A Ring For Angelina

A RING FOR ANGELINA

  Copyright Lindsay Johannsen 2015

  Thank you.

  National Library Of Australia Cataloguing-in-publication data:

  Author: Johannsen, Lindsay Andrew

  Title: A Ring for Angelina

  Cover art and design bungled by the author.

  To order the McCullock’s Gold paperback version or contact the author please visit

  www.vividpublishing.com.au/lajohannsen

  A RING FOR ANGELINA

  If you should ever happened to find yourself driving around the bush north-east of Alice Springs on the eastern end of the old Harts Range mica fields, you may very well come on evidence of an old overgrown and washed out track that once went through there. This is all that remains of what in earlier days was the original track through to Queensland – or the section at least from Harding Springs in the eastern Harts Ranges themselves to Red Tank soak on the Plenty River (now the Huckitta Station homestead site).

  On a whim you might attempt to follow what is left of this old track – toward the ranges, say, in a general south-westerly direction. Should you do so, and should you miss where it went through the scrub into the ranges, then you might just be fortunate enough to come across the remains of an old mica mine – abandoned in the early 1950's when the mica price crashed. It's on the last two hundred metres of flat country before the ranges, adjacent to a sizeable notch in the first line of big hills.

  The first thing you’ll notice there is the fallen-in pit and the fresh-looking rocks of the spoil heaps and, off to one side of them, a neatly built corrugated-iron hut, still standing and complete.

  It’s a miner’s hut typical of those earlier days, so it might strike you as odd that it’s still standing, certainly given the appetite of the local termite species. An inspection soon gives the answer to this apparent anomaly, however: instead of bush-timber, the hut's posts and rails are light steel tramline, the type used for running skip-trucks in small mining operations.

  Should you choose to stay – overnight perhaps or just to look a little further afield – you might come across the grave. It’s just a marker and some white rocks, though passing cattle seem to like milling around there and kicking the rocks out of place.

  The marker once had writing engraved on it but you can’t read it now. I know because I saw the grave when it was fresh. Sometimes, when I can manage it, I go back there – to straighten the rocks and make it tidy again.

  And the memory of this place will remain with you somehow, long after you return home. It’s because of the grave, I suppose, it being in such a lonely place. Yet even those who miss seeing the grave will remember the iron hut, because everyone remembers the iron hut.

  This is the story of Angelina Spinelli and Johnny Doss, of some others who lived there and a very special Christmas.

  I first met Johnny Doss in 1949, when I was a skinny kid about eight years old. We were travelling around the bush at the time, Mum and Dad, and me – in our big green Oldsmobile. Dad was doing some prospecting and would call in to places here and there to visit old friends. It was just an ordinary sedan car, but he used it like a four-wheel drive and went wherever he wanted, more or less, track or no track.

  We'd camp in the bush during these trips – on a clay pan or in a dry sandy creek bed. Mum and Dad had a big double swag but I slept on the back seat of the car. It was so wide I could lie without my head or feet touching the doors.

  We’d driven a long way that day and arrived at the iron hut just before sundown. Dad knew the man who came out to greet us. His name was Gino Spinelli.

  Gino owned the mica mine there – I can’t remember what it was called. Anyhow, we were invited to join them for dinner and to stay the night. My Dad was always interested in looking at the different mines about the place, so that’s what we did. And that’s how I came to meet Johnny Doss.

  Johnny would’ve been somewhere around twenty-three, I suppose. And he’d only been working there a few weeks. Another man worked there too – an Italian bloke about the same age. Alfredo, his name was.

  Johnny and he did the mining; Gino and Mama sorted and cut the mica.

  The workers’ accommodation was a bush shelter. It had a few sheets of iron for a roof and walls of acacia brush. A sooty old hurricane lamp hung from the rail spanning the centre. It had a spare camp-bed and I was invited to sleep there instead of in the car.

  After dinner Mum and Dad got talking to our hosts so I went off with the workers to their donga. Alfredo only had a little English and it was easy to see that Johnny was desperate for a conversation – glad even to talk to a brainless ratbag like me.

  He showed me puzzles he’d made out of nails and number-eight wire, like the two bent pieces which somehow fell apart in his hands as I watched. Then he put them back together and handed the puzzle to me. Any fool could have seen that it was physically impossible for the two to come apart – yet somehow they did.

  He showed me card tricks, too. And it didn’t matter which card I secretly selected, because Johnny would either produce the card or tell me what it was – and sometimes both. When I tried to fox him by changing my mind half way through he immediately knew, and at the end produced both cards. From his shirt pocket!

  Now as it happened, Gino and Mama had three daughters. Mama refused to be separated from her husband so the girls had to stay in Alice Springs with Mama’s sister and her husband. The two youngest went to high school there, while the eldest, Angelina, worked as a waitress in her uncle’s cafe. Alina everyone called her.

  Alina was a big girl, sturdily built and neither shy nor retiring. It was widely known, too, that she would accept no rowdy behavior in her uncle’s cafe. She was the right sort of person to have around whenever a truck was being loaded or if one of its tyres had to be changed. She’d have been an asset at her father’s mica mine as well (or at any mine for that matter), but Gino wouldn’t hear of it. He had no intentions of having Angelina weather the rigours of life at their isolated bush camp.

  Gino and Mama were happy to have their daughters visit whenever they could, though, and, as it happened, Angelina’s uncle was to deliver a truck load of supplies to the mine just a week after we were there. And with him on that occasion came the fair Alina.

  For both Johnny Doss and Angelina Spinelli this proved a fateful event, for within forty-eight hours of Alina’s arrival there the two were in love – hopelessly, gloriously and overwhelmingly in love.

  Yet not a word had passed between them that wasn’t witnessed by at least one of her parents, and even these were just common courtesies. Yet so intense were their feelings that the tension in the air between them was like a thundercloud the moment before releasing a lightning bolt.

  Two days later Gino Spinelli’s bags of cut mica were loaded onto the truck for the trip back to town. Alina went too, smiling happily and waving cheerio via her own self-imposed mental straight-jacket. She hadn’t the faintest idea what was to happen, but knew instinctively that the slightest show of emotion could have disastrous consequences.

  Mama and Gino had noticed nothing. Alfredo was suspicious but Johnny denied any thoughts of Angelina. Then his appetite began to wane and he soon became desperate for sleep – sleep that would not come. Within a few days Johnny had lost his energy, and his ability to do the heavy mining work fell away.

  Alfredo was watching as this happened ... and became even more suspicious. One afternoon, while he barrowed a load of dirt from the workface to the shaft for hauling out, Johnny sat on the water-tin for a breather and went to sleep. Without a word Alfredo continued, doing the work of both.

  Then Johnny fell over and awoke. He was so embarrassed about not pulling his weight that he confessed.

  Now Alf
redo was a friendly enough sort of fellow, though he tended to keep his thoughts to himself. His apparent lack of English was mostly to do with him being a man of few words. On this occasion, however, because it was work-time, he gave Johnny a friendly pat on the shoulder and told him not to worry, they'd talk about it later.

  The confessing helped Johnny’s appetite at least, for that evening, much to Mama's delight, he wolfed down his usual monster dinner. And later that night, in the seclusion of their