6. Becoming Wild Bill

When Young Bill was ten and Neil was seven, Old Bill discovered they’d been smoking the cane chairs.

In those days smoking was still good for you and everybody did it except kids - mainly because they lacked the disposable income.

An excellent substitute for tobacco was to be found in the cane used for the construction of tropical furniture. A single cane chair could produce hundreds of porous tubes the length and consistency of a cigarette. Young Bill would cut a couple of smokes from the underside of one of the veranda easy chairs and take Neil, already his faithful puppydog, behind the Hibernian Hall for a few puffs. It was rather a harsh smoke because of the lacquer but the boys had great fun daring each other to do the drawback, blowing smoke rings and emulating Humphrey Bogart (1899-1957), a famous smoking stylist. 

Nobody noticed for months.

Then one day, weary from a hard day of humping sugar bags round the wharf, Old Bill threw his skinny arse dramatically down on a verandah lounger. This particular chair was one preferred by the boys for the mildness of its malacca. Most of its substructure had already been turned into cigars.

The weakened seat offered no resistance to Old Bill’s skinny arse as it continued it’s unhindered descent to the floor. An antimacassar flew into the air and neatly draped itself over his eyes. Naked tacks tore through his drill trousers and drew blood from the small of his back. The headrest shot forward, whacked into the back of his head and caused him to bite his tongue. Convinced he was being assaulted from behind, Old Bill screamed like a girl. 

Mum Mason rushed from the kitchen to find her hysterical husband wrestling with the furniture.

That night Mum educated Neil while Old Bill did some good to Young Bill.

In the tiny lounge room they stood back to back and whirled like a two-seater merry-go-round propelled by their squealing progeny. They didn’t stop until an uncoordinated backswing entangled the belt and the razor strop. It was quite romantic.

It was the first time they’d done anything together in years.

The cane-chair hiding was the final straw that set Young Bill in direct opposition to everything his father stood for. He set his foot and vowed a Henceforth - "Henceforth I will oppose all tyranny - especially from that old bastard," he said. 

He awarded himself the soubriquet Wild Bill to distance himself from his dad. The name Young Bill implied the existence of an Old Bill and Wild Bill didn’t even want to imply his father. That’s how wild he was.

Neil took to the name right away. Wild Bill was his hero. Wild Bill loved Neil too. Neil was already displaying an uncanny gift for saying the wrong thing at the right time.

When Old Bill heard about the name-change he issued a threat. He said, “If you don’t stop that nonsense I’ll Take off my belt and you know what’ll happen then?”

 “Your pants will fall down,” said Neil.

Wild Bill laughed all the way through the hiding.

The extra zip Old Bill was putting into Wild Bill’s education was a direct result of a lesson Mum had taught him seven years before. The lesson was this: “You’ll never put another human torpedo inside me”.

The birth of Neil had a lot to do with it. Neil was a huge baby with a huge head and he came out arse backwards. Mum heaved and cursed at Old Bill but no amount of straining would discharge the macrocephalitic Neil. He stayed there with his huge head wedged inside her like someone reluctant to back out of a tunnel - one long last look at the old place before joining the world. 

So, at the age of twenty-five, Old Bill had to rack his cue, as they used to say.

Now as a thirty-two-year-old, never-going-to-be artist with two kids and a permanent snooker on the middle pocket, people still told him to count himself lucky. That’s because this was 1936, seven years into the Great Depression.

“Count yourself lucky you’ve got a job at all,” they’d say.

The people who said this were the men in Old Bill’s gang. Those days before container ships and bulk-loading, wharfies worked on steel-hulled ships in forty degree heat in gangs of six – two on the wharf, one on the deck, one on the winch and two in the hold.

These were the members of Old Bill’s gang: Slimey Thomson, Lord Foulmouth, Shifty Stevens, Sad Les and Turd Murdoch.

Talk about depression.

© Ray Lillis 2012

5. Davy's skin

The Lodge backs onto the river and a track winds parallel back upstream past the single men’s quarters to the wharf and the processing plant. Davy hurries along the track until he reaches the big lilly pilly tree beside the plant. There, he hides until the factory hands straggle back in to work. He sees his mother laughing at some raucous joke. She flicks the butt of her smoke at a small man wearing a plastic hair net. A dirty joke. He waits. When he hears the starting whine of the water pump he knows they’re busy again and it’s safe to move. He runs the length of the wharf, drops at the other end onto the boat ramp and scurries up the other side into the cover of the bush. He knows the bush is the only place where he won’t feel alone.

This is what he doesn’t know:

His name is not Davy.

The laughing woman is not his mother.

Big Stan is not his father.

They are white people and he comes from people whose land is hundreds of miles away to the south. Davy is an Aboriginal boy – he is one of the People. He is eight years old. His connection is Snake.

The People have a story about when Davy was a baby. It’s this:

At that time the People had a big meeting about land and all the families came. After everybody had greeted the baby, they built up the campfire for the meeting and he was put into the care of his aunty, a girl about fourteen years old. That girl was distracted because she had just met her cousin on her mother’s side, a handsome boy from Mareeba and he invited her to go for a bit of a walk.

She knew she wasn’t allowed to be with that boy. She was wrong skin but she wanted to go anyway. So she put the sleeping baby on a blanket in a little lean-to at the edge of the camp and those two snuck off for a cuddle.

In that rainforest there’s a snake called a scrub python. He grows up to over twenty feet in length and comes out hunting at night. Scrub python likes to go after things like possums or small wallabies. He’ll take a chook too – or a puppy.

It’s not exactly true that the python crushes you to death. What he does is to get his coils round you nice and tight until you let out your breath, then he tightens up a little bit more so you can’t breathe in. Then he just waits until you suffocate. Everybody knows he hunts by tasting the air with his tongue until he gets the flavour of something alive and small. Once he locks onto that track he’s relentless.

Here’s this little ngawa all by himself with that baby smell of sour milk and stale piss and out of the darkness comes sliding that big old snake.

If anybody had looked up from the conference they might’ve seen the last six feet of the python’s body pour itself into the annex. But they didn’t.

The python’s tongue flicked the air as it drew itself up beside the little brown body in the white cotton nappy. The baby was lying on his back and the head of the snake drew up to the sleeping face to taste the air. Then its head disappeared under one tiny shoulder and reappeared on the other side. The baby was raised up with his head resting on the arched neck of the snake. The great snake with its cold eyes and flicking tongue held him motionless as the giant coils of its body slowly insinuated themselves into position.

Next thing you know there was a heck of a ruckus at the camp.

Nobody remembers exactly what happened but a woman screamed and those two young lovers got sprung. The boy’s mother dragged that young girl into the firelight by the hair. Then the boy’s real girlfriend tried to slap him and got his mother instead. The boy fell into the fire. People started shouting. Hell of a mess. The old fullahs all got cheesed off because they weren’t the centre of attention anymore and they started to grumble. It went on for quite a while before the baby’s mother could make herself heard.

Where’s the baby?

Usually it would be that the mother and the girl would just go and retrieve the baby but this time it was as if the people knew something was going on. Everybody, including the old fullahs followed the girl to the little humpy which was really just a couple of sheets of tin propped up with some branches.

When they got there, somebody flicked the tin away and everybody stopped dead in their tracks. Nobody said a word – not even the baby’s mother. The last one to arrive was the old bloke who spoke for that mob, a fullah named Eddy. He said, “Nobody move”.

There wasn’t much chance of that. Everybody was still trying to figure out what it was they were looking at.

The snake was huge at somewhere around twenty feet. It was coiled into a tight circle that raised its body into the shape and size of a truck tyre. The diamond patterns of its scales glinted in the flashes of firelight.

Nestled in the centre of this tangle of muscle that tiny baby lay fast asleep. The snake’s head rested on his little chest.

Scrub python had been asleep too, or at least his eyes were closed but when Eddy spoke, the eyes flashed open and the tongue began to twitch at the air.

“Don’t worry,” Eddy said, “nobody’s going to hurt you.”

It wasn’t clear whether Eddy was talking to the baby or the snake but the baby stirred. He waved his arms in jerky little spasms and his tiny fist bumped the snake’s eye. The people gasped but the python wasn’t the least worried. It moved its head clear of the baby who woke at that moment.

That baby lay there in the folds of the scrub python gurgling and smiling at the circle of faces around him as if he were safe in the soft arms of his own mother.

Eddy stepped up a bit closer and hunkered down like stockmen do when they decide to have a bit of a yarn.

“Now listen father,” Eddy said (his connection was Snake too), “this baby is one of the People and we’re about to get into a big long fight. We’re going to need these young fullahs to carry it on when we get too old or too tired. So I’m just going to take him now OK?”

When Eddy reached out his hand the snake drew back in the figure S that means it’s about to strike. Eddy sat back nice and calm and said, “We’ll look after him.”

The snake kept Eddy and the semi-circle of people baled up with its eyes but they saw that its body was unwinding itself from under the child. The baby was lowered gently as a feather onto the blanket. Then Scrub Python wound his way straight under Eddy’s moyu, across the feet of some of those standing by and back into the bush.

The ones who were touched said it felt like magic, like nothing they’d ever felt before or since and the others started making jokes about how good it must’ve felt on Eddy’s moyu.

Your moyu is your bum.

After that Eddy gave the baby a new black-fullah name.

But Davy doesn’t know any of this.

© Ray Lillis 2012

4. Terra nullius

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