misunderstandings.

His own experience had been that if you treated the Aborigines with respect and abided by their laws and requests, they were more likely to help rather than hinder your existence.

This was the one major flaw he had found in Lewis’ character - a near total reluctance to understand or learn the Aborigine’s language and customs, even though he was well equipped intellectually to do so.

"Very well, Lewis, I’ll tell you the full story of the Golden Hole, but on the express understanding that tomorrow we start again with the Aborigines.

"Around mid-April, 1894, there were a group of amateur gold seekers, farm hands, clerks and navvies, six in all, who having met on the steamer from Melbourne, pooled their limited resources and invested in a stout horse and cart on arrival in Fremantle. They, like thousands of others, joined the rush to Coolgardie. Their thinking was sound in joining together, for this was security indeed against the flotsam of the world who were by then flocking to the fields.

Many a single man disappeared forever during this period, his food and gear being used or sold at a profit on the fields. Even better was their decision to buy and stock the cart, for the price of the most rudimentary goods was tenfold on the diggings. The carriage of large quantities of water was also made possible by this ruse. Anyway, after many weeks of travelling and abortively trying to find any unclaimed site on the diggings, they wearily made their way south of Kalgoorlie in the frail hope of locating a productive field where many had tried and failed before. The horse had become weary of its load and the men were disillusioned to the point of chucking it all in. All the laughter and good willed speculation had left the group.

"As they made camp one afternoon, Johnny Mills, one of their number, kicked at a