The Warden’s Clerk

One Grafton and Dalmorton, March 1893

The telegram reached my office above the saddler’s in Prince Street on a Tuesday, which was the day I usually spent pretending to be busy. It came from Dalmorton, ninety miles up the Clarence, and said only: COMMISSION SITS 29TH. NEED COUNSEL. CAN PAY SOMETHING. POOLE.

Can pay something. Every lawyer in Grafton knew what those words meant. I had been admitted for eleven months. I had drawn four wills, collected two debts and lost one horse case. I took the coach.

Dalmorton was a goldfield, which meant it was a place men came to get rich and mostly didn’t. It sat in a fold of the ranges on the Boyd River, one street of weatherboard and tin, with the mullock heaps on the hills behind it like the town’s unpaid bills. The biggest building was the Warden’s Court. The second biggest was William Frederick Poole’s store, which was also the post office, and for the past year the telegraph office too, and that, as he explained to me that first night across his own counter, was where all his troubles began.

He was forty-six, Irish, with a long beard going grey and the steady grey eyes of a man who has been counting other people’s money for twenty years. He ran the store. He was the postmaster. He was also the Warden’s Clerk and Mining Registrar, the man who wrote down who owned which piece of the ground. For that last job the Government paid him ten pounds a year.

“Ten pounds,” I said.

“Ten pounds.” He poured two whiskies. “They pay it so low because the man who holds it is forbidden any interest in mining. You see the logic. If he can’t profit by it, why pay him?”

“And did you? Have an interest?”

He didn’t answer straight away. Behind the curtain at the back of the store a baby was crying, and a woman’s voice, low and tired, was singing it down. Frances, his wife. She was thirty-six and had given him ten children, and you could hear every one of those years in the song.

“Mr Healey,” he said at last, “there are fifty-five men in this town who signed a paper last July saying I’m unfit to sell them a stamp. Ford’s behind it. Ford wanted the telegraph office for his own place. When the Postmaster-General gave it to me instead, Ford went looking for a stick to beat me with. Now he thinks he’s found one.”

“Has he?”

He drank his whisky. “That’s what I’m paying you to find out.”

I noticed he hadn’t said no. That’s the first thing they teach you, and the last thing you ever learn.

Two The Warden’s Court, 29 March 1893

The Royal Commission sat in the Warden’s Court on the twenty-ninth of March, 1893, with the windows open and the flies coming in. There were three charges and twenty-six witnesses. By the end of the second day I had heard every grudge on the Boyd River. Mr Ford had brought every man who had ever lost a claim to a neighbour, and every one of them was sure the Warden’s Clerk had a hand in it.

Most of it was smoke. I did my job. I cross-examined a carter who couldn’t remember which year he’d seen what he swore he’d seen. I made a publican admit he owed my client nineteen pounds on account. I got a laugh out of the room twice, which in a country inquiry is worth a great deal. By the afternoon of the second day I was starting to think we might walk out of there.

Then the Commissioners called a name I didn’t know, and a thin young man in a bank clerk’s collar walked up from the back of the room and put his hand on the Bible.

His name was Platt. He was an accountant with the Commercial Bank at Grafton, and he had a ledger under his arm.

I looked at Poole. Poole was looking at the ledger.

In August 1891, said Mr Platt, a customer had opened an account at the Grafton branch. The first deposit was a hundred and twenty pounds. Not in notes. In gold.

“And in whose name was the account opened?”

Platt didn’t need to look at the ledger. “Mr William Frederick Poole, of Dalmorton.”

There is a sound a courtroom makes when it has stopped being an argument and become a verdict. It isn’t loud. It’s mostly the sound of thirty men breathing out at once.

The gold, it came out over the next hour, matched the crushings from a reef on the range called the Mount Marvel. Its registered holders were Bushell, Shea, M’Kenzie and Bonnar. It was a very good reef. And the man who had written those four names into the register, in his own careful hand, was the Mining Registrar of Dalmorton.

That night I sat across the counter from him again. There was no whisky.

“You could have told me,” I said.

“I could have,” he agreed. “Would it have changed what you did today?”

It would not. That was the hell of it.

Three Grafton Circuit Court, 17 October 1893

The Commission reported. The Government read the report and did what governments do: it dismissed him. All his offices, effective the nineteenth of April. A police constable took over the register. Somebody else got the post office. The store, which had gone insolvent once already in ’78, began its slow second slide.

That might have been the end of it. A man loses his place; he goes on living. But somewhere in the long, slow middle of the Commission, before Platt and his ledger, my client had made a declaration on oath denying that he held any interest in the Mount Marvel mine. In the Crown’s view, that made it perjury.

They came for him in the winter. Committal at the Grafton Police Court in October, the bank clerk again, the ledger again. And on the seventeenth of October, 1893, the Grafton Circuit Court, before His Honour Mr Justice Windeyer.

I knew what Windeyer was. Everybody did. He was a reformer, a fierce, upright, unbending man who believed in the law the way country preachers believe in hell. He wasn’t cruel. But in my experience the upright ones are more dangerous than the cruel ones, because they can’t be moved.

I did the only thing I could. The information had two counts. I fought the first one to a standstill, and on that count the jury acquitted. I fought the second one too, and lost it on the ledger, as I had always known I would. Guilty.

At sentencing I stood up and told His Honour the truth, which by then was all I had left. Twenty-three years a Dalmorton man. A storekeeper who had given credit to half the diggers on the river when no one else would. A father of nine children still at home, the youngest not yet a year old. A man who, whatever he had done, had injured nobody but himself. And the Crown had never said a single claim was jumped, a single digger robbed, a single shilling taken from the public purse.

Windeyer heard me out. He was always courteous. Then he spoke of the abuse of his official position. He said a man who keeps the register of other men’s ground and quietly helps himself to a share of it strikes at the root of the trust on which the whole goldfield stands. Then he gave him three years’ penal servitude.

Frances was in the gallery. She didn’t cry. She held the baby, Frederick, a year and a half old, and looked at her husband across the courtroom. I knew that look. It was the look of a woman doing arithmetic.

Four Bathurst Gaol, 1893–1896

They took him to Bathurst. The description sheet they made out on the sixth of November is still in the archives, if you want to see it. Native of Ireland. Born 1847. Arrived per the ship Black Bird, year not known. Trade: Warden’s Clerk. They photographed him for it: the beard, the grey eyes, the dark coat. It is the only picture of him that has ever turned up. A man’s whole life, and the only likeness he left was taken by the people locking him up.

What happened next is the part of the story I like best, and the part I had least to do with.

Within a fortnight a petition was going round Grafton. Then Glen Innes. The Glen Innes Examiner ran a leader that I have kept to this day. It said three months instead of three years would have met the equities of the case. It talked about the twenty-three years, the nine children and the credit on the books. Ordinary people signed it. These were men who had stood in that store and been told pay me when the reef comes good. Some of them, I’m quite sure, had signed Ford’s paper too.

That is the thing nobody tells you about small towns when you’re young. They’ll hang you on Tuesday and petition for your release on Friday, and they mean both.

It took a long time. The newspapers were still saying endeavours are being made in January 1895, fifteen months on. Governments don’t like to be told they were too harsh. They like it least of all when they were.

On the twenty-ninth of January, 1896, the gates of Bathurst Gaol opened and William Frederick Poole walked out of them “by special remission.” He had served a little over two years.

I wasn’t there. I’d like to say I was. I was in Grafton, losing a fencing dispute.

Five Balmain

I saw him once more, years later, in Sydney. I was down for an appeal, and I saw a grey-bearded man on a Balmain ferry wharf and knew him at once. He’d got thinner. The family had gone to the Manning River after Bathurst, he told me, and then come down to the city. There was a new son, born up at Coolongolook. The older girls were married or nearly.

“No mining,” I said.

He almost smiled. “No mining.”

We stood there with the ferry coming in, and I asked him the question I had never asked across the counter in Dalmorton.

“Why did you do it? Ten pounds a year and the post office and the store. You were the most important man on the river. Why risk it for a share in a reef?”

He was quiet so long I thought he wasn’t going to answer.

“You’ve been up there, Mr Healey. You’ve seen it. Every day for twenty years men came into my office and wrote down where they thought the gold was. Every day I wrote it in the book for them, in my best hand, and every day they went out and got rich or broke, and either way they lived. And I sat behind the counter selling them stamps.” He looked out at the water. “A man can only write other men’s names in the gold book for so long.”

The ferry bumped against the piles. He touched his hat and went aboard, and that was the last I saw of him. He died at Balmain not long after, in 1900. He was fifty-one or so.

Frances outlived him by twenty-eight years. She died at Ashfield in 1928, in her seventy-second year, and her children put two words on her stone: our mother.

I’ve thought about him a great deal since, more than about most of the men I won for. The law is very good at the question it was built to answer, did he do it? He did. The ledger said so, and I never once pretended otherwise.

But the law has no column for the other question. What did it cost? Who paid? In the end the people who answered that one weren’t the judge or the Commissioners. They were a few hundred people in two country towns, who signed a piece of paper because they thought three years was too long.

I still think they were right.