8. Neil's thinking machine.

In Esperance in 1969 everybody, with the exception of many of the women, wore a full beard. Any man daring to bare the flesh on his face was immediately labeled a practicing homosexual (a pejorative in those days) and summarily given a hiding. This hiding, although intended to have the same effect as those provided to children – education - required neither belt nor strop. The student was usually beaten with fists until comatose or displaying a satisfactory flow of blood.

This was not an enlightened society.

When Wild Bill and Neil arrived on the scene, Wild Bill had already been anointed as Top Dog by Messrs Carter and Martin as skipper of the mother ship Osprey but this appointment would only get him so far. In order to really establish his right to lead this group he would have to prove himself to the scallywags of Esperance through the expression of another natural law.

This law was first described in1921 by a Norwegian zoologist named Thorlei Schjelderup-Ebbe (1894-1976). He called it Hackordnung, a German word. The English translation is Pecking-Order. Thorlei was talking about the social arrangements of chickens – or more precisely – hens (a rooster isn’t needed for anything but procreation and they fight with their feet).

This principle easily transfers to a community of males where the dominant individual wouldn’t necessarily have the biggest pecker but could be able do the most damage. In that regard Esperance might well have been a henhouse. Somewhere along the line Wild Bill was going to have to claim the high perch.

The first time Osprey steamed up the river to take berth in pride-of place in front of the factory, the whole village (except Big Stan who was still asleep in the Lodge urinal courtesy of the singing ringer) turned out to measure him up.

He looked the goods.

At forty-three he was a big man with a barrel chest and a thick black beard. Standing in the wheelhouse of that magnificent steel ship, barking orders at the crew, spinning the wheel with nonchalant expertise to bring the massive vessel to a perfect rocking halt with barely a yard’s tolerance between the wildly jerking trawlers of the fleet, he was impressive.

Here’s something they don’t know about Wild Bill: He hasn’t had one fight in his whole life.

So impressive was Wild Bill’s entrance that nobody noticed the strength and efficiency of the man on deck expertly adjusting fenders between the sponson and the wharf. It was forty-year-old Neil. He was clean-shaven.

These two have been together now for twenty-six years - ever since they ran away from home.

Sad Les, loitering to the back of that gawping assembly didn’t recognize them as the delinquent sons of his one-time stevedoring colleague Old Bill Mason (1900-1952). If he had, he might have wondered about their exploits in the elapsed time. Had he asked he would have heard wonderful tales of their sugarbag years post world war two – jumping the rattler, cutting cane, mustering on the long paddock - until they found themselves in another tiny fishing village at the other end of Australia in 1955 - Port Lincoln.

1955 was the year of the great southern blue-fin tuna boom in the Great Australian Bight. An enterprising family of salmon fishermen using a purse seine net supplied by the CSIRO, having noticed a quantity of blue-fin tuna in the catch, asked this question: Might tuna be there in commercial quantities?

The answer: Yep -shitloads.

The two vagabonds (now strapping young men of twenty-six and twenty-nine) were taken on as deckhands and taught the art of poling tuna. That kindly fishing family of the Great Southern Ocean undertook to develop both young men to their full potential.

Thus, Wild Bill worked his way through the grades and classes of maritime study picking up certificates of competency like Command Navigation, Advanced Firefighting and Shipmaster’s Medical. By the time he was ready to take on the Osprey he held Master Class 3 and Skipper Grade 1 qualifications.

Neil applied an equal amount of dedication. He learned to read and he became a first class deckhand.

The apparent discrepancy between their achievements can be explained by the differential in the speed of their thinking machines (Neil always reacted violently to the word “brain”. It reminded him of an abusive overseer they once knew named Brian and the sound always set him off. Unfortunately, it was a word people were often tempted to use around him, though they quickly learned to make the substitution – “Use your thinking machine,” – “Did God give you any thinking machines at all?” - and so on).

Possessors of standard thinking machines usually made these comments because they thought of Neil’s low-velocity model as a handicap but that’s a design floor in standard thinking machines.

One advantage of a slow thinking machine is extreme focus.

Because his mind was free of the clutter of second thoughts, implications or distractions, Neil could conceive one simple concept at a time and give it the full force of his attention until it was aborted or taken full term to solid reality. This is how he discovered the way to decrease the size of his head.

Brian started it. Neil was impervious to verbal abuse because his thinking machine couldn’t keep up with it but from one particularly creative flow of Brian’s invective he managed to snag the term ”giant’s head”.

 A seed of a thought drifted lightly on a gentle breeze across the peaceful fields of Neil’s mind and settled into a fertile crevice. Days of mulling it over allowed it to take root and produce a sprout. A giant’s head didn’t look wrong. For five full days he meditated on that subject and the sprout became a stem. My head would look right on a giant. Another five days produced a blossom: I will become a giant!

And he did.

As assiduously as Wild Bill attended to his studies, Neil lifted things.

In those days the bodybuilding industry was still a fledgling. The only model available to Neil was to be found on the back of his favourite reading material, an Archie comic. Neil never tired of the hi-jinx of the Riverdale High gang Archie, Reggie, Betty, Veronica and especially Moose but the real treasure was the augmented photograph of a human giant on the very back page – Charles Atlas.

Charles Atlas (1892-1972) was a famous American strongman and model who claimed to have constructed his beautiful and (more importantly) big body from the unpromising clay of a 97-pound weakling. Atlas actually eschewed the use of barbells and weights and promoted a version of isometrics he called dynamic tension. Neil didn’t know this because he didn’t send in the coupon. The only bit of ad he read was the headline – “Hey – Skinny!”

Neil embarked on a weights routine in the style of the Australian Don Athaldo (1894-1965) who’d decided to bulk up after seeing a strongman at the circus.

Neil was neither 97-pound nor skinny in the first place. He was a hundred and eighty pounds of endomorph. For him a normal day’s work was to stand in a tray on the back of a boat in the pitching ocean holding an eight foot pole with eight feet of line and a barbless hook. When the tuna boiled on the surface he would hook, lift and throw over his shoulder a fish at the rate of one every thirty seconds. A small tuna would be thirty pounds, a big one a hundred and fifty.

When the day’s work was done Neil would begin his exercise regime of fishlifting. He’d select fish carcasses of an appropriate weight for repetition or resistance weight training. He did standing, squatting and bench work. He pressed, pronated and powerlifted. He lifted with arms, legs, hands and feet. He trussed a tuna in a towel, gripped with his teeth and lifted with his neck. He’d grab two fifty-pound fish by the tail and use them as Indian clubs.

Talk about focus.

Had they noticed him at all, none of the villagers welcoming Osprey would have remarked on the size of his head. The effect of his work had provided a kind of symmetry. His head now looked as muscle-bound as his body. Because an overabundance of bulk in his latissimus dorsi held his arms out toward the horizontal, the overall impression was that of a handsome, shaven gorilla.

Now he was happily hidden in the shade of his big brother. Wild Bill stood on the walkway on the portside of the wheelhouse and thanked the crowd for the welcome. He told them that all the fleet trawlers had been called into port and tomorrow afternoon he would hold a meeting at the Lodge. There the skippers and crews would be re-contracted and given a briefing on how fishing operations would proceed. Right now he and his brother were keen to locate their quarters, stow their gear and find their landlegs. They’d been steaming round the east coast of Australia for the last eight days.

This business of re-contracting sent a frisson of panic through the crowd as it occurred to them that they might be in a new-broom situation. They liked the old-broom situation. 

Nobody except Big Stan and Neil had an easy sleep that night.

© Ray Lillis 2012

7. Manu's camp

Back in 1885, Halley was mystified. By his calculations they should have been close to the Palmer River goldfields but they hadn’t encountered a single digger. Where they should have found a thriving populous of busy gravel-washers they found mangroves.

This country didn’t look mineral bearing in any way. 

In fact the goldfields were six hundred miles to the northeast and all but panned out. The only person making real money above ground there was a woman named Palmer Kate. She owned the brothels and the bars. If you wanted instant wealth without putting your hand in someone else's pants, you had to be a mining company with the funds to dig deep. Halley's funds were long spent and the only company he had was tired, frustrated and edgy. 

It was the dry season and they'd just dragged their unwilling horses over twenty miles of unshaded, brown and crusted flood plain to reach this slash of green that wasn't the Palmer. This river had no name but it did have blue-grey mud, mangroves and mosquitoes.

Coincidence is a natural law.

Our Halley – Herbert – was the direct descendant of Sir Edmond Halley (1656-1742), a famous English scientist. He was an astronomer, mathematician, geophysicist and geologist. He built a diving bell!

This Halley had the same kind of luck as Antonio Salieri (1750-1825) who stood in the shade of Mozart (1756-1791). He was Floyd Patterson (1935-2006) to Muhammad Ali.

Edmond’s umbrella was Sir Isaac Newton(1643-1727) - the man who pretty much invented science. Newton’s theory on the natural law of gravity (which, by the way, he only published because Halley asked about it) sucked up all the available attention like a black-hole on light. History all but forgot about Halley.

The only reason he’s remembered at all is because of the eponymous comet and he wasn’t even the first to see that. He used Newton’s theory to plot its course – that’s it. The comet wasn’t named after him until 16 years after his death.

Over two hundred years later this anonymous river (which, if any of the band would notice, was now sludging back in the opposite direction to when they first arrived) would not be named the Halley River until exactly sixteen years after the death of Herbert – eerie.

The reason the river was now travelling the opposite way was the self-same gravity that Newton had identified so many years before. They were five hundred yards from the river mouth and didn’t know it. The tide was coming in. Below the surface huge fish were jostling for feeding positions among the mangrove roots while Halley’s men were all but starving.

If it weren’t for Manu and his uncanny ability to live off the land the expedition could not have got this far. Halley had loaded the pack horses until they were sway-backed and splay-legged but he loaded them with pans, cradles, shovels, picks and the component parts of his four-poster bed. There was some food – flour, tea, salt-pork, pemmican, rice, sugar and salt – but only enough to feed a healthy troop of boy-scouts (this measurement not available to Halley since the boy-scouts would not be founded until 1908).

The fearsome looking Spaniard Manu had learned a good deal in his youth about living off the land from his iwi the Rongowhakaata. It wasn’t this land but many of the skills were transferrable. He showed Connelly and the Edwards boys how to make bird snares. He found wild yams, sweet potato and portulaca and taught the others where to find them.  Now, with access to a fishery, he could really show them something.

He found a safe place away from the mud to set up a calico camp and bivouac the horses. He suggested the building of a perimeter of sharpened stakes to defend the camp from native attack. 

Halley wasn’t convinced. He hadn’t seen a single native Australian since the start of the journey and he couldn’t imagine anyone would want to live at this place if given the choice.

Halley was keen on a natural law to do with the concept of terra nullius. This was an old Roman idea that said if you could find a bit of land that didn’t belong to anyone you could just grab it.

 Recognising that some black people might have got there first would just cloud the whole issue so Halley preferred to believe they weren’t there.

In fact the people of that region had been watching them for weeks. These people were called the Karundi and they’d been preparing to leave the area ahead of the monsoon rains when Halley’s expedition clanked into sight.

The People decided not to stick spears into the visitors since they might have firearms and, besides, the floods would flush them soon enough. Halley’s arrival delayed their departure because his little camp was so entertaining.

Every day the People would gather behind any convenient hiding place and try to stifle their laughter while the Edwards brothers and Condon had their morning argument which usually culminated in the throwing of boots or cookware. They marvelled at Halley’s ablutions, the sickly pink skin and the scraping of the face. They were entranced by the scarifications on Manu who seemed to them to be the only adult in the group.

This little theatre kept them entertained for days and detained them dangerously. Their usual entertainment - two spectacular, perfectly-formed tubes of cloud that stretched from horizon to horizon every morning, had given way to ominous grey thunderheads that rumbled and cracked across the sky every afternoon. To the Karundi this was a virtual weather forecast. It said: "Leave this place because soon it's going to piss down". They knew this warning well - it happened every year, but still they stayed. They were waiting in delicious anticipation for the final act.

On the perimeter of Manu’s camp were three scrawny acacia trees on whose branches he’d hung several portions of horsemeat humming with flies as they ripened. If you drew a direct line from the meat, through the middle of the camp to the river, you’d arrive at a long deep culvert cut into the riverbank. Because of the depth and width of this ditch, the People knew it was the slide of a gigantic old man crocodile. He’d have to be over thirty feet.

The People wanted to be there when that old man croc got home.

© Ray Lillis 2012