McCullock's Gold

The Land Cruiser was travelling fast and braking hard. As it slithered to a stop the passenger’s door flew open and Watts leaped out with the rifle.

  “Don’t bloody move y’ mongrel bastard!” he yelled as he ran the last few metres, “We bloody gotcha this time!” He halted two paces from where Cadney was standing, the gun pointing straight at Cadney’s chest.

  Tyler eased himself from behind the wheel and strode purposefully forward. “We have come for the gold, Mister Cadney,” he said. In his hand was a heavy tyre lever...

  McCullock’s Gold

  L A Johannsen

  Copyright 2013 L A Johannsen

  National Library Of Australia Cataloguing-in-publication data:

  Author: JOHANNSEN, Lindsay Andrew

  Title: McCULLOCK’S GOLD

  Aluwarra Cultural and Language Adviser: Marjorie Rainbow Harris.

  Cover art and design by the author.

  Mundanity-filter final setting: 1400 microbleems.

  The following narrative is a work of fiction. The people mentioned herein and the names used are fictional and do not refer to any person living or deceased. Any towns, highways, station properties, mineral fields and major geographical features you believe you are familiar with have been described fictitiously or referred to in a purely fictitious context, so any differences or irregularities you think you may perceive therein are your own affair entirely. All Aboriginal ceremonial sites, ceremonies and other activities, geological minutiae, events actions and conversations mentioned in this narrative are products of the author’s limited imagination and do not refer to or describe any real event place or happening.

  To order the paperback version or contact the author please visit

  www.vividpublishing.com.au/lajohannsen

  Author’s note:

  In the following narrative I use the term Secret Place rather than Sacred Site. This is because, during the forty years my wife and I lived in the bush advising, provisioning and tending the health of our Aboriginal neighbours, I never once heard an old man utter the words, “Sacred Site”.

  It was always, “Go this way. Over there is a Secret Place.”

  L.J.

  For Max, my stockman mate.

  He didn’t have looks but by hell he had style.

  Prologue

  North east of Alice Springs, about twenty-five kilometres south-west of the Jervois Ranges and Bonya Hill, two large dry rivers and a smaller one converge. The rivers are the Marshall and the Plenty; the third is Thring Creek.

  Oddly, the streams don’t merge to form something bigger. Instead the first donates half its water to the other, then the smaller one makes up its loss. After that the two go their separate ways: the Marshall flows more than seventy kilometres east before turning down to the Simpson Desert; the Plenty River goes there more directly. Both eventually falter amongst the Simpson’s mighty sand ridges.

  Midway along the Marshall’s long eastward reach there lies a large waterhole, the only one to be found in all the kilometres of broad sandy creek bed downstream from the convergence. The waterhole is named for the wall of granite gneiss standing across the channel there – The Marshall Bar.

  For eons this barrier has resisted the forces of nature that have shaped the stream and the landscape beyond it, and when big summer storms sweep over the distant catchment, floodwaters pouring across it scour from the sand of its downstream side a deep, long-lasting pool.

  Yet, like the gutters and gullies that spawn it, the waterhole is mostly dry. Certainly water persists there longer than anywhere else in its long journey down to the desert, but slowly and inevitably it drains and dries away.

  This is not the end of it, however. Long after the surface water has gone an enduring supply can be found there in the sand, all safe from the searing heat of summer and the dry desert winds. And for millennia this long-lasting reservoir has given Aboriginal people access to a tract of land they could otherwise only have visited after rain

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