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  After Mitchell discovered the Barcoo River in 1846 and Leichhardt disappeared in 1848, Gregory forged a route through the deserts to Adelaide.

  Gregory was one of the first explorers to dispense with the trappings of comfort, travelling instead on horseback with a minimum of supplies. Between 1855 and 1858, he made a series of ambitious expeditions around the fringes of the central Australian deserts, but his efforts were frustrated by the lack of water. As Gregory explored the north-west of the continent, even major rivers like the Victoria, which settlers hoped might turn out to be Australia’s Mississippi, splintered into thousands of rivulets and drained away into the arid land beyond. Gregory’s last hope of reaching the core of Australia was a watercourse he had named after Charles Sturt, but it too evaporated amongst the dunes:

  Having followed Sturts Creek for nearly 300 miles, we have been disappointed in our hope that it would lead to some important outlet to the waters of the Australian interior. It has, however, enabled us to penetrate far into the level tract of country which may be termed the Great Australian Desert.

  It was the final straw. Gregory gave up chasing the ghosts of lost scientists and invisible rivers—instead he decided to test a theory of his own.

  In the 1840s, the explorer Edward Eyre had tried to penetrate the centre of Australia by travelling due north from Adelaide but he was repeatedly thwarted by an impassable ‘horseshoe’ of salt lakes. Eyre’s furthest point was a peak he named Mount Hopeless because the desolate view from the summit destroyed all his hopes of progressing any further. Gregory was convinced that if he attacked the problem from the opposite direction, he could travel south down Cooper Creek, via Mount Hopeless to Adelaide, thus establishing a route from the heart of the desert back down to the coast.

  The journey was difficult even for an experienced party but, after crossing a large tract of barren terrain, Gregory emerged triumphant on the southern side of Mount Hopeless. It was the closest anyone had come so far to crossing the ‘Great Australian Desert’, but it had not quite solved the puzzle. There was still about 1300 kilometres of unexplored country between the Cooper and the north coast of Australia. Gregory’s assessment of its potential was hardly enthusiastic:

  The universal character of the country along the boundary is level sandy desert or worthless scrub without any sign of change in advancing into the interior beyond that of increasing sterility, caused by the greater aridity of the climate, while not one single stream emanates from this inhospitable region, to indicate ranges of hills, better soil or climate.

  Since Gregory’s expeditions were largely funded by the New South Wales government, his pessimistic conclusions might have been exaggerated in order to deter land speculators from deserting the Sydney market. Nevertheless, his reports fuelled the popular perception that the Australian interior was nothing more than ‘a scene of awful desolation, a sterile solitude, without a trace of verdure or a sign of life’.

  Stories of Australia’s ‘dead heart’ grew until the hellish descriptions of an immense impenetrable void seduced prospective explorers, eager for the heroic challenge of taming such an implacable enemy. The catchcry ‘There’s nothing out there’ started in the mid-nineteenth century, and it is a myth that permeates urban Australian culture to this day.

  It wasn’t just the Australian deserts that repelled the European settlers. The northern regions had been just as unpopular ever since the vagabond explorer William Dampier landed on the north-west coast in 1688 and reported that:

  The land is of a dry sandy soil, destitute of water…the woods are not thick nor the trees very big…We saw no sort of animal, nor any track of beast, but once. Neither is the sea very plentifully stored unless you reckon the manatee and turtle as such.

  After this derogatory assessment, no one bothered with the north or west coast for some time. It wasn’t until the British became suspicious of the French poking around in the area that they dispatched, first Matthew Flinders (the man who gave Australia its name) and later Phillip Parker King, John Wickham and John Stokes to survey the northern coastline.

  Each naval expedition found itself beset by the same problems. Unable to penetrate the estuaries and swamps, the sailors found only ‘a continuous mass of mangroves, mosquitoes, mud and mosquitoes’. The natives seemed equally unhospitable. In 1839 Commander Wickham nearly lost two men who had gone ashore to fix the ship’s compass. As they made their repairs, a party of Aborigines appeared, wielding their spears in an unfriendly manner. With great presence of mind, the men folded their arms and began a vigorous demonstration of the sailor’s hornpipe. So bemused were the warriors that they threw down their weapons and roared with laughter while the sailors danced for their lives on the beach below. The area, east of Darwin, was later named Escape Cliff.

  These miserable reports of hostile tribes, predatory crocodiles and over-enthusiastic insects were unlikely to inspire colonisation—but with an eye to the area’s strategic location on the edge of south-east Asia, the British made a couple of half-hearted attempts to establish settlements near the present-day city of Darwin. In the 1830s and 1840s, small groups of unfortunate soldiers and civilians were dumped on the north coast, told to uphold the honour of the empire—and then left to fend for themselves. Most traders sailed straight past them, preferring the established ports of Singapore and Indonesia to these pestilent naval garrisons. In the tropical heat, the new communities were soon strangled by fever. After visiting the settlement of Victoria on the Cobourg Peninsula in 1848, Thomas Huxley described it as, ‘the most useless, miserable, ill-managed hole in Her Majesty’s dominions’.

  By 1860 nearly two-thirds of Australia remained unexplored. The oldest continent on earth seemed to have evolved an ability to repel the new immigrants for longer than almost anywhere else on earth bar the polar ice-caps. It was almost as if the unreachable centre was taunting the cities developing around its perimeter. The desert remained oblivious to nearly a century of European colonisation. Its indigenous inhabitants lived and died as they had always done and, on the banks of Cooper Creek, the old coolibah trees stood unmolested, their roots responding to the floods and droughts that had dictated the rhythms of the interior for thousands of years. But the tranquillity would not last forever.

  Two

  Marvellous Melbourne

  ‘Nothing will ever be attempted if all possible objections must first be overcome.’

  Samuel Johnson

  Dr David Wilkie was an explorer of the armchair variety, a distinguished city physician who had never ventured further than the odd country picnic. So it was somewhat surprising when, in 1857, he suggested that Victoria mount a grand expedition to search for Ludwig Leichhardt and unlock the secrets of Australia’s enigmatic core.

  When Wilkie announced his plan to the November meeting of Melbourne’s Philosophical Institute, it was met with bewilderment. The members debated the idea and then responded as they would many times over the next three years. They formed a committee and ordered a report on the matter.

  The Philosophical Institute had been formed in 1855. It was the sort of semi-social, semi-scientific organisation that inevitably sprang up amongst the educated classes in cities throughout the British empire. A few of its members were professionals, a few were self-taught amateurs and the rest were either enthusiastic eccentrics or committed social climbers. They normally confined themselves to obscure papers on such subjects as ‘The Nature of Whirlwinds’ or ‘The Acclimatisation of the Llama’, but the idea of a transcontinental expedition appealed to their sense of importance. Perhaps it was time for the infant colony of Victoria to prove itself with a daring bid to open up the centre of the continent.

  Despite a generous thirty-two members, the new Exploration Committee, headed by Melbourne’s mayor Dr Richard Eades, boasted just two men with practical experience in the art of geographical discovery: the naturalist William Blandowski, who had led some small scientific collecting parties, and the government botanist Baron Ferdinand von Mu
eller, who had been with Augustus Gregory in northern Australia.

  When Wilkie’s plan was shown to Gregory, the explorer dismissed it as ‘almost hopeless’. Mueller then suggested that a light party should be sent out from Melbourne to the Darling River on a sort of apprenticeship journey for fledgling explorers. It could establish a depot just beyond the settled areas and the experience gained could be used to mount a more ambitious expedition at a later date. This new idea confused matters further. After much deliberation, the Exploration Committee only succeeded in producing another long and ultimately inconclusive report.

  Representing many of Melbourne’s most powerful men, the Royal Society was often lampooned by satirists sceptical of its scientific credibility.

  A month later, on 22 December, a group of men with top hats and mutton-chop whiskers could be found hanging around on Melbourne’s Collins Street, loosening their starched collars and cursing the Christmas heatwave. The members of the Philosophical Institute had gathered for their meeting—only to find the violinists from the Philharmonic Orchestra had beaten them to it. Tempers flared as the musicians ‘fiddled away happily’ inside and the institute’s secretary searched for alternative accommodation.

  The anger over the lecture halls mix-up set the tone for the rest of the meeting. Mueller’s report provoked a series of furious arguments. ‘How could Victoria hope to cross the entire continent when it had no explorers and no one with any experience to lead the party?’ shouted the institute’s secretary John Macadam, a man of many professions including doctor, pathologist, chemist and university lecturer. ‘How many men would venture on a larger expedition until they had gained some experience on a smaller one?’ ‘Dozens! Dozens! Dozens!’ screamed Blandowski. ‘Two stockmen—yes, two stockmen, by Gott—would gallop across the whole distance and be back in five weeks!’

  Ignoring the chairman Dr Richard Eades’ pleas for calm, the committee continued to fling amendments in every direction. Some wanted a return to Wilkie’s proposal, others wanted an expansion of Mueller’s plan, and Blandowski disagreed loudly with everyone.

  It was the discovery of gold that gave Victoria the financial luxury to argue about exploration. In 1851, several large nuggets were found near Ballarat and then Bendigo, north-west of Melbourne. The strikes had a magnetic effect on the population.

  The countryside was soon crawling with men pushing wheelbarrows down muddy tracks towards the goldfields. By 1853 a thousand ships a year were arriving in Melbourne. Lieutenant-Governor La Trobe despaired as everyone from bank clerks to police officers headed for the hills. ‘Cottages are deserted,’ he complained, ‘houses are to let, business is at a standstill, and even schools are closed. In some suburbs not a man is left.’ The Argus couldn’t resist poking fun, printing a mock dispatch from La Trobe to his colonial masters:

  My Lord,

  As nearly all my officers have ‘sloped’ for our extravagantly rich diggings, I am obliged to write my despatches with my own hand; besides having to clean my own boots, groom my horse, and do a little amateur wood chopping. I have no clerks and no constables. High and low are at Mt Alexander and, between ourselves, are doing more real work in a day than they used to spread comfortably enough over a month… Yours, in a hurry, as I fear the chops are burning.

  Those who left the city to make their fortune soon discovered that life in the diggings was not what they had expected. Once the surface nuggets had been removed, mining was a back-breaking slog in the mud with a pick and shovel. Most people lived in filth under makeshift tarpaulins strung out between the few gum trees that remained standing. Food and supplies were sold at vastly inflated prices and many miners made only enough to drink themselves senseless at the sly-grog shops, which popped up like mushrooms around the shanty towns.

  Those who did strike it lucky returned to the city to demonstrate that there was no one more generous than a successful miner with a few drinks under his belt. One digger bought the entire stock of champagne from a Melbourne hotel, emptied it into a horse trough and invited all and sundry to drink it; another donated a full set of solid gold horseshoes to be put on display in the city centre. Onlookers were astonished to find that they had been fitted and used.

  Gold transformed life in Melbourne. Imposing sandstone buildings resplendent with columns and carvings began to appear around the city centre. A huge public garden was opened next to the River Yarra. It boasted a bandstand, a menagerie, a dance floor and a theatre. At weekends visitors could watch re-enactments of the burning of Moscow or the eruption of Vesuvius, and at night there were spectacular fireworks displays. Outings to the theatre became popular, particularly among miners looking for an excuse to pick up women. The venues and the shows were as lavish as they were vulgar. One of Melbourne’s favourite theatres was renowned for its saloon bar dubiously named ‘The Saddling Enclosure’.

  By the end of the 1850s gold had catapulted Melbourne from a primitive muddy port to the most magnificent colonial city in the southern hemisphere. Victoria’s population jumped to half a million people, many of whom were engaged directly or indirectly in the production of one third of the world’s supply of bullion. Melbourne was, claimed the celebrated polymath Archibald Michie, ‘as comfortable, as elegant, as luxuriously lit, as any place out of London or Paris’.

  As Victoria’s wealth spiralled, so did its scientific and cultural aspirations. The growing sense of sophistication brought with it a feeling of shame that large portions of the continent were unmapped, unnamed and—to European eyes—unclaimed. Melburnians might marvel at aeronauts ascending to the skies in giant balloons, or wonder at the African lions in their latest travelling zoo—but no one could say for sure what lay between the city and the north coast.

  In this era of opulence the centre of Australia was an insult to the colonial mind; a rebellious outlaw that refused to be parcelled up and tied down by lines of latitude and longitude. The newspapers began to call for a resumption of the colony’s early enthusiasm for exploration, with one columnist lamenting, ‘That the interior of this continent should still remain shrouded in mystery, is a national reproach to the Australian communities in general but especially to Victoria.’

  Victoria, however, was the least likely of all the Australian territories to solve the continent’s geographical conundrums. It was the smallest and southernmost mainland colony, hemmed in by New South Wales and South Australia. Since there was no room for territorial expansion, it had little experience in exploration. Yet the pride that Victoria felt in its self-proclaimed status as ‘the most advanced of the Australian sisterhood’ fuelled the idea of a grand scientific enterprise. The Argus wondered why such an ‘advanced’ colony was not striving to make her mark, by opening up an overland route to the north coast:

  In all probability the time is not too far distant when we shall wonder at the timidity or the apathy and the ignorance displayed. A ghastly blank will no longer stare us in the face when we bend our eyes upon the map of this continent, and the track of the explorers, winding over that white plain, may become one of the highways of commerce dotted with centres of population, and vital with the ebb and flow of a periodic tide of travellers.

  Despite the rowdy disorganisation of the Philosophical Institute, the idea of a transcontinental expedition had taken root amongst the rich and powerful in Melbourne society. When the shouting died down at the meeting on 22 December 1857, it was decided that the project should be tackled with new resolve. The institute formed another Exploration Committee, this time with a mere twenty-five members. Their job was to turn the rhetoric into reality.

  The first requirement was money. Politicians were duly approached but most were uninspired by the idea of dispatching a group of scientists into the wilderness for the good of humanity. As far as official funding was concerned, the expedition was placed on the backburner. Here it seemed destined to remain, until a saviour stepped forward in the unlikely guise of Mr Ambrose Kyte.

  William Stawell was an influential figure
in Melbourne. He exploited Burke’s weaknesses to implement his own Machiavellian plans for the expedition.

  Kyte was an Irish businessman of questionable but successful methods. He once had his arm set in plaster so he could later disown a signature on a contract he was unsure he wanted to honour. One of Kyte’s greatest ambitions was a good name and a knighthood, so he set about establishing himself as a philanthropist. In August 1858 he approached Sir William Foster Stawell with a generous offer for the Philosophical Institute.

  Stawell was a lawyer with a commanding gaze and inexhaustible reserves of energy. After emigrating to Australia, he went on to hold nearly every public office in Victoria, from attorney-general to chancellor of Melbourne University and commander of the Royal Yacht Club. For now, he was Victoria’s chief justice, president of the Philosophical Institute and a member of the Exploration Committee.

  Kyte offered £1000 towards an expedition, provided his fellow colonists subscribed at least another £2000. He wanted his donation kept anonymous, no doubt intending to reveal it when the expedition had succeeded and the impact would be all the greater. Stawell tipped off the Argus, which announced the scoop the following morning:

  We are authorised to state that a gentleman of Melbourne has proposed to give the sum of one thousand pounds towards the promotion of a judicious scheme of Australian exploration… the mystery of our Interior is one of the most perplexing and at the same time one of the most interesting of the unsolved problems of physical geography. Hitherto every effort to penetrate it has failed, and Australia presents still the singular spectacle of a great land fringed with a belt of population and industry and yet we possess less positive knowledge than we have of the remotest interior of Africa.