What You've Got Within You

Prologue

Prologue

Harry Langlands was a big, fat, ugly bastard. He wandered the north west of Australia, as a prospector, looking for the wealth of minerals he was convinced lay underground.

He lived off the arid land just as the original inhabitants had for centuries, the main differences being that Harry had a g*n, a mangy old horse and the waterholes he padded up to, in the insect-buzzing dusk, were man-made, boozy oases rather than peaceful billabongs hidden deep within the rocky gorges of the desert.

His wants were simple and easily satisfied under the big blue canopy of the sky. He spoke very little. He did not need to. Out in the dusty hills of darting geckos and spindly, sharp bushes, there was plenty of room to roam without coming into human contact. He liked it that way.

Harry thought he knew the rough, red mountains of North West Australia intimately. Yet every twist down a rounded, honeycombed gorge, revealed secrets he could never have imagined. He found iron ore down one gorge and staked a claim. More discoveries in the mighty Hamersley Ranges followed. Money came in, but Harry kept searching.

It was while traipsing through the heat and dust of Disaster Gorge, a narrow slit between terraced walls of rock in the hills in the Hamersley Ranges, that Harry noticed a steel blue sheen in an escarpment, the like of which he had never seen. Venturing into the floor of the canyon below, he found chunks of red, crusted rock with a core of blue-grey. He picked up a fist-sized piece and noticed the straight-fibred blue material beneath the red-brown shell. The fibres lay in perfect parallel lines like miniature organ pipes. Harry plucked at the material. Fibrous strands bellowed out; breaking up into sharp, blue needles as Harry teased the strands out further.

It was magical stuff.

He looked up at the cliffs and the blue mineral that was all through this narrow, remote, Western Australian gorge. Whatever it was, Harry figured it must be valuable. It must be special. He collected some samples and set off for the nearest town to lodge a claim.

Harry’s hunch proved correct. It was special stuff. Very special. He had discovered blue asbestos. And companies wanted it because of its amazing properties. People told him it was a fire retardant, a good insulator. It could be added to cement and sand to make building sheets, or pipes that were light and strong. It was indestructible, resistant to acid, heat, the weather. Harry had no difficulty selling it.

After he sold his rights, Harry had wealth to go with the wealth he had already racked up from his iron ore. But all that money never made him happy. The fortunes made from the asbestos didn’t make many others very happy either. It wasn’t the miracle fibre everybody had thought it was. In the end, many wished Harry had left it lying on the ground in Disaster Gorge.