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THE comet is coming.

Seventy-five years have passed since the last sighting of Halley’s Comet, a span longer than most lifetimes. Longer than the reign of Queen Victoria, a princess in layers of petticoats when the comet appeared in 1835 and now dead for almost a decade. Her stony likeness surveys parks and esplanades around Australia while passers-by scan the heavens for the comet, which to some is a harbinger of pestilence and drought. People say the earth will pass through poisonous gases in its spectacular tail. To ward off noxious effects they sniff camphor and take comet pills made of sugar and hope.

It is the year of the comet, 1910, but on this hot February afternoon in Melbourne, a young city named after the late monarch’s first prime minister, there is a distraction: a public event advertised in newspapers and on placards carried through streets by youths with scuffed knees. People come early to secure a vantage point. They press up against the sides of Queen’s Bridge; push back on to the road blocking wagons and bicycles, horse-drawn cabs and smoke-belching motor cars; peer from both banks of the Yarra River, those on the south side shielding their eyes against the sun.

Young clerks and office boys and urchins clamber three-deep on to narrow ledges. In the crush, women offer children to strangers, entreating them to hold their infants aloft so the little ones can witness the miracle. They wait for a short, thick-set man in a bright blue bathing-costume who arrives in a rush and appears not at all surprised to find thousands of restless spectators gawping at him. He has seen others just like them in different places many times before.

Like a condemned prisoner confronting his execution with equanimity he mounts a parapet high above the sluggish water and holds out his wrists to be manacled. He smiles when chains are wound around his neck and chest and shoulders, as if it were all a great joke. He says something in mock complaint about their weight, but only those closest to him can hear. His restraints are checked, to confirm they are secure.

Then, with a slight nod of his head, though perhaps he is just glancing down to see how far he must fall before his bare feet break the surface of the river, he steps into air as warm as blood.