The Goldseekers

By Greg Bastian

A fascinating story of the goldfields - the hardships, injustices, and triumphs of the human spirit. In the mid-1850s, Australia is in the grips of Gold Fever. Muji and her older brother Dong-il, two Korean children, who have been abducted from their homeland, are working on the goldfields to save for a passage home. Sam and his father, Mister Bill, are also trying their luck on the goldfields in order to create a better life for their family. Both parties are eking out a living and then disaster strikes ... In the stealth of night, a group of men raid the celestial camp destroying everything. Sam and his father, who have been visiting the camp of Muji and Dong-il on the night of the raid fall victims to their fellow Europeans' hostility. Sam is appalled with this behaviour and helps Muji and Dong-il to safety, but he wants to do more. It is the puppy, Ah-Poo, that comes to everyone's rescue when gold dust is discovered in his fur. Sam must race to find his two friends, who have left the goldfields and convince them to come back and stake a claim. He must also convince his father that unity between the Celestials and Europeans is possible, if not for all, at least for them.

• Language: English
• Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers Australia
• Release date: May 1, 2010
• ISBN: 9780730444411

Book preview

1

For a girl of her age—nine—she has overcome the problem of loneliness rather well. She imagines it as a shadow that she can chase away with a wave of her hand or a stern shout: Whoosh! Whoosh! And when loneliness is at its strongest, at the beginning and end of each day, when a wave or a shout is not enough, she has only to call on her brother for him to be quickly at her side. And although he merely pretends to join in her childish game of swiping at nothing and threatening the thin air, he accepts without question his role as her Patron and her guide.

For her brother’s protection she must agree to obey him and serve him in all things. If he complains because his trousers are damp or his vegetables are undercooked, she must find a way to restore his temper. He is the head of their little family now and if they are to have any chance of returning to their home, it will be because they have taken the very best care of each other.

The girl’s name is Miju, which in her language is the word for a small bird, one that skims across the water collecting tiny insects. She knows she is nine years old because she has been keeping a count of the days by adding stitches to the hem of her scarf, one stitch for each day and a larger stitch, in the shape of a persimmon blossom, for each full moon. She now has twelve blossoms sewn into her scarf; the last one completed that very morning. She finds it difficult to believe that they have been away from home for one whole year and worries that the memories she holds of her village and her family might be fading like an old painting. She counts the blossoms again, to be absolutely sure, and as she examines each one she takes note of the changes that have come over her sewing. The first blossoms are made up of wistful, untidy loops, but the most recent ones have been sewn in a precise shape, made pretty with double and even triple outlines and a neatly curving stem.

Because he distrusts calendars and clocks, she has yet to tell her brother how long they have been away from home. He says calendars and clocks are like factories in which little parcels of time are forever packaged and weighed and matched until the days can barely be distinguished one from the other. ‘We don’t need clocks,’ he insists whenever she mentions the lateness of the hour or the long weeks of trekking it took them to arrive at the diggings. ‘All we have to do is open our eyes and our ears to know what time of day it is or what month we are living in, or how long it is since the rain last fell. People are simply too lazy to notice these things.’

But Miju knows that the cause of her brother’s distrust is not people’s laziness, rather it is the workings of his own memory. Dates, times, places. The only purpose they serve is to conjure up the past with all its attendant anger and sorrow. Better to look forwards, not backwards, to a time when they will be reunited with their parents and the people of their village, when they will again drink from the dragon’s mouth and sleep to the gentle beat of their mother’s spinning wheel.

Her brother’s name is Chung-Kai, which he has shortened to simply Kai. He is four years and three months older than Miju. She also has a second brother, Suk-Jae, younger than herself, who should now be close to three years. He was beginning to stand and to attempt a few wobbly steps when last she saw him. She remembers Suk-Jae with strict clarity, as sharply as if she had taken his photograph. He was standing nearby when she and Kai were spirited away. Such an unexpected calamity. She can still see the shocked look on his little face. This should not be happening, his look said. Even in his little child’s brain, Suk-Jae knew those men to be foreign devils. Heaven knows what effect it must have had on him. No doubt it made him into a backward child, one who could never let his parents out of his sight and who could never again venture out from the safety of the village.

Miju has planned a modest celebration to mark the passage of their first year away. But when Kai arrives she will tell him she has strung the lanterns and ribbons around their camp and cooked them a special meal because it is the birthday of their little brother, Suk-Jae. He cannot be angry at that. And when he sees that she has cooked his favourite dish of pork mandoo, and the trouble she has taken to sweep the hessian floor and gather wood for the fire, he will understand that she has done her very best to make him happy and that really he has little if anything to grumble about.

But grumble he must, for he is Chung-Kai, son of Hwang-ju, Patron of Chongno. It is his job to grumble. Since when did the first-born son of a Patron go around laughing and joking like a stupid drunk? His job is to restore order where disorder has been allowed to flourish, to be righteous and unbending, particularly here in this lawless place.

‘Why have you turned our camp into a noraebang?’ he asks on his return.

‘Because it is our little brother, Suk-Jae’s, number-three birthday. I have invited some friends to celebrate.’

He bends and lifts the lid from a bamboo steamer. Dumplings sit neatly like eggs in a nest. ‘Pork mandoo?’ he says, his tone softening.

‘Your favourite.’

‘I hope you’ve made enough.’

Not for the first time he warns his sister that it is ill-advised to have a celebration of any sort. For one thing, it is frivolous and irresponsible and not the correct way to behave: they should be directing all of their efforts towards getting home. And also it is dangerous—drawing attention to oneself in this godforsaken place can only invite trouble. Less than a month ago a man from whom they had been purchasing their ginseng powder was savagely beaten by a notorious gang of white devils, the Gung-pae. They sliced off his pigtail, stripped him of his clothes and forced him to walk the twenty miles to Lambing Flat. He was lucky to survive: incidents like this are becoming more common. The races are fracturing, as if anticipating the arrival of some momentous event.

‘Do we need this many lanterns? Couldn’t we have just one?’

‘Let us have three,’ Miju concedes. ‘Since it is Suk-Jae’s number-three birthday.’

Kai marches away into the dimming twilight. He will wash his face and arms with the men. Even walking from the camp down to the sluices he holds his head at an imperious angle and his body erect, forever the Patron’s son, forever the righteous Yangban. Miju steps out from beneath the roof of their little camp and watches her brother descend the hill. Standing there in light tinged blue by smoke, she notices for the first time that when she stands quiet and still, concentrating on the sounds, the slanting sunlight, the changing temperature, she can see that Kai is right. The days here have a rhythm more accurate than any clock. The light glides across the land like a slowly swinging pendulum, the heat rises in great lazy sheets, voices thicken in tune with the air, the clang and rumble of men working the creek beds die away in predictable portions like the sound of a receding train. And as night falls, the cradles cease their clatter and the sound of tired men can be heard tolling up the dark hills.

Squatting before her cooking fire, wrapped in its warmth, she awaits the arrival of her guests. Kai returns from the sluice where he has washed the dust from his face and hair. He ducks into their tent to change into clean clothes.

‘Who have you invited?’ he asks.

‘Sam, Mister Bill, Miss Turner, Mister Foon…’

‘That old fool!’

‘He lent us the ribbons and lanterns.’ ’There will be something to pay, just wait and see. Who else?’

She is spared an answer by the early arrival of Sam and Mister Bill. Sam comes forward into the light, leaving his father lingering in the shadows, dousing his lamp, unsure of how to behave in Miju and Kai’s camp.

‘Come in, Da,’ Sam tells him. ‘It’s real nice.’

The red lanterns, the coloured ribbons, the bittersweet smells. Sam’s father feels intoxicated, mildly shocked.

He grunts to hide his confusion and pushes his head under the calico roof. An unreasonable sense of fear grips him, as if he’s strayed across a hostile border and must be on his guard. Once in the glow of the red lanterns and the fire, he feels even more ill at ease. ‘See, Da, I told you it was nice.’

Mister Bill has brought a damper, a big lump of bread wrapped in a moist cloth. He bends down and puts it on the floor with the chopsticks and bowls. ‘Kind of you to invite us,’ he says.

‘You must take a seat, Mister Bill,’ says Kai, emerging from their tent. ‘Over here is your place.’

Even with his cushion raised a few inches above the floor on a low stool, Mister Bill finds the position uncomfortable. He wishes he’d thought to bring his own bush stool, the one he’d fashioned himself, not because there is anything wrong with sitting low to the ground, but because he could have shown them what’s correct. He could have explained to them that all they have to do is make a few minor changes in their behaviour, such as sitting in chairs, eating ordinary food, saying good morning, good evening, not wearing those outlandish clothes and stinking up the place with their noodle soups and their fried whatnots and their damned joss sticks. Surely that’s not too much to ask. And think of the trouble it would save them. No more beatings, no more name-calling, no more being forced to the back of the queue and refused entry to the shops. And they could even learn to speak correctly. If they learned to speak correctly their problems would evaporate like steam.

‘You two will have to come over to Bonnidoon next time,’ he announces. ‘I’ll show you how to make a damper and a billy of tea. We’ll throw a gum leaf in it for a bit of flavour.’

He has nothing against them. He isn’t the type to bear a grudge against a person just because they come from a different part of the world. And Sam seems to think very highly of them—he worships Kai and he follows Miju around like a puppy. They have even given him a special Celestial name, Namja, which is their word for an unexpected feeling of joy.

‘They don’t drink our kind of tea,’ Sam informs him. ‘They drink green tea.’ He reaches over and hands his father a worn metal tin bearing raised outlines of bridges and lakes.

Mister Bill unscrews the lid and takes a pinch of the contents between his fingers. The tea is a thin papery leaf, dark green, that crumbles to a coarse powder when rubbed between his fingers. He lifts it to his nose. It reminds him of dried gypsum, earthy, a sweet touch of mould as if it’s been buried in the ground.

‘You usually have it with the food,’ Sam explains. ‘And you don’t need milk.’

Bill Carlyle watches the expression of wonder on his boy’s face. He has