Inside an expedition to locate the Beagle’s lost anchors
Island Explorer at Holdfast Reach on the Victoria River in the NT. James Wheeler
From The Australian Financial Review by Paul Toohey
A search team is doing the heavy lifting of finding the artefacts in the turbulence of a wild river mouth in the Northern Territory.
The Victoria River, a carotid artery on the western neck of the Australian continent, sets forth its paradox clearly: its heavily silted surface is in a constant state of rips, churns and eddies, pointing to even greater upheavals beneath; yet outwardly, the river remains unchanged from when HMS Beagle felt its way upstream in 1839. The Beagle’s crew encountered a small group of Aboriginal people on the river’s shores. But nowadays the downstream Indigenous population has if anything decreased with the gravitation to settlement life. For the non-Indigenous, ever anxious to claim victories over nature – up on Everest, they do so while stepping over the corpses of the like-minded – it remains too forbidding. In five days on location, we didn’t see another boat or human. The river still holds the whip hand.
Although Charles Darwin had completed his travels with the Beagle years prior, the vessel would forever be linked to its former ship naturalist.
The Vic cannot be understood with a sweep of the eye. It is both a personal and impersonal river to experience. It is one of the least disturbed places on Earth and resides in its pristine state. For that reason, you feel protective towards it. Yet like any wild thing, it does not wish to be known. It wants to be left alone. It is never going to be your friend.
Entering a maze of muddy islands, the mouth of the Victoria is a vast delta within the Joseph Bonaparte Gulf that does not easily explain itself to mariners. We are in the 65-foot Island Explorer, decked out for group fishing tours but now temporarily repurposed in an attempt to locate two anchors that were cut free from the Beagle at a point on the river named Holdfast Reach 180 years earlier.
Here’s the ABC’s take on the same story from SATURDAY EXTRA with Geraldine Doogue
