The first white men to find the original site of the
village at the mouth of the river were a group of five. They were lost but
didn’t know it. A dead magnet in a faulty compass had been leading them steadily
west while maintaining the fiction that it was taking them north.
Every evening when they stopped to make camp, they found time to marvel at the most spectacular sunsets in the world but not one
of them noticed that the sun was apparently setting in the north.
Every morning when it rose in the south, they put it on
their left shoulder and headed west.
They were prospectors and misguided in more ways than
one. They’d heard rumours that ordinary folk like them and some Chinese,
following in the unfortunate tracks of Edmund Kennedy were regularly tripping
over gold nuggets the size of your head at a place called Palmer River west of
Cooktown. They were in a hurry.
The band had come together, as many bands do, because
of a note tacked to a message board outside a store by one Herbert Halley. This one was at a chandlery
in Port Douglas in August, 1885.
WANTED 14 or
15 healthy and reliable hands for an expedition to the northern regions on an
pleasant search for precious stones, minerals and the like. The advantage will
belong to those with knowledge of mining, sufficient funds for support and a
horse. See Herbert Halley, Royal Hotel.
Halley was a young Englishman with a taste for
adventure. He was supported by a remittance, a classical education and very
little common sense.
Though there were only four applicants none of whom
had any experience, funds or a horse, Halley decided to press on with the
expedition. He not only assured them of their kit (“you’ll remunerate me on our
triumphant return”), he managed to convince them they were a select team of
specialists handpicked by himself for the venture.
They were the two Edwards brothers, the sons of freed
convicts who refused to provide any account of their lives to date; an Irishman
who gave his name as Connor but failed to answer to it for the first few weeks
of the expedition; and a Maori named Manu who insisted he was Spanish in spite
of his striking tribal tattoos.
Actually, to say they were the first white men to find
the place is open to dispute. The malfunctioning compass had brought them to
the crook in the right arm of the Gulf of Carpentaria, an area already well
traversed by the Dutchmen, Carstenzoon and Tasman (generally accepted to be white),
Macassars from Sulawesi (off-white) and Matthew Flinders (lily-white). There’s
a good chance Ludwig Leichhardt might also have passed through the area and
it’s also possible that Burke and Wills might have set foot there before
disappearing on their trip home.
Claiming to be the first white man to set foot
somewhere was a popular game of the time. It was the first step in the process
of renaming geographic features. Halley irritated his travelling companions for
the entire journey by repeatedly setting his feet and proclaiming henceforths –
“Henceforth this creek shall be known as Halley’s Creek,” and so on.
The Gulf Rivers are tortuously serpentine which meant
that Halley’s straight-line navigation technique required them to cross this
last one at every bend. Each time they did, Halley under the misapprehension it
was a new stream, set his foot and named it again. By the time they reached the
mouth he’d named it thirteen times.
Having exhausted his supply of variations on his own
name (Herbert Hill, Berty Bluff etc), classical references (Mount Olympus, Olympus
Creek etc.), and contemporary events (Broke Leg River, Runny Poo Plains etc.), he offered
the honour of naming rights to the men. The Edwards boys stretched their
imaginations and came up with Our River. Conroy wanted to call it Ned Kelly
Waters after a friend in Victoria but the laurel fell to Manu (with some
justification since he was probably the first Spaniard with a moko to set foot
there). He named it “Esperanza” which meant,
“hope” in his native tongue. Halley immediately anglicised it to “Esperance”
and it was to be the only nomination made by the expedition (besides Halley River) to stick.
They slaughtered a horse and Halley bade Manu cook a
haunch in a traditional Spanish earth oven while the others looked for a tree
big enough to blaze with the momentous news of their arrival.
They couldn’t find one.
© Ray Lillis 2012
Macassars keep turning up - they were the ones who brought tamarind and Coconut trees to that part of the north. The coconut oil was used for hair oil - hence - antimacassars to keep the California Poppy from staining the chairs. Small bloody world.
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