Carrot-beard, whose name was Jim McKenzie, berated the guards. ‘Women and invalids!’ he shouted at them. ‘Are you telling me they overpowered you?’

They had no answer to this, but one of them asked, ‘Is that who we are? People who shoot women, who murder those who can’t lift up their heads?’

And the miners’ leader was checked by this response and didn’t know what to say. He wondered if his desire for mastery of the situation, his longing to replace his own hard life with the easeful old age which gold would buy, had made him more heartless than he knew.

He made his way to the hospital, taking care to fill his pockets with bullets for his gun, but when he went into the longhouse, the stench of it made him reel back. He stood in the doorway, regarding the scene. The place wasn’t yet crowded, but from the paillasses where the sick lay struggling with the ravages to their bodies came a low and terrible human cry, which froze McKenzie’s blood.

Among the sufferers, who numbered eight or nine, two Malay women, with scarves wrapped around their faces, were working as nurses, offering medicine and swabbing the vomit-stained floor. When they saw the Australian gold-seeker at the door, they barely glanced at him, but lowered their eyes and continued with their work.

To find himself disregarded in this way troubled McKenzie almost as much as the sight and stench of the dying. He was a forceful and fearless man, used to being respected for his hardness, but what he saw here were people who had passed into a different realm of existence, where nothing signified except the struggle with death. He suspected that, were he to raise his gun and point it into the room, the nurses would take little notice of this, but merely see his actions as futile.

It was then that he began to feel afraid. He and his fellow miners had gambled much and travelled far on the wings of rumour. They had let themselves believe that there were fortunes to be made from the Sarawak mine, but as yet had found not an ounce of gold. And now, not only did they seem to be tiring themselves out for nothing, they were at risk from a contagion which could end their lives. Against most enemies, they had their courage, their weapons, their knowledge of hardship and their pride, but they had no arms against this. People said the Mal de peste came from the air. You just breathed it in and then it was carried on the exhalations of the dying, which was why the nurses wound cloths around their faces. McKenzie knew that it was only a matter of time before it reached him and the other men.

He returned to the goldfield. He knew how badly the diggings had besmirched the land, how the forest had retreated, with the trees felled for slabs and for firewood, leaving a desert of stones, earth and detritus. But it was that time in the early evening when the sun was going down beyond the rim of the forest and the earth’s ugliness became almost invisible and the men were clustered around bright fires, drinking grog or arak, singing familiar songs. McKenzie found this camaraderie as consoling as anything he’d ever known. As he joined in the drinking and singing, he wondered if this – a harmony of men’s voices defying the poverty in which they existed, asserting that despite so many disappointments they still lived in hope – whether this might, after all, be defence enough against death. But he didn’t know.