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  Suddenly the idea of crossing the continent didn’t look so farfetched after all.

  Australia was richer than it ever had been but it remained dependent, by necessity if not inclination, on Great Britain. It looked across the globe for government, manufactured goods, export markets and a constant supply of eligible young women. But there was a perpetual time lag since the clipper ships took two to three months to bring news from Europe. Farmers had to wait the best part of a year before they discovered the price for last season’s wool clip; mining companies produced tonnes of copper, only to find that, once it reached Europe, everyone was looking for nickel; settlers rushed home to visit a sick relative and found themselves in the nearest graveyard.

  In other parts of the world these problems were being solved by a dramatic new invention—the overland telegraph line. In 1844, the first cables were laid between Washington and Baltimore. Suddenly messages could be relayed over hundreds of kilometres with the click of button. Investors and entrepreneurs were quick to embrace the new technology and soon the planet was festooned with an ever-expanding wire network. When engineers began to plan undersea cables, no corner of the globe seemed inaccessible. In these early days, enthusiasm often outstripped expertise—the line from Dover to Calais worked for a just few hours and then went dead, leaving its backers with huge losses.

  It was the discovery of gutta-percha (a natural latex) to protect the cables that pushed the technology forward. By 1853, Britain could wield its influence through the copper wires as far afield as Germany, Austria, Russia and Turkey. Plans were under way to link America and Britain. The new communication system was particularly useful in times of conflict and when the Crimean War broke out in 1854, Australia realised how isolated from the rest of the world it was. Wild rumours circulated that the Russians were about to invade, and at the prospect of this rather unlikely offensive, calls mounted for a cable link to Europe.

  The governor of South Australia, Sir Richard MacDonnell, petitioned the British government for assistance. Its response was to dispatch Charles Todd, a London astronomer with a passion for anything electrical. His task was to link the towns along the South Australian coast, giving Adelaide an early-warning system against an enemy attack. Todd arrived to find that private enterprise had outstripped government bureaucracy, and the cable was already in place. He turned his attention to building a line between Adelaide and Melbourne. A small dynamic man, Todd supervised every last detail of his projects. Fond of bad jokes, he would ride from camp to camp announcing to anyone who would listen, ‘Without the T, I would be Odd.’ Few disagreed with him.

  By 1858, all three of Australia’s major cities were linked, and Todd began to indulge his ultimate telegraphic fantasy. He wanted to connect Australia to Europe. Like a giant web, the cable network was already being spun throughout Asia—but which route should it follow to reach the remote cities of Adelaide, Melbourne and Sydney? The cost of undersea cabling was about £1000 per kilometre, so it seemed sensible to bring the cable ashore on the northern coast of Australia at its closest point to south-east Asia, then take it directly south. That is—unless you worked for a cable manufacturing company.

  Entrepreneur Francis Gisbourne had been involved with the plan to connect New York and London. Now he saw even larger profits in the southern hemisphere. Gisbourne arrived in Australia with an ambitious scheme to bring an undersea cable ashore on the east coast, thus maximising his revenue from the vast amounts of wire needed to go from south-east Asia all the way to Brisbane.

  The idea horrified the South Australians. Adelaide was the first port of call for the European clipper ships. It was the gatekeeper of all the news from around the globe and the government made a handsome profit from disseminating the latest reports to the other states. Everyone from businessmen and politicians to homesick settlers had an insatiable appetite for information. Journalists would charter pilot boats to meet the incoming clippers, and then race each other back to the telegraph station with the latest stories. The competition for transmission slots was so intense that one enterprising reporter enraged his colleagues by ordering passages from his Bible to be telegraphed. Having tied up the line with Deuteronomy, he then composed his European news summary.

  For Adelaide, an east-coast telegraph line via Brisbane to Sydney would mean isolation and financial disaster. Governor MacDonnell commissioned a report from Charles Todd who, unsurprisingly, stated that an overland route through the centre of the continent south to Adelaide was the most satisfactory option. MacDonnell communicated these sentiments vigorously, if not speedily, to the British government.

  The undersea line via Brisbane never eventuated. It was not the British who wrecked the scheme, but the intransigence of the Australian colonies. Francis Gisbourne returned home a disappointed man. Not only had his American cable fallen to pieces after twenty-seven days, but he found that the Australian colonies had ‘opinions of their own, a most discouraging factor, even to themselves’.

  Gisbourne left behind him a titanic struggle between the warring factions. Western Australia wanted the telegraph line to come ashore in Albany on the south-west coast. Brisbane and New South Wales were adamant that the eastern option was preferable and Victoria wondered how it could divide the pack and secure the prize for itself. While the overland route seemed the most logical solution, there was one problem. No one had actually travelled from one coast to the other—so who could say exactly where the telegraph should go?

  At Melbourne’s Philosophical Institute the issue of the telegraph wires began to influence the more astute members of the Exploration Committee. Soon it was secretly splintering into opposing factions. Scientists like Ferdinand Mueller still envisaged a slow well-equipped party furnished with distinguished scientists and artists to record the natural riches of the Australian interior. Politicians and businessmen such as Sir William Stawell were more concerned with the strategic benefits of controlling the telegraph line, and with the possibility of an overland trade route linking Melbourne with south-east Asia. A swift gallop across the continent to establish a suitable site for a northern port would suffice. Pastoralists wanted to find out if there was fertile soil in the centre of the continent that could somehow be annexed to Victoria. They lobbied for a party led by an experienced bushman who knew a decent chunk of pasture when he saw one.

  With money pouring into Victoria’s coffers from the goldfields, population pressures increasing and the overland telegraph on the way, the desire to solve the riddle of central Australia was stronger than ever. The reasons to cross the continent were numerous and compelling—but they were also contradictory and the history of exploration has shown that a successful expedition depends on clear objectives.

  Three

  The Fertile Island Theory

  ‘Land will not reveal itself easily or quickly. It must be sought for patiently, over time, by many people, employing a wide range of skills and sensibilities. Discovery is a long, drawn-out process, which can have no final conclusion.’

  Ray Ericksen

  If Thomas Embling had achieved his aims, Australia might now be teeming with zebra, antelope and buffalo, not to mention herds of quagga and flocks of South American curassow. A close friend of Sir William Stawell, Embling was a politician and an entrepreneur with a reputation for eccentricity and spectacular sideburns. He saw Australia as a vast wilderness waiting to be filled with the best in fauna and flora from around the planet.

  Among Embling’s obsessions was a determination to solve the puzzle of the ‘Australian Sahara’ and establish an overland trade route with Asia using camels. An ardent contributor to the newspapers, he wrote in 1858:

  Our desert could be crossed in 10 days, north to south, and all we need is to leave in Europe that curse of our race—namely, doing only as our fathers have done, from wearing a black hat and black woollen garments, to trying to cross the desert on a horse.

  Embling wasn’t the first man to realise the potential of the camel in Australia. I
n 1846, a resourceful English grazier by the name of John Ainsworth Horrocks set out from Adelaide with an imposing bull named Harry. ‘I have great hopes,’ he wrote to his sister, ‘the journey suits my temperament as I want a more stirring life.’

  Horrocks’ adventure turned out to be a little more stirring than he anticipated. Harry soon revealed his darker side by grabbing one of the expedition goats in his mouth and ‘would have broken his back if a man had not quickly rescued it’. Later that afternoon the camel attacked the cook, biting his head and ‘inflicting two wounds of great length above his temples’. A few days later Horrocks was loading his gun when, ‘the camel gave a lurch to one side, and caught his pack in the cock of my gun, which discharged the barrel I was unloading, the contents of which first took off the middle fingers of my right hand between the second and third joints, and entered my left cheek by my lower jaw, knocking out a row of teeth from my upper jaw’.

  As he lay in agony in the wilderness, Horrocks scrawled a note for posterity, apologising to his family and patrons. ‘It is with extreme sorrow I am obliged to terminate the expedition…had it been earlier in the season and my wounds healed up I should have started again.’ The injury turned septic and Horrocks died a few days later—the only explorer to be shot by his own camel.

  It was Ambrose Kyte’s offer of £1000 and the renewed public interest in exploring that prompted Thomas Embling to reignite his campaign for the introduction of the camel. At the same time a horse-trader by the name of George Landells was about to set sail for India and was looking for a lucrative return cargo. Landells offered to bring back two dozen camels to be used for exploration or as the basis of a breeding program.

  At a public meeting on 31 August 1858, Embling and Stawell announced that Victoria’s chief secretary John O’Shanassy had agreed to finance Landells’ scheme and was also considering funding for the proposed expedition. Importing the camels was seen as a strategic masterstroke. It would give Victoria the decisive advantage over other less adventurous colonies whose explorers continued to lumber around on horses and in bullock carts. Editorial after editorial extolled their virtues. ‘The camel, with a load of five to six hundred pounds upon its back,’ the Argus enthused, ‘will with the greatest facility proceed at a rate of forty or fifty miles, and if necessary, will go without water for a period of from ten to fourteen days…What might not be expected from an exploring party equipped with these ships of the desert?’

  The camels had been ordered but the Exploration Committee still had to raise the £2000 necessary to supplement Kyte’s offer. Despite rousing speeches on the value of exploration, most people were too engrossed in their daily lives to care about what lay in the centre of the continent—much less pay for the privilege of finding out.

  The Philosophical Institute responded by forming yet another committee, headed by Sir William Stawell. Ostensibly the Exploration Fund Committee was an independent body, yet all but one of its members also served on the Exploration Committee as well. This led to several farcical situations when one body had to ‘resolve’ a contentious issue with the other. At least it made sitting on the fence a little easier. It was, after all, the position of choice for most members of the institute.

  The Herald suggested that Victoria should approach South Australia and New South Wales to see if they were interested in ‘a grand combined effort to complete the exploration of this continent’. The South Australians, fearful of losing their monopoly on the overland telegraph, had been openly scathing since the expedition was first suggested. ‘Victoria has hitherto done nothing in the work of exploration,’ scoffed the Register, ‘and with the customary ardour of a neophyte she is now projecting labours which no veteran would willingly undertake.’

  New South Wales regarded the plan with a polite lack of interest—as did most of the citizens of Victoria, who between them contributed an average of just £100 per month to the expedition’s coffers. The Exploration Fund Committee meetings fell away from three times to once a week and by December 1858, they stopped altogether. The project seemed unlikely to survive the lethargy of a Melbourne summer, let alone the heat of the Australian desert.

  It took the achievements of a diminutive Scotsman in South Australia to rouse the slumbering Victorians. John McDouall Stuart might never have come to Australia had he not been so small that he was rejected for full army service. At 1.67 metres tall and weighing less than sixty kilograms, he was not considered fighting material, and he turned to civil engineering instead.

  One of at least eight children, Stuart was born in Dysart, Fifeshire, in 1815, the son of an army captain. He and his siblings spent their early days running wild, exploring the honeycomb of smugglers’ caves that ran through the cliffs near the harbour. When Stuart was just twelve years old this happy childhood was shattered when both his parents died in quick succession. His older brothers went away to study at university and his sisters were sent to boarding school in Edinburgh. Although Stuart was cared for by an old housekeeper in the same city, he rarely saw the rest of his family. From that moment on John McDouall Stuart struck a lonely figure, always an outsider who never managed to re-establish a home of his own. One incident in particular seems to have sealed his destiny.

  By 1838, Stuart was living in Glasgow. Early one September evening he was on his way to visit his fiancée at a small cottage on the edge of town. The Scotsman had met the young woman through his friend William Russell—she was Russell’s cousin. Now he had finished his studies as a civil engineer, Stuart wanted to find out if she would be willing to emigrate to Australia with him. Rounding the corner he looked up to see his future wife locked in an embrace with another man. As Stuart stared at the scene in horror, he realised the man was none other than Russell. He turned away and headed for the docks.

  Stuart caught a boat to Dundee and secured a passage on the Indus, bound for Australia. He sailed the next day, never realising that William Russell was also due to leave for Adelaide and had called around to see his family on the eve of his departure. The kiss was nothing more than two cousins saying goodbye. (Two years later the young woman wrote to Stuart enclosing her engagement ring and explaining what had happened—but by then the young Scotsman had closed his mind to all thoughts of female companionship or marriage.)

  Stuart had always suffered from poor health and the voyage to South Australia did nothing to improve his frail constitution. A fellow passenger recorded that, ‘on the voyage out Mr Stuart was somewhat delicate, having two rather severe attacks of vomiting blood’. (His later symptoms and constant stomach problems suggest that he was suffering from a duodenal ulcer.) Another noted: ‘He was a great reader, comparatively silent, very stubborn, yet withal an agreeable companion, and was rather a favourite amongst his fellow passengers.’

  Those who met Stuart after his arrival in South Australia in January 1839 spoke well of him but, still suffering from the pain of his broken engagement, he shunned Adelaide society and headed for the solitude of the bush. He soon found work with a survey team, mapping out plots of land for new settlers. He slept in a makeshift tent, worked six days a week and received a wage of two shillings and ten pence per day plus rations (not including fresh vegetables).

  There is a peculiar quality to the Australian bush that permeates the consciousness of anyone patient enough to endure the heat, the dust and the insects, and who can look beyond its initial disguise of pallid uniformity. It is a fascination fuelled by the intense transparent light and the overpowering sense of space. The explorer Ernest Favenc understood this. ‘Repellent as this country is,’ he wrote, ‘there is a wondrous fascination in it, in its strange loneliness, and the hidden mysteries it might contain, that call to the man who has known it, as surely as the sea calls to the sailor.’ So it was with Stuart. Like many explorers he was a social misfit, craving escape from the conventions of society and never comfortable with emotional commitment. Most of his friends were either children or animals and he was so ill at ease staying in the city tha
t he took to sleeping in the garden whenever possible.

  In 1844, when Stuart heard that the surveyor-general Charles Sturt was planning an expedition towards the centre of Australia, he jumped at the chance to join the party as a draughtsman. As the gruelling journey towards Cooper Creek took its toll, ‘little Stuart’ surprised everyone with his stamina and resourcefulness. He once saved the party by tracking a flock of pigeons to one of the few remaining waterholes in the area. Then, when the chief surveyor James Poole died from scurvy, Stuart took over, earning high praise from his leader who recorded the ‘valuable and cheerful assistance I received from Mr Stuart, whose zeal and spirits were equally conspicuous, and whose labour at the charts does him great credit’.

  The expedition with Charles Sturt cemented the desert landscape in Stuart’s imagination. At a dinner to celebrate its return he told guests:

  It might be thought by many present that their journeys through the scorching desert of the North were unrelieved by any agreeable change. This was a mistake. They had all along the pleasure which enlightened men know how to appreciate,of admiring the stupendous works of Nature; and they were ever and anon buoyed by the hope that their explorations would result in an extension of knowledge.

  An unusual portrait of John McDouall Stuart dressed in his ‘exploring clothes’.

  From now until the end of his life, Stuart was to return again and again to the Australian wilderness.

  Charles Sturt’s reports of unrelenting misery did not inspire the South Australian government to fund further exploration. Between 1845 and 1858, John McDouall Stuart tried his hand at land speculation and sheep farming but he had little business acumen and most of his ventures ended in failure. It was only when wealthy businessmen James and John Chambers and William Finke hired him to find agricultural land in and around the Flinders Ranges that the Scotsman found his real vocation.