ABPA — The Australian Bush Poets Association Inc.

Gold Rush Embers

© Sean Duffy

Winner, 2024 Blackened Billy Verse Competition, awarded in Orange, NSW.

In the southern Baw Baw foothills
     when the looming winter schemes,
and cicada sounds fall silent
     as the sleeping summer dreams;
when the early frost prepares to
     hunt the remnants of the heat,
and the shades of dusk awaken
     where the light and darkness meet –
in Walhalla’s twilit spaces
can you see their haunted faces?
  As the valley rim grows fainter
     and the sickle moon takes flight,
with the shroud of dusk descending
and the shapes of shadows bending
do you see their pale forms blending
     with the velvet edge of night?

For this quaint, historic hamlet
     with its forest-scented calm
has a beauty laced with sadness
     and a chill beneath the charm.
Pause awhile amid the graveyard
     on Walhalla’s eastern hill.
Read the epitaphs on headstones
     in the eerie evening still.
Though the gold rush years have drifted
and the scourge of death has shifted
  even now the bygone perils
     leave their poignant graveyard scars.
When the dying day grows dimmer
do you see their ghostly shimmer
as the last light’s tender glimmer
     stirs the coals of countless stars?

In your mind’s eye see them toiling
     for the gold their souls still seek,
as their spirits intermingle
     with the mist above the creek.
Hear the sounds of steel on rock face
     in the deep and blinding black,
where the light of lanterns barely
     holds the crushing darkness back.
Hope and promise fanned a flame here –
loss and sorrow staked a claim here –
  there was wealth, though many battled,
     their existence hand to mouth.
But for some the jobs were steady,
willing workers always ready,
courting danger in the eddy
     of the gold rush in the south.

Mining metal in Walhalla
     was a war against the stone,
where the hard-won spoils were tarnished
     by the miners’ blood and bone.
Mortal man has few defences
     when the flesh and rock collide,
or when dust – the airborne killer –
     wastes him slowly from inside.
Fiscal gain for callous bosses
justified the human losses
  (though the entries in the ledgers
     never counted those who died).
For the worker, fate was fickle,
reaping blindly with the sickle,
till the rush became a trickle
     and the golden river dried.

While the miners knew the menace
     of the tunnel and the cave,
merely living in Walhalla
     meant a fast burn to the grave.
There was filth and overcrowding
     with disease and death run rife,
when the hills were incandescent
     with the fires of gold rush life.
This was once a place of drama
but the ambience is calmer
  now – a century of seasons
     since the sunset of ‘the rush’.
From their haunts among the hollows
shadows spill and nightfall follows
as the hungry darkness swallows
     what remains of twilight’s blush.

In the afterglow of sunset
     sense the presence of the dead.
Feel the brooding, brittle tension
     as the day hangs by a thread.
Where the graveyard trees stand sentry
     at the verge of now and then,
does it seem, for just a moment,
     that the past might live again?
In the stillness time is slowing
and we share the fate of knowing
  not the manner of our passing
     to that place no mortal sees.
Mystic veils suspend between us
and the spirits who have been us:
fleeting phantoms who have seen us
     at their graves among the trees.

For a while Walhalla flourished,
     but the fortune could not last.
Now the ghosts of those who died here
     draw us back into the past.
Feel the heartache and the anguish;
     taste the salt of bitter tears –
painful memories now softened
     in the endless flow of years.
Though the atmosphere grows colder
still the gold rush embers smoulder
  as another autumn settles
     in the valley’s verdant fold,
while the sounds of death and dying
echo sadly in the sighing
of the trees that watch the lying
     place of men who died for gold.


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