The Place of Youth

LONG, LONG ago the aborigines came and called it Wilya-Wilya-Yong. It was a dark, barren hill formed like a scimitar, its back broken, its slopes serrated and pitted and scarred, naked, sunburned, and wind-seared. One day a white man talked with a black man and learned that Wilya-Wilya-Yong meant the Place of Youth.

White men brought their sheep and a poor German named Charles Rasp was employed to herd them. Rasp gazed at the Place of Youth, climbed the slopes, and found what he found. He knew nothing of precious metals, and so travelled to the nearest city and purchased a copy ofThe Prospector’s Guide. On his return he broke off a piece of the Place of Youth-it didn’t matter where-and experts declared it to be loaded with silver-lead.

The fame of it sped across the surrounding sea-flat plains to the distant coasts of new-found Australia, and men came on horseback and on foot, in wagons and Buffalo Bill coaches, and they sank holes and rigged machinery. Others came and built a mining camp about the Place of Youth, which they called the Broken Hill. The camp became a shanty town named Broken Hill. Paupers became rich overnight, and rich men became paupers in a matter of minutes. Champagne was a flood; water but a trickle.

Rasp and his partners faded out. Men were buried hastily in shallow graves: those who were lucky. Yet more men came to Broken Hill, lingered, departed-generations of them-and the shanty town became the third city in the state of New South Wales. Famous men came-engineers, scientists, industrialists; and eventually, in their turn, there came Jimmy the Screwsman and Napoleon Bonaparte, DI, CIB Queensland.

Broken Hill wasn’t Jimmy’s objective when he left Sydney on completion of a burglary, the planning of which had called for mental concentration over a period of three weeks, and Jimmy had looked forward with keen expectancy to a long holiday.