The Dig Tree Page 5
Surveying new grazing runs allowed Stuart to spend most of his time in the bush, which was probably just as well as he had a reputation for ‘intemperance’ whenever he went back to town. Stuart was a classic binge drinker. He could function perfectly well for weeks out in the bush, but as soon as he came within a sniff of a whisky bottle he drank until he dropped. The fourteen-year-old son of one of Stuart’s friends recalled:
Oh, he is such a funny little man, he is always drunk. You won’t be able to have him at your house. Papa couldn’t. Do you know, once, when he got to one of Papa’s stations, on coming off one of his long journeys, he shut himself up in a room, and was drunk for three days.
Away from the bottle, Stuart had an uncanny knack for discovering good pastures in rough country. It was a valuable talent. Many South Australians had disappeared to the Victorian goldfields and only the prospect of rich grazing land would entice them back to rejuvenate the local economy. As well as the paucity of labour, a presumption known as the ‘Fertile Island Theory’ was hampering agricultural development. It predicted that the salt lakes Edward Eyre had found around the north of the state would stifle any further territorial expansion, leaving South Australia isolated and enclosed by an impenetrable natural barricade.
In 1858, Stuart’s patrons Finke and Chambers decided to send their surveyor to disprove the ‘Fertile Island Theory’. Stuart was delighted. It was the perfect opportunity to try out his new tactics for dealing with hostile country. Like Augustus Gregory, Stuart rejected Charles Sturt’s strategy of hauling cumbersome wagons and heavy supplies from camp to camp. He planned to move as fast as possible with just a few horses. It was a risky scheme that could easily backfire in bad conditions but it would allow Stuart’s party to cover more ground and cut down the time they needed to stay out in the desert.
Taking advantage of the cooler weather, Stuart left the settled districts in June 1858 with an assistant, George Foster, and a young Aboriginal guide. The trio rode north towards the salt-lake country through the Flinders Ranges. These soaring red escarpments and cavernous gorges stretch for 300 kilometres, before stopping in a series of sheer rock walls that stand like battlements guarding the desert country beyond. The view from the edge of the bluffs is one of the most arresting in Australia. To the south and east, the giant rock undulations run down like waves until they break gently above Port Augusta. To the north and west, there is nothing but desiccated brown earth running towards a string of sharp white salt lakes on the horizon.
This scorched landscape stretches all the way to Lake Eyre, a salt lake covering around 5800 square kilometres with an annual rainfall of less than 125 millimetres. Surrounded by the Tirari Desert, the area has remained largely immune to the taming influence of fences, roads and homesteads. Travellers through the ages have found it an unsettling environment. The explorer Cecil Madigan wrote in 1940:
There are other barren and silent places, but nowhere else is there such vast, obtrusive, and oppressing deadness. One does not need to understand the past history of the region; the ghostly spirit brooding of the past is inescapable, haunting, menacing. Death seems to stalk the land. The vast plain that is the lake is no longer a lake. It is the ghost of a lake, a horrible, white, and salt-crusted travesty.
Thirst can never be quenched there, it can only be aggravated; eyes are blinded by the flare, throats parched by the bitter dust. All signs of life cease as the dead heart, the lake, is approached. The song dies on the drover’s lips; silence falls on the exploring party. It is like entering a vast tomb. Gaiety is impossible. One fears to break the silence. There is the indefinable feeling of the presence of death.
It takes a certain type of courage to clamber down from the fertile plateau and set out into the haze with just two companions, six horses, a month’s supplies and a compass. Stuart did not hesitate.
He rode north-west across the plains, searching for a mythical freshwater lake referred to by the Aborigines as Wingilpin. The northern settlers told stories of a giant oasis surrounded by gum trees and mobs of kangaroos—there were even rumours that the lost scientist Ludwig Leichhardt had been killed on its shores. Whenever Stuart asked the local tribes where the lake was, they would point in the direction he was heading (whatever that might be) and announce that it was ‘five sleeps’ away.
As the days passed, Stuart began to wonder if the lake was just wishful thinking. With the terrain deteriorating, he complained everything was ‘bleak, barren, and desolate. It grows no timber, so that we scarcely can find sufficient wood to boil our quartpot.’ But his persistence was rewarded by the discovery of a significant watercourse he named Chambers Creek. The party pushed on further through good grazing country and it began to rain. Cracks in the drought-ravaged soil filled with water and overflowed until Stuart found himself ‘on an island before we knew what we were about. We were obliged to seek a higher place. Not content with depriving us of our first worley [shelter], it has now forced us to retreat to a bare hill, without any protection from the weather.’ The next day the floods receded but the horses were still ‘sinking up to their knees in mud’ and at one point the whole party was forced to wade ‘belly deep’ in water. The men made for drier ground and crossed a small range of mountains. On the other side, the whole world turned white.
Stuart had stumbled onto the bleached stony plains that surround the present-day opal mines of Coober Pedy. It is a landscape so alien that it is used as a location for science fiction movies. The town’s name comes from the Arabana Aboriginal term kupa piti, which means ‘white man’s hole’. The miners discovered that the only way to deal with the extreme temperatures was to live underground. Today subterranean homes, churches and shops still exist. Outside there is hardly a blade of grass or a tree to be seen, yet in a few areas nearby sheep are raised with some success. Locals joke that they browse in pairs—one to turn the stone over and the other to lick the moss off the bottom. It is hardly intensive farming. Even in the more fertile areas, it takes twelve hectares to support a single sheep and twenty hectares to support a cow.
As he rode through the bleak landscape, Stuart found that the intense light reflecting back from the white rocks caused constant mirages. They were so powerful, he wrote, ‘that little bushes appear like great gum-trees, which makes it very difficult to judge what is before us; it is almost as bad as travelling in the dark’. With no sign of better country ahead, the explorers were in a precarious position. They had been away for more than two months. Ahead, they faced a scene of terrible desolation. The horses were lame and the scarcity of game meant that their supplies were almost gone. On 16 July 1858 Stuart swung southwards, admitting that he couldn’t ‘face the stones again’.
The retreat came just in time. The men were down to their last loaf of damper when they noticed the first signs of fertility returning to the countryside. Soon they were riding through grass ‘up to the horses’ knees’. Seizing his chance to escape, the Aboriginal guide deserted Stuart and Foster. The ragged pair trudged towards the Nullarbor Plain and once more the countryside degenerated into a ‘dreary, dismal, dreadful desert’. ‘When will it end?’ asked Stuart despairingly in his journal:
For upwards of a month we have been existing upon two pounds and a half of flour-cake daily…Since we commenced the journey, all the animal food we have been able to obtain has been four wallabies, one opossum, one small duck, one pigeon, and latterly a few kangaroo mice, which were very welcome; we were anxious to find more.
It was five agonising days before Stuart spotted some fresh horse tracks in sand, an indication he was nearing the south coast. From an old hand-drawn map, he judged that they would reach water the next day. Twenty kilometres later the men stumbled into Millers Water, near Ceduna on the Great Australian Bight, just as Stuart had predicted. They were safe.
His journey was an outstanding achievement. He had travelled through more than 1600 kilometres of inhospitable territory using only a compass to navigate and he had mapped out thousands of squar
e kilometres of potential sheep country. The total cost of his journey was £10 for food and £28 for his assistant’s wages. The expedition completed Stuart’s rigorous apprenticeship. He had been out with one of Australia’s greatest explorers, he had honed his bush skills through years of surveying and now, he had completed a major journey with the minimum of equipment. More than most European men alive, he had come to terms with the capriciousness of the Australian desert.
Stuart learned that the outback is governed by irregular climatic patterns that last for years, not months. It is the driest region of the driest inhabited continent on earth, yet it can experience more than 180 millimetres of rainfall on a single day. The temperature ranges from minus 5°C on a winter’s night to 45°C on a summer’s afternoon. The sky is filled with an overwhelming intensity of heat and light that can be dissolved by the fury of a violent thunderstorm at a moment’s notice. Like a giant eraser, the wind skittles across the landscape resculpting the sand dunes and obliterating the footprints of all those who have gone before. Gusts of over 110 kilometres an hour pick up the dust and hurl it around, blotting out the sky and churning the air into a writhing mass of grit. Yet Stuart also realised that the desert was a place of surprise and delight. He learned to savour the fragility of the sunrises, the riotous sunsets and the clarity of the heavens lit up each night by the giant white smudge of the Milky Way.
Stuart kept to a similar route on his three attempts to cross the continent. His discovery of mound springs between the Flinders Ranges and Oodnadatta helped him reach central Australia.
Stuart seemed oblivious to the desert’s detrimental effect on his health. As he travelled home from Ceduna to tell his patrons Chambers and Finke of his discoveries, he called in to see his fellow Scotsman, Robert Bruce, the manager of Arkaba Station. Bruce recalled:
I turned to see a pallid pasty-faced looking face, crossed by a heavy moustache, and roofed in with a dirty cabbage tree hat, peering through the rails. ‘You have the advantage of me,’ said I, though the man’s voice sounded very familiar to my ears. ‘Oh, you know me all right, I’m Mr Stuart,’ he responded…’I thought I knew your voice,’ I replied politely, ‘but what have you been doing with yourself? Your voice is all that is left of you.’
To Stuart’s delight, the cattle station had just taken a delivery of whisky. By the end of the evening the normally taciturn Scotsman was boasting about his ancestors from the Royal House of Stuart and delivering rousing versions of ‘Auld Lang Syne’. Even Bruce seemed surprised at the amount of liquor such a small man could consume.
Only the desert was more enticing than the whisky bottle. When Stuart’s hangover subsided, he continued to work for the Chambers brothers. During 1859 he and three men explored around the northern end of Lake Eyre where they discovered a chain of mound springs running for hundreds of kilometres through some of the most barren areas on the continent. These tiny volcano-like structures occur along faults in the earth’s surface. They are formed when water, which once fell as rain over the Great Dividing Range millions of years ago, trickles into a giant underground reservoir known as the Great Artesian Basin. Then it bubbles up through tiny cracks in the earth’s crust at temperatures up to 43°C, forming tiny oases and unique thermal wetlands like Dalhousie Springs on the edge of the Simpson Desert.
This ready supply of fresh water was the key to breaking through the horseshoe of salt lakes that had defeated Edward Eyre. The geological faultline led Stuart to rivers that beckoned towards the interior. Now more than ever he was determined to ‘lift the veil’ that hung over central Australia, and cross the continent from coast to coast.
Four
An Affair of Cliquery
‘Why explore? It is as well for those who ask such a question that there are others who feel the answer and never need to ask.’
Sir Wally Herbert
When John McDouall Stuart returned to Adelaide in July 1859, he found the drawing rooms of the rich and the powerful more accessible to him than ever before. South Australia’s politicians were delighted. Stuart had broken the stranglehold of the ‘Fertile Island Theory’ and proved that sizeable patches of fertile land lay beyond the salt-lake country to the north. It opened up vast agricultural opportunities and strengthened the case for bringing the overland telegraph line down to Adelaide.
Sensing the public mood for further expeditions, William Finke and James Chambers offered to make Stuart available for an attempt to cross the continent. Their terms were simple: the government would have to cover part of the cost and offer a bonus for reaching the north coast. Governor Richard MacDonnell was enthusiastic. On 19 July, he wrote to the South Australian treasurer, William Younghusband, saying, ‘It would settle forever the practicability of carrying the wire, as well as sending horses for export to India by that route…I strongly recommend immediate action.’ The treasurer was not so sure. He was eager for glory but reluctant to pay for it. Perhaps, he suggested, the gold-rich colonies of New South Wales and Victoria might like to make a contribution?
But New South Wales was still not interested in exploration. Even though much of the ‘ghastly blank’ was technically within its jurisdiction, the Sydney government had plenty of land and was committed to building an expensive railway network. The Victorians also declined, only less politely. Months of caustic Adelaide newspaper editorials, pouring scorn on their exploratory efforts, had made them more determined than ever to mount their own expedition.
South Australia was forced to switch tactics. In August 1859 it announced a prize of £2000 for the ‘first person who shall succeed in crossing through the country lately discovered by Mr Stuart, to either the north or north-western shore of the Australian continent, west of the 143rd degree of east longitude’. Closer inspection of this ‘generous’ offer reveals it was little more than a crafty ploy to induce the Victorians to plan their route for South Australia’s benefit. If they wanted the prize they would have to travel through the country ‘lately discovered by Mr Stuart’, which was just the territory Adelaide needed to open up the overland telegraph.
Whatever the motives that lay behind it, the prize succeeded in jolting Melbourne’s Philosophical Institute out of its summer somnolence. When the Exploration Committee meetings resumed, there was renewed enthusiasm for crossing the continent, but now the original scientific and philanthropic intentions were replaced by politics, intercolonial rivalry and greed. It had become a race between South Australia and Victoria—with £2000 waiting for the winner.
Still short of money, the Exploration Fund Committee tried to speed up proceedings by starting a false rumour that Ambrose Kyte’s offer of £1000 was in danger of lapsing. The Argus predicted that Stuart would win the race before Victoria had even saddled its camels.
With Melbourne society alive with talk of northern ports, acres of pastoral land and the chance to build a telegraph line, Victoria’s new chief secretary William Nicholson realised there was more to the proposed expedition than a few jars of pickled animals and a couple of new flower species. On 20 January 1860 he announced that parliament had agreed to make £6000 available for the purpose of exploring central and northern Australia. Shortly afterwards the Philosophical Institute received another boost. It was granted a royal charter and became the Royal Society of Victoria, housed in a new building on La Trobe Street.
On 23 January, the Exploration Fund Committee dissolved itself and the Exploration Committee managed to slim down to seventeen members. It now comprised five doctors, four scientists (including Ferdinand Mueller, John Macadam and geologist Alfred Selwyn), the chief justice, Sir William Stawell, the surveyor-general, Charles Ligar, his deputy, a vicar, a journalist, an ironmonger, a publican and a pastoralist, Angus MacMillan. Stawell was appointed chairman. There were still only three men (Mueller, MacMillan and Selwyn) who had any experience of exploration. With only this shallow pool of expertise to draw upon, the committee began to choose an expedition leader.
Victoria was hardly bursting with suit
able candidates. In fact, by 1860 Australia itself was somewhat deficient in battle-hardened explorers. To everyone’s relief, Thomas Mitchell had retired and was now annoying the British with his constant demands for a knighthood. Charles Sturt had returned to England a physical wreck and Ludwig Leichhardt had disappeared altogether. Augustus Gregory was the obvious choice and, although the leadership was informally offered to him, he accepted an offer from Queensland to become its new surveyor-general.
In the absence of any seasoned contenders, the naturalist William Blandowski, who had been so vociferous at previous meetings, put his own name forward. He had a reputation for controversial behaviour. A few months earlier he had decided to settle a few personal scores by naming several grotesque species of fish after particular members of the Royal Society. Dr Richard Eades was assigned to a specimen with a ‘receding forehead and a large belly’ and the Reverend John Bleasedale was given a fish described as ‘slippery, slimy…lives in the mud’. When the names were published, Blandowski realised his career was unlikely to progress much further. He sailed to Europe soon afterwards.
Ferdinand Mueller was unwilling to lead the expedition himself but he did have a candidate in mind. Major Peter Egerton Warburton was an ex-army officer who had taken up the post of police commissioner in South Australia. In 1857, he was dispatched to recall a surveying team led by Benjamin Herschel Babbage. In recovering the errant party, Warburton had made several valuable discoveries of fertile country north of Adelaide. His triumphant return was overshadowed by his malicious public criticism of the ponderous, yet thorough Babbage, and by his failure to stay out in the field through the hot season. The newspapers branded Warburton a coward for coming home rather than ‘summering out’ in the desert. ‘Really,’ thundered the Register, ‘we are compelled to enquire what was the precise object of the Major’s trip. Was it to explore or enjoy?’ Despite this withering appraisal of Warburton’s ‘ticker’, several committee members supported his candidacy, including Mueller and the prominent artist and naturalist Ludwig Becker. But there were two reasons why the rest of the Royal Society refused to endorse Warburton.