| NEAR DEATH EXPERIENCE, NO. 1 (THE ENTOMBED MINER, EASTER 1907) Since it was so rare to me in my childhood to travel mysterious dark tunnels, often I would dream of long galleries through alpine stone. That first tunnel I saw was two hundred yards long at most, a scarpland bolt hole hollowed near the western coast of Australia; the one bloody tunnel in the whole of the railway system of a state a third of the entire continent! But it was a wild ride coming down to Swanview in the steam train. On a three-foot-six gauge line the whole train rocked like a shaken cocktail as we left the inland, clocked a heady thirty-five with whistle's scream. And when we popped out into sunlight of a summer afternoon there was the land's edge spread out like a signature. Soon we'd swim in the Swan River's saltsea mouth. And so, in a sense, new-born out of country life we soared down steel wheel squealing grades while trapped coal smoke poured from carriage windows as we all leaned out and entered our first big city! A bit sooty and begrimed, where most cooked on wood-fired stoves. Rising from brick kilns, smoke climbed to join a multitude of other factory chimneys. On the river's bank, at Goodwood, long barrows of boiler-clinker glowed in twilight where rakes of railway wagons dumped the daily ash. We slowed for wooden bridge and powerhouse smoke stack. At last over clutter of criss-crossing points we slithered into central station. Here it was, the slow regional capital, Perth, a small town in a nation newly taken. Still pencil carbon traces on a map. Sure there were wild times here sometimes. A divorce one year, a drunken sailor run amok in the seaport, a wronged girl, for fear of birth, dead from a knitting needle. On hill above bleached port town there stood the great grave jail of colonial failure. The cells like tunnels, where pale prisoners swarmed, secret termites of the night. Distanced from these soiled limestone yards picnickers trod white sand of their holiday island scarcely glimpsing a sad shambling band of shackled black men mourning spirit lands. Memories of those holiday summers: hot streets being tarred, delivery horses in their carts dropping dung all day, while fallen figs starred backyard paths and cicadas sang in the trees. It was years before I breathed chill Milanese fog and boarded the brown train for the Valtellina, skirting Lake Como's shore. Here, beyond Lecco, again and again entering tunnels, more than thirty of them. White stripes on the sides of each galleria rise and fall, rise and fall. Then kilometre after kilometre passes of the same tunnel wall. Will it never end? But we break out and there are the deep gelid waters of the lake under a winter moon, with snow-frocked Alps standing up close. Blackness changes our train's tune, as we hurtle once more into mountain's heart. Now we're following another river's course, the Adda, which flows down from here, with meltwater, through this lake, past Lecco, the Brianza and the town of Lodi, to frost-bound flatlands of the Po. Strange that up above in the Alpi Orobie where the fierce yet subtle art of tunnelling has been passed down generations, was the start of strange connection with my distant land. In Gorno, province of Bergamo, there was only work for the oldest men on dying village farms. Zinc mines had given youngsters hope, but they’d closed them down. It was poverty time. Get married? How could you keep alive all crowded in the one room of some tottering house of stone and slate where cornmeal, cooked in the fume of an open grate, gave children rickets? No wonder men's thoughts turned to distant lands. 'There's gold for the digging in Australia! Sign up and ship out!' they were told. 'It's just more tunnelling. You'll be rich!' So these countrymen came to my country, to my birthland of red dust - to Southern Cross, Bonnievale, Marvel Loch. Knives that trimmed vines would rust unused, set aside with heavy northern clothes. Coolgardie began as a mining town in the desert more than a hundred years ago. My grandfather, a Welsh engineer, who once ran the powerhouse, so they say. I was born one town away. Our western goldmines needed tunnelers. They came here from all over the world; Lombardy of course supplied many men. Then one day a freak autumn storm hurled a flood down a mine shaft trapping a miner there. Modesto Varischetti from Gorno crouched in an airlock in a rising drive, a stope, and used the Italian miner's code to tap his messages of hope to luckier workmates frantic at the poppet head. Pumps too slow - they'd have to get divers, some from the coast, send one down maybe with spare diving suit for entombed man. But Varischetti could easily drown before divers came three hundred miles by train. No trouble finding expert divers in the West. Some had worked at Broome, up where the State's pearling industry still thrived, where many had gone to their doom in cyclonic seas of Roebuck Bay. The chosen men included Hearn and Hughes divers brave and expert, able to give the trapped miner a fighting chance. Such deeds are the stuff of fable; but even an express would take seventeen hours! What if they cleared the tracks and sent an engine almost on its own at top speed, a 'rescue special' on that narrow-gauge over the hills? Maybe in this time of need the race for a life could be cut back by an hour? With divers and their gear sharing the guardsvan this black pocket battleship rocks away into the night for its moonlight run. Up through the steep cuttings, to slip through Swanview tunnel on the long haul to Bakers Hill. Telegraph jangles all along the line, rousing the night's staff to go out in chill air looking down the line from Muresk, Meckering, Baandee, for the yellow headlight snout there of jet-black locomotive pounding through the dark. Meanwhile at the mine the trapped man waited in his looming tomb hearing each creak of timber, falling speck of stone like the boom of cannon. And the squalid water lurking at his feet. A horse and buggy drawn up ready at the station gate when, near morn, the racing train arrived a record four whole hours before the usual time! The miners, breathless to explain, bundled the men aboard, took muddy road to the mine. Hughes and Hearn methodical, calm, studied diagrams drawn to show where Varischetti lay in the rise, his signals weaker in a grey dawn he'd never know again, unless they brought him out. Air pump and windlass prepared with feverish hope, Diver Hughes donned his heavy suit, checked provisions, miner's lamp and checked again. Then each foot thrust into leaden boot they screwed the heavy helmet into place. One wave of glove and down he went into water’s dark. Two men steady at the vital pump kept clean air pushing in the flailing tube that followed him into the sump. Behind him Tom Hearn helped with the straining rope. So the crowd grew big at the muddy shaft as the windlass winch unwound; and busy newsmen searched for words that each could send speeding around through telegraph and seabed wire to set the world alight. Eastertide: but down below a sudden rock fall mocked Modesto's hopes. Strife for Hughes, trapped in the slumping shaft and he must dig and dig for life hefting heavy air pipes, snaking into dark. Too bad his first attempt would fail and Hughes retreat to Level Nine. Instead, it was he near done, as his pale face showed with the helmet raised from his head. And so Hughes rested from that sepulchre remote. And Varischetti, as he later told, lost heart, despite the air that hissed through the line to his old rockdrill. Would he eat candle stubs? Be missed if he failed to stay alive? He lay on stones and cried But Diver Hughes had got some strength back. The caged skip took the good news rattling up to surface watchers, still there at the mine. Then, to submerge once more, Hughes readied himself with rations and writing slate in his pack. Though now more pumps ran day and night, the sullen waters, turbid, cold, dropped hardly a fraction further down the mine. Then the diver lurched off to behold once more that stone tunnel to the man to be reborn. Varischetti, crouched now in rubble of his stope, felt beard bristle, his hair stand on end, when out of the water dimly lit by diver's lamplight a black bulk began to ascend. "Il Diavolo stesso! Jesu Cristo," he mumbled and fell. To reassure him, Hughes held out a rough hand and raised the tottering Modesto on broken rocks of the stope. Showed him the provisions. Then, when ready to go, motioned him to make message on the slate. Slowly Modesto came alive at that. Tears streamed. He tried to grasp Hughes' hand as the lumbering Titan finally turned back into chill flood water and trailed dead-weight umbilical of his diver's trade. Once more Hughes struggled upward, signalling his return on the tugging lifeline at every pace, while the clattering slate of Varischetti's scrawl was held to him until, losing its case, that mystery message from 'the other side' erased. At last Hughes rose above the muddied waters and Hearn with Crabb, the rescue director, hastily unscrewed the Welshman's helmet. Hughes’ eyes rolled back with fatigue anew as men pressed close to hear words forced from his throat. Five hundred round the pit-head saw the hawsers move: 'Someone's coming up!' they called in hope. Countrymen of Varischetti pressed close to the shaft watching as the skip rattled up its slope and the news broke: 'They've got to him!' But first the lowering of the drenching waters, inch by inch, until the entombed Italian might be dragged through the waist deep tunnels; after eight days be brought into dazzle of desert light, welcomed amid grey-green wattle and mallee and red earth! And so elsewhere the tale continues to be told of how this miner's life resumed, how Crabb's little boy helped at his bedside to heal the broken spirit of the entombed; how Varischetti's legend began its own tunnelling life. |
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