Josh and the Mine
by
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We walked to the entrance of that mine. This easy way into a mine, John told me later, is called an ‘adit’. This means that you walk straight into the side of the hill along a level track. At first there is a cutting with a bank on either side, then there is an opening into the hill and you keep going into the mouth of the tunnel. If the tunnel is not very tall you maybe have to duck and stay crouched over so that you don’t hit your head. He told me that when a mine was new, there often used to be some sort of woodwork, or roof, that stopped the earth above the adit from falling into the mouth of the tunnel. One hundred and forty years later, there was nothing left to stop that happening. Rocks and earth had slid down the hill and mostly blocked the mouth of our tunnel. There was only a kind of small cliff above a little, jagged hole, that we could get into. I led the way up and over that rock-fall at the entrance. I squeezed through the hole down into the mine, feet first, pushing my backpack ahead of me. Matt followed his backpack and me into the dark tunnel. I remembered that when I was in Grade Five, John wanted to help me with my reading. He wrote a story about him and me in this very mine. It was all about me rescuing him from the mine after a snake bit him and how I’d raced back to the farm on my bike to call the ambulance. How was I to know that John had a sixth sense or something? The first thing I noticed as I slid into that old mine was how wet the entrance was. It was muddy and I could feel the freezing water soaking into my shirt and pants. Yuk! “Eeww!” went Matt, behind me. I was at the bottom of the slope when Matt and his backpack cannoned into me. I’d just stood up and then he hit me behind my knees so I fell over on top of him. “Ummmph!” was all I heard. I got a soft landing, but Matt wasn’t so lucky, being on the bottom. He got even wetter and yelled, “Geroff, ya big dope!” He comes out with some crazy pommie sayings at times. We sorted ourselves out. Matt’s head torch had gone out and he fiddled around with it for a while until he got it going again. We picked our packs up and put them on. They were wet, too. Yuk again. We’d been in the mine only five minutes and we were pretty wet, Matt more than me. Lucky it wasn’t cold and of course there wasn’t a wind in the mine to add any sort of chill factor. John told me about the wind-chill factor the first time I went up to Mt Buller to stay with him and Jody at the Ski Lodge. Even so we were wet and not all that comfortable. This was so different from last time in the other mine – and that little voice inside me whinged a bit more. Just then Matt let out this enormous burp so I laughed and punched him on the arm and forgot about the ‘voice’. “Come on! Don’t just stand there burping!” I ran down the tunnel that was in front of me. I could hear him following. Pretty soon we came to where there had been a rock fall from the roof. We stopped and had a good look. We could see where other people had gone over the top of it; so we decided to go on to see what was on the other side. There wasn’t much room between the pile of rocks and the roof, which was pretty jagged just there. We had to crawl again. It was drier on top of the rocks but we got more dirt on our bellies as we went. I had to stop and wriggle out of my pack and told Matt he should too. I wriggled a bit more and managed to pull my pack by my side until it was in front of me. I could hear grunts from behind me as Matt did the same. He had a bit more room than me because he was not quite as far up the rock fall as me and he’s a skinny, lanky sort of build. I’m shorter than him and definitely more muscly. That means he’s got an advantage in tight spaces like we were in now. I’d never felt worried about being underground before but somehow this time it was different; I could sort of feel the weight of the rock above me. It felt as though it was coming down to squeeze me and I started to feel panicky. I didn’t know it but Matt told me later I started to moan and gasp and kick my heels. I nearly jumped right out of my skin when he grabbed one of my feet. My head jerked up and hit a rock hard enough to make my teeth click. Lucky I had that old canoeing helmet on. “Ouch! What’d you do that for?” I yelled at him ’cause I’d got a fright. “Stop kickin’ dirt in my face, you moron. Whatcha tryin’ ta do? Kill me?” he yelled right back at me. I could smell the old mine now, a strange, dry, dusty, musty smell that made my nose prickle. It didn’t help me feel good. It made me think of rock, lots of rock, above me and around me, closing in on me.
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About the Book
Joshua Daniel is nearly fourteen, and he has a story that he must tell. The things that happened to him in the last holidays have been twisted by some of the residents of the hamlet where he and Matthew Forsyth stayed. Now he must tell the true story. It is not a story that makes him proud. The rumors about it could ruin the man who led the rescue and damage his own reputation in the small community in which he grew up. The true facts are bad enough. Josh gets bored on his own, so he invites Matt to go with him to John’s farm. While staying there, they hatch a plan to go into an old gold mine in the bush that borders the farm, a mine that they have been told was dangerous. What happened, as a result of this plan, nearly killed John, who is like an uncle to Josh. The local policeman also goes to hospital. Josh did not mean this to happen, but Matt and he set out to do something forbidden. They started out having a lot of fun in that mine, but Josh later discovered things about the mine and about himself. Those things trapped him there. Matt has to call John to rescue Josh. They succeeded, but the mine got its own back while Josh slept. When he woke up, they are nowhere to be found. He realized that they were still in the mine and that he has to get them out of the mine before either of them die. It becomes a race against time before Elysium claims a friend. What can have happened? Who is Mad Max, and why does Josh hate him? What happened to sending Senior Constable Angus McIntyre to the hospital as the rescue was completed?
About the Author
John Welford: He remembers his mother teaching him to read at the age of four. Ever since then he has loved to read. As a boy, on holiday from school he would lie in bed reading a book until late in the mornings. At school, boarding school, he would read under the blankets by the light of a torch, after lights-out. Writing, however, was a different thing. English composition was hard, though not as hard as comprehension exercises - they were boring. Of course, he understood what he read. Why bother to answer questions about that? It wasn’t until he wrote a history essay on the causes of the First World War when he was sixteen that he found out that writing could be fun. he scored 19/20, but believes his handwriting lost him the one mark. He didn’t immediately take up writing screeds and screeds – far from it – he wrote only when he had to and only as much as was absolutely necessary. Typical schoolboy! Later, studying for a degree in England meant more scribbling, mostly notes in lectures, but that was hard work and far from what he really wanted to be doing: sailing. Meanwhile, somewhere at the back of his mind was the thought that he would like to be able to write a book - about what he didn’t know, just a book – any book. He never found the time during his working life to write one. When he retired, suddenly, he found himself making a little essay that he wrote for a boy he was tutoring, into a novel. In 2006, he won a Macquarie Longlines Fellowship to Varuna House, the writers House and used that time to write much of this novel and to make a start on a biography of his parents.