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