The Dig Tree Read online

  In the centre of the turmoil, standing on top of a wagon, was a tall flamboyant Irishman, with flashing blue eyes and a magnificent black beard. Shouting orders in a strong Galway accent, he was trying (and failing) to impose order on the mayhem below. Expedition leader Robert O’Hara Burke grew ever more impatient as he tried to squeeze too much equipment onto too few camels, horses and wagons.

  The expedition was already running hopelessly behind schedule but, as fast as his men tried to organise the stores, more people descended in a frenzy of curiosity. They inspected the rifles and ammunition, sat down at the cedar-topped dinner tables and discussed the relative advantages of the bullock cart versus the American wagon. The expedition doctor, Hermann Beckler, recalled later, ‘no member of the expedition could see another, none could work with another, none could call another—such was the crush among the thousands who thronged to see our departure’.

  The Victorian Exploring Expedition had been organised by a committee of Melbourne’s most important men. In July 1851 Victoria had proudly severed its ties with its parent colony of New South Wales and this grand enterprise was designed to show off the achievements of a new and ambitious colony. Every eventuality was catered for using the latest inventions. One ‘hospital camel’ was fitted with an enclosed stretcher, which would ‘afford capital accommodation for invalids, should sickness unfortunately visit the party’. In order to cope with dry conditions, each man carried a ‘pocket charcoal filter, by means of which he will be able to obtain drinkable water under the most unfavourable circumstances’, and should anyone get lost, the party carried ‘an abundance of signals, from the rocket and the blue light to the Union Jack and the Chinese gong’. As the Age remarked, ‘Never did an expedition set forth under, on the whole, brighter auspices. Everything that could possibly be furnished, as in any way useful or auxiliary to the expedition, has been given it.’ The problem was—where to put it all?

  By lunchtime the crowd had swelled to around 15,000, a good turnout for a city of 120,000. An impromptu band was formed and a carnival atmosphere swept through the park, compounding the general disarray and giving the proceedings ‘a very gay and animated appearance’. Whispers began to circulate that certain ‘entertainments’ could be procured in the bushes around the edge of the park and a ‘sly grog shop’ opened up behind the camel stables.

  By mid-afternoon an expedition member confirmed one of those rumours by appearing amongst the crowd ‘a little too hilarious through excess of beer’. Burke had already dismissed two of his party for disobedience and he now fired ex-policeman Owen Cowan on the spot. The expedition was three men down—and it had not even finished packing.

  The only surviving photograph of the expedition leaving Royal Park shows Burke standing in the centre giving a speech to the city’s dignitaries.

  One man avoided the revelry. Refusing to be interviewed or to have his photograph taken, a neatly dressed young Englishman stayed inside his tent, wrapping his scientific instruments and placing them inside purpose-built mahogany boxes. Surveyor, astronomer, meteorologist and third-in-command, William John Wills packed his nautical almanacs, sextant, compass, theodolite, chronometer, barometer, thermometer, anemometer, telescope, sketchbooks, notebooks, specimen jars and bottles of preserving fluid.

  Wills was a born scientist. It was his mission to discover, record and explain the world around him, and now at the age of twenty-six he had the opportunity to cross an entire continent, from the Southern Ocean to the Gulf of Carpentaria. Wills had no doubt that scientific observation would soon dispel the mystique of the Australian interior as surely as it would explain away religion and other superstitions. He expected the journey to last more than two years.

  The expedition had been due to depart at one o’clock in the afternoon but ‘hour after hour passed in preparation for starting’. After lunch the deputy leader, George Landells, who had special responsibility for the camels, delayed proceedings even further by losing his temper when it was suggested his animals should carry an extra 150 kilograms each. Burke was becoming flustered. With the city’s dignitaries waiting to offer the official farewell, he was facing the embarrassing prospect of having to leave with only half his party. Impulsively, and with little regard for the cost, he hired two extra American-style wagons and ordered that the rest of the supplies be loaded at once.

  When the column of camels, horses and wagons finally assembled shortly before four o’clock, the mood became patriotic. It was as if the city of Melbourne was saluting its troops as they strode off into battle. Burke returned to his tent, changed into his explorer’s uniform and then addressed the crowd. For a man who often had plenty to say, his speech was awkward:

  On behalf of myself and the Expedition I beg to return you my most sincere thanks. No expedition has ever started under such favourable circumstances as this. The people, the government, the committee—they all have done heartily what they could do. It is now our turn; and we shall never do well till we justify what you have done in showing what we can do!

  In private Burke was more forthright. ‘I will cross Australia,’ he told his friends, ‘or perish in the attempt.’

  As the band struck up ‘Cheer, Boys, Cheer’, the crowd applauded and the explorers began to march. It was an exotic cavalcade. Dressed in traditional ‘oriental’ attire, George Landells took the lead on an enormous bull camel, waving to the spectators and relishing the attention. Burke followed on Billy, his favourite grey horse, and behind him came the Indian sepoys, the scientists, the packhorses and the American-style wagons. The entire procession was half a kilometre long. ‘Never have we seen such a manifestation of heartfelt interest in any public undertaking as on this occasion,’ the Argus declared, ‘the oldest dwellers in Australia have experienced nothing equal to it.’

  Among the vehicles swaying out of Royal Park was one extraordinary contraption. It was a wagon designed so that ‘at a very short notice it can be taken off the wheels, and put to all the uses of a river punt, carrying an immense load high and dry on the water’. This elaborate construction revealed the general uncertainty about what lay ahead for the explorers. Some believed the Australian interior would reveal nothing more than a vast desert, others fantasised about mountain ranges, fertile plains, lost civilisations and wild animals unknown to science. A few believed the semi-submersible wagon might be needed to sail across an inland sea. The truth was—nobody knew.

  It was 4.30 when the expedition left the park. Ahead lay a journey of at least 5000 kilometres, the equivalent of marching from London to Moscow and back, or making the round trip from New York to Las Vegas. As the rousing speeches faded away and the crowd dispersed, the magnitude of the task became apparent. Several of the wagons became bogged in the soft ground at the edge of the park. One broke down completely just beyond the camels’ manure heap.

  By the time Burke coaxed his recalcitrant convoy out of Melbourne in 1860, it was the age of overland exploration. Most of the world’s great maritime voyages were over and every continent bar Antarctica found itself being poked, prodded and plundered by scientists, missionaries, traders and tyrants. In the course of the nineteenth century Lewis and Clark blazed the Oregon Trail, William Wallace formulated evolutionary theory in south-east Asia, David Livingstone disappeared into the depths of the Zambezi and Friedrich von Humboldt traversed Venezuela, gingerly cataloguing the properties of the electric eel.

  Australia revealed its secrets with reluctance. Unlike America, where the pioneers had spread out west as fast as their wagons could carry them, Australia’s first colonies were convict settlements. The last thing the British government had in mind was a mass exploration of the surrounding area. This policy of containment was assisted by the foundation of Sydney in 1788 beside the natural prison of the Great Dividing Range. The new immigrants spent the first few decades simply trying to survive, and when they felt secure enough to travel further afield they found they were pinned to the east coast by the towering sandstone cliffs of the Blue M
ountains.

  Some convicts were convinced that China lay on the other side of the range, others told stories of fearsome warriors, savage kingdoms and dangerous wild animals. These myths were propagated by overworked army officers, keen to emphasise the lurid consequences of escape from the prison farms. But as conditions in Sydney improved, and the fetters of convict society were loosened, pioneers spilled north and south searching for new pastures along the edges of the continent and helped set up the cities of Melbourne, Adelaide and Brisbane.

  Despite the opportunity to explore a landmass of 7.5 million square kilometres (about two-thirds the size of Europe), the new settlers showed a marked hesitancy to leave the coast. It seems strange that a new society could cling to the hemline of its adopted continent for so long without knowing what lay in the centre—but with a small population and plenty of fertile soil, there was little incentive to travel inland. Even today, more than 80 per cent of the Australian population live within thirty kilometres of the coast.

  As the towns grew into cities, people came to regard ‘the bush’ with a mixture of apathy and apprehension. They might never have seen a koala or a wombat in the wild; the nearest they came to a kangaroo was when they walked over the skin rugs in their English-style cottages. The subtle olive-greens and silver-greys of the eucalypt forests seemed pallid in comparison. Settlers like John Sherer in the 1850s regarded the Australian landscape as a source of tedium and discomfort:

  There can be no walk, no journey of any kind, more monotonous than one through the bush…there is no association of the past connected with it…Imagination is at a standstill—fairly bogged, as your body may be in a mud swamp. There are no sacred graves…no birthplaces of great men. Nothing of this kind; all is deadly dull, uninspiring hard work.

  The first attempts to penetrate further inland were often individual excursions by ambitious farmers. They took off into the unknown, armed with little more than a swag, a rifle and a healthy dose of enthusiasm. Little by little, these unsung heroes of Australian exploration extended their knowledge of the surrounding countryside. They might discover abundant grasslands and giant forests or stumble over nuggets of gold. But as they fumbled further afield, the fertile coastal safety net gave way and the landscape assumed a more menacing aspect.

  In 1858, a farmer known as Coulthard set out alone to find new pastures to the north of Adelaide. His mummified body was later discovered by a government expedition. Before he died, he scratched a last message into his empty water bottle:

  I never reached water…My Tung is stkig to my mouth and I see what I have wrote I know it is this is the last time I may have of expressing feeling alive & the feeling exu is lost for want of water My ey Dassels My tong burn. I can see no More God Help

  It was only when the politicians realised that there was money to be made from the new grazing lands that a full-scale assault on the inland began. The countryside was attacked with military-style expeditions using columns of horses and bullock carts to carry enormous quantities of supplies into the bush. Drawings from the early nineteenth century show men wearing starched collars and impressive moustaches, clinging to their European traditions with admirable, if misguided, tenacity. After a hard day in the field, the officers would retire to their separate quarters and dress for dinner. In the middle of nowhere, they sat down at large oak tables, ate their three-course dinners with silver cutlery, sipped their wine and wiped their chins with spotless white napkins.

  By the 1830s, the most imperious of all the government explorers, Surveyor-General Sir Thomas Livingstone Mitchell, was marching around New South Wales doing battle with the complexities of its river systems. Apart from being notoriously bad-tempered, Mitchell won recognition for opening up huge areas of grazing land in the far north-west of the colony, but when it came to unravelling the south-eastern rivers he faced a series of humiliating defeats.

  Many of the waterways were boomerang-shaped, and just when Mitchell was convinced he knew where they were heading, they had a bizarre tendency to curve inland and flow in the ‘wrong’ direction. This led Mitchell’s great rival, Charles Sturt, to conclude that rivers like the Murray and the Murrumbidgee must eventually drain into an ocean in the middle of the continent. Why else, he reasoned, did seagulls mysteriously appear from the interior in certain years? Sturt was so confident that he pioneered the technique of building wagons that could be converted into small boats. With backing from the South Australian government, he set off from Adelaide in 1844, heading north on a ‘voyage’ towards the centre of the continent.

  While Eyre and Leichhardt explored Australia’s coastal fringes, Sturt penetrated the interior in his quest for the inland sea.

  For a man convinced he was about to ‘launch into an unknown sea and run away towards the tropics’, it was a heartbreaking journey. The grass turned to rock and the cool winds of the coast were replaced by searing blasts of air slicing across the treeless plains. As Sturt continued north, the waterholes dried up and the colour green seemed to vanish from the spectrum. At every turn he was confronted by vistas of sand, salt and clay. After 600 kilometres, his party became trapped between an expanse of gleaming white salt lakes and towering red dunes, ‘the most forbidding that our eyes had wandered over’, he concluded.

  Tormented by mirages, Sturt continued north-west. With a commendable sense of irony he described himself ‘as lonely as a ship at sea’, stuck in a giant maze of sandhills, ‘which looked like the ocean swells rising before us’. Not only had he failed to find the inland sea, he and his men were now marooned in one of the most unforgiving landscapes Australia possesses. ‘The truth flashed across my mind,’ he wrote, ‘that we were locked up in the desolated and heated region that we had penetrated, as effectually as if we had wintered at the Pole.’

  After an agonising summer, entombed in a small rocky gorge he named Depot Glen, Sturt mustered his last reserves for a final journey north. He emerged to find his way was barred by ‘gibber plains’—enormous expanses of bare earth covered in nothing but small purplish-red rocks.

  The area became known as Sturt’s Stony Desert and it was to plague Australian explorers for decades to come. Geologists believe it is the relic of an ancient plateau that has been eroded over millions of years to leave belts of rocky plains intersected by sand dunes. The earth is rich in iron and it is the process of oxidation that gives the desert its distinctive colours. The average rainfall is less than 130 millimetres per year. During a drought, there is not a sign of life anywhere.

  Sturt’s party stumbled onward. As the stones sizzled in the sunlight, it was like crossing a giant barbecue. Within hours their boots were in tatters. The expedition’s dog lost all the skin from its paws. Sturt didn’t realise it, but he was travelling at the height of one of the fiercest summers ever to be recorded.

  The expedition was saved by the kind of geographical miracle that Australia sometimes reserves for those with sufficient perseverance. A chain of waterholes lined with coolibah trees seemed to appear from nowhere. The pools were linked by a series of channels to form a delicate ephemeral river system. This precious water was known to the Aborigines as Kini-papa. On 9 November 1845, Sturt named it ‘Cooper’s Creek’ after a South Australian judge.

  It was only a temporary reprieve for the exhausted explorers. Every time Sturt tried to leave the creek, the countryside reverted to a waterless wasteland. A terrible drought gripped the country. Even the local Aboriginal tribes were struggling to survive. There is no water, they told Sturt—‘the sun has taken it’.

  After months of torment, Charles Sturt’s disappointment turned to despair. Sick with scurvy and exhaustion, he conceded defeat and turned south on 11 November 1845. The surveyor abandoned his small wooden boat on the edge of the desert—and with it his dreams of an inland sea.

  With so much of Australia’s landmass unexplored, the continent proved irresistible to European scientists and adventurers who had run out of discoveries closer to home. Ludwig Leichhardt turned out to
be an exceptional explorer. Educated in Prussia, he arrived in Australia in 1841, determined to learn everything about his new environment. His training in zoology, botany, geography, geology and meteorology was so extensive that even Thomas Mitchell was impressed and hired him as a naturalist for several journeys around northern New South Wales.

  The Major was less enamoured when, in 1846, he learned that his protégé had led a privately funded expedition from Brisbane to the British settlement of Port Essington, north of the site of Darwin. While Leichhardt blazed a trail through 4800 kilometres of largely uncharted territory, Mitchell was at home polishing his sextant and waiting for government funding for the same journey.

  Leichhardt returned to Sydney a hero but his glory was short-lived. His second expedition ended prematurely when heavy rain set in, bogging his wagons and giving his men a ‘dose of fever’. Undeterred, he set off again from Roma (to the west of Brisbane) on 4 April 1848. It was a substantial party with seven men, fifty bullocks, 270 goats, seven horses, tents, rifles, ammunition and tonnes of supplies—yet it vanished into the wilderness and was never seen again. To this day, no verifiable trace of the expedition has ever been found.

  Leichhardt’s disappearance provided another incentive to investigate the mystery of Australia’s centre. The New South Wales government asked surveyor Augustus Gregory to search for the lost scientist. Before he left, the methodical and cautious Gregory wrote to Thomas Mitchell asking for his advice. The Major refused ‘in a most discourteous manner’.