The Dig Tree Page 6
The Major disliked working with camels. And he was South Australian. The idea of a ‘crow-eater’ in charge of a Victorian expedition was unthinkable. Chief secretary William Nicholson was especially reluctant to see a government-funded project led by a rival colonist. To Mueller’s dismay, Warburton was sidelined. Then in a bizarre departure from protocol, the committee decided to advertise the job of ‘Expedition Leader’ in the press. The Herald was appalled. ‘Men of science, of enterprise, and with some knowledge of the ways of the world,’ it exclaimed, ‘do not relish the notion of being advertised for, as the keeper of a registry office advertises for a butler, housemaid or a cook.’
The general consensus was that the advertisements had been designed to offend Warburton and to put off applicants from other states, particularly those of a ‘lower class’ like John McDouall Stuart. The Exploration Committee’s secretary John Macadam hid the advertisements in the ‘Public Notices’ column rather than ‘Positions Vacant’, and then ‘forgot’ to place them at all in Sydney or Adelaide.
This unorthodox method of finding an expedition leader was really a devious manoeuvre to ensure that Burke was offered the post.
The resulting applicants ranged from mediocre to downright hopeless. Of the fifteen men who replied, only four had any experience of adventurous travel. None had ever led a major expedition, although one, Gustav von Tempsky, was proud to say he had ‘drilled and fought Indians, Blacks, White and Redskins’ during his thirteen years in America. The others ranged from dreamers and lunatics to armchair travellers and military men. Warburton refused to respond at all. The whole process, he told the committee, was ‘repugnant’ and ‘incompatible’ with his position as a police commissioner.
Melbourne was soon awash with rumours that the appointment was simply a matter of personal favour to be handed out by the most powerful faction within the Royal Society. The Argus was disgusted:
We might ask what confidence can be placed in any body of men who could blunder so egregiously at the outset with regard to the appointment of a leader…and who if the reports of their late meetings and the announcement made in the their late extraordinary advertisement, are to stand for anything, do not up to this time, know what they are going to send an expedition to explore.
Pummelled by scathing editorials and intense public dissatisfaction, the Exploration Committee sank further into an abyss of indecision. Reports of drunkenness and factional infighting at meetings were leaked to the press and by March 1860 the situation was becoming desperate.
While the Victorians bickered, news arrived from South Australia that John McDouall Stuart had set out with two men from Chambers Creek on 2 March. His aim was to find the centre of the continent and then continue to the north coast. If there was to be a race, it seemed that one side had already started.
In Melbourne, the Exploration Committee continued to flounder. On 8 March, the Argus warned that the expedition was in danger of collapse. ‘The exploration committee are in an embarrassing position. Time presses. The season of the year in which the expedition should set out is rapidly passing away, the camels have not yet arrived; no leader has been appointed.’ The committee’s response was to form a sub-committee, which drew up a shortlist of possible leaders including most everyone who had applied for the post—plus Warburton, who hadn’t submitted his name at all.
Among the candidates was a police superintendent from Castlemaine and Beechworth, Robert O’Hara Burke. Although there is no record of a personal application for the post, Burke’s name was put forward by a senior officer, P. H. Smithe, who assured the committee he was:
a most active man and very strong—most temperate in his habits—and is kind and gentler in his manners—but possessing a strong will—ambitious and had been accustomed to command since boyhood…In conclusion, I am confident from my knowledge of Mr Burke that there is not another gentleman in this Colony possessing so many of the qualifications necessary to the success of the undertaking in question as my friend Burke.
It was said that Burke had powerful backers within the Royal Society but, since he had no previous experience whatsoever, he was initially passed over in favour of Gustav von Tempsky, who was questioned at length by the committee. A report was prepared. No decision was made.
To break the deadlock, Ludwig Becker came up with the idea of an ‘exploring exam’. Keen to promote Warburton’s case he persuaded the committee that each of the candidates should be called in like schoolboys to answer questions on astronomy, surveying, navigation, map-making and metrology. Since Warburton was the only man with practical experience, he was bound to win, but quite how Becker thought a man who would not answer a public advertisement could be persuaded to take a classroom test was a mystery. The scheme was soon abandoned. Just as it seemed as if every dilatory tactic had been explored, the committee made an announcement. It had decided not to make any further decisions for another three months.
The most plausible justification for this declaration was that since the camels were yet to arrive, there was no hurry to appoint a leader. The second excuse was laughable. All the remaining applicants were to be given three months to learn the art of ‘taking lunars’—that is, navigating by the stars. The committee was effectively admitting that not one of their otherwise ‘suitable’ candidates could find his way home through the bush. By now, most of Melbourne was convinced that the selection process was rigged; a candidate had been promised the appointment and he was being given time to brush up on his navigational skills.
In April, the Royal Society held its annual dinner. It was a feast of fine wine and self-congratulation. Endless toasts were drunk and long speeches were delivered invoking the Roman emperors, the glory of Victoria and the achievements of the Royal Society. In the early hours everyone rolled home red-faced and thoroughly pleased with himself. Melbourne’s gentlemen had been discussing an expedition for the best part of three years, yet they still had no camels, no leader and no route mapped out.
By the time news of these antics reached South Australia, John McDouall Stuart had been heading north for nearly three months. The Register couldn’t resist a dig at its neighbour:
Only let the Victorian explorers look out for their laurels. It is quite possible and by no means improbable that at this moment the problem of the interior is solved and that John McDouall Stuart will be back in time to show the camels a beaten track through the heart of the Australian mainland.
It was the arrival of the camels that finally stirred the Exploration Committee into action. On 16 June 1860 a small but expectant crowd gathered at Railway Pier in Melbourne. The crisp morning air was choked with steam as a large crane chugged into life and lowered a giant sling towards the decks of the Chinsurah, just in from India. People strained for a glimpse as a camel, quivering in fear, was placed inside the cradle. Under the watchful eye of George Landells, the beast was lifted into the air, swung round in a great arc and lowered to the ground. When all twenty-five camels had disembarked safely, Landells took them to St Kilda beach where, to the amazement of the families strolling along the foreshore, he trotted them up and down on the sand.
By lunchtime, the camel dealer was ready to show off his purchases to a wider audience. Resplendent in the traditional red and white robes of an Indian cameleer, he marshalled the animals into a procession and jogged triumphantly through the streets of Melbourne. The ride was disrupted for a moment when a young ‘pet’ camel scattered the crowd by ‘by taking a preliminary canter on its own account, and performing some most extraordinary antics to the terror and confusion of certain elderly ladies who stood gazing with astonishment at the novel importation’.
The citizens of Melbourne were immensely proud of their new purchases. ‘Years hence, Australia will boast of its race of camels as England does now of her horse…they certainly are magnificent animals,’ bragged the Argus. There was a sense of wonder that these exotic creatures cavorting through the city would shortly lift the ‘veil of the centre’. So many pe
ople turned out to witness the parade that the police had to clear the way to the parliament stables where the camels would recuperate from their long journey.
The new arrivals and their sepoy handlers soon became local celebrities, attracting so many visitors that the Argus worried they might not make it to the desert at all. Hundreds of people took to gathering at the stables, dropping their cigarettes amongst the straw and plying the sepoys with beer and brandy. All this unexpected hospitality was apt to make them a little ‘absent minded’ when it came to matters of safety.
With the camels ready to go, there was no excuse to delay appointing a leader. The impasse was broken at a meeting of the Exploration Committee on 20 June 1860. The three candidates left in the race were Warburton (despite the fact he had not applied), Gustav von Tempsky, and the Irish police officer, Robert O’Hara Burke.
Crucially, Warburton’s principal supporter, Ferdinand Mueller was sick and stayed away and several other committee members were so disgusted by the ‘base and shameless personal motives at work’ that they boycotted the meeting. As a result, discussions centred on von Tempsky and Burke. When the last vote was taken, no one supported Warburton and just five committee members chose von Tempsky. The clear winner with ten votes was Police Superintendent Robert O’Hara Burke.
The Victorian Exploring Expedition finally had a leader—a man who had never travelled beyond the settled districts of Australia, who had no experience of exploration and who was notorious for getting lost on his way home from the pub.
Five
A Trifle Insane
‘All things considered there are only two kinds of men in the world—those who stay at home and those who do not.’
Rudyard Kipling
In 1854, it was common in the town of Beechworth to see a tall athletic horseman thundering past the weatherboard cottages, sending mud flying in all directions. With his long black beard flowing in the wind and a daredevil glint in his bright blue eyes, he would gallop twenty kilometres to the local magistrate’s house, leap from his horse and swing on the garden gate until he had enraged its owner beyond words. Only then would the police officer ride home, remove his uniform, and retire to a bathtub in his garden. Superintendent Robert O’Hara Burke did not care for the heat.
Newspapers greeted Burke’s appointment with a mixture of relief and incredulity. Most commentators were pleased that a Victorian candidate had triumphed over the ‘foreigners’ but others were baffled. Did the policeman possess any relevant qualifications for the post?
Until recently Burke had been unknown in Melbourne society but, as reporters soon discovered, his past was as intriguing as his current bathing habits. He was born in Ireland in 1820, the second son of a distinguished family of landowners, and he grew up in the privileged surroundings of the St Clerans estate in Galway, cared for by his devoted nurse Ellen Dogherty.
At the age of twenty, Burke chose a military career but he shunned the British forces, opting instead for the predominantly Catholic Austrian army—a highly unorthodox move given the fact he was a Protestant. After securing an introduction to Prince Reuss’s Seventh Hussars through the British ambassador in Vienna, the young Irishman became a cadet in 1842, and by 1847 he had been promoted twice and was posted to Italy. Life in the regiment was tough. The soldiers wintered out in muddy fields, living under canvas in freezing conditions, often with little to do except play cards and keep an eye on the bands of Italian rebels roving the countryside. But the army also had its perks. Once on leave, Burke travelled to the great European cities and, dressed in the braided uniform of his elite regiment, found that doors opened into an altogether more glamorous world.
The young Irishman cultivated a rakish image, indulging himself in the pursuits expected of a young officer: hunting, gambling, dancing, gambling, chasing women and gambling. He acquired a particular reputation as a favourite with the opposite sex and legend has it that he acquired the large scar on his cheek by fighting a sabre duel to defend his honour. Burke was intelligent, musical, well-read, and could flatter anyone he chose in French, Italian and German. With another promotion at the end of 1847, he seemed to be on the brink of a glittering career. Yet just a few months later First Lieutenant Robert O’Hara Burke was facing ruin at the hands of a military court.
As his regiment prepared for action in Sardinia, Burke went absent without leave and set off through Recoaro in northern Italy to the spa towns of Grafenburg and Aachen in Germany. Rumours circulated that he was ill with constipation but it seems more likely that a mountain of gambling debts provided the real incentive to leave.
By the time he returned to his regiment early in 1848, he was facing a court-martial and a possible jail sentence. Fortunately, a preliminary inquiry found he had run up his debts through ‘carelessness’ rather than deceit. Burke was allowed to resign—his punishment was the dishonour of a shattered reputation.
Burke presented this portrait to Julia Matthews whom he first met in 1858, when he proposed to her for the final time.
With his military career over, Burke turned to the police force and joined the Irish Constabulary in County Kildare. He quickly made a name for himself as a ‘powerful young man’ whose ‘great feats as an athlete were the theme and conversation of all who witnessed them’. But Burke found the life of a country policeman monotonous and the salary inadequate—it hardly compared to the excitement and sophistication of Europe.
A transfer to Dublin’s mounted police failed to curb Burke’s restlessness. He hung around in the city’s bars, where stories of gold and adventure in Australia cut through the haze of tobacco smoke and fired his imagination. As a member of the gentry, he was more fortunate than most—family connections gave him strings to pull, and he had no reservations about giving them a sharp tug in order to escape his provincial existence. In time-honoured fashion Burke accumulated an impressive portfolio of references from men who barely knew him, but nevertheless proclaimed he was ‘a man with unusual and extensive knowledge of the world’. Thus armed, he set sail for Australia.
By the time he landed in Melbourne in 1853, Victoria’s gold rush was in full swing and the colony was in desperate need of police officers to impose order on the chaos. So many fortune seekers had arrived that most miners were struggling to make a living. Burke soon realised that gold mining was not the guaranteed route to wealth he had imagined. He fell back into a police career and was made an acting inspector at Beechworth, 260 kilometres north-east of Melbourne.
The position was not an easy one. When Burke arrived it was the administrative centre of the Ovens Valley region, which was dominated by the gold-mining industry. Crime was rife and ethnic disagreements between the European and Chinese immigrants promoted a simmering sense of unease in the valleys. Bushrangers menaced the highways, cattle rustlers stalked the plains and petty thieves harassed the shopkeepers. The pubs were crawling with diggers drowning their sorrows or picking fights. On a good evening, they might even manage both. It was a district that became famous for hardened criminals—the Kelly gang was to terrorise the area in the late 1870s until Ned Kelly was caught and committed for trial at the Beechworth courthouse.
For now, Acting Inspector Burke was preoccupied with reforming his demoralised officers, who spent most of their time extracting bribes from the local ruffians and drinking the proceeds at one of the sly-grog shops in the area. He was also left to deal with endless petty offences such as ‘riding furiously while intoxicated’ and ‘public drunkenness’.
As the local police chief Burke was also the town prosecutor. Given the number of magistrates who reprimanded him for his inattention to detail and propensity to lose important paperwork, it was a role he obviously found irksome. In fact life in Australia was proving to be depressingly similar to the one he had left behind in Ireland. The only compensation was the salary. At £700 a year, it was three times what he would have made back home.
Away from the bright lights of Europe, Burke ceased to maintain his dashing image. De
spite his rank, Burke did not appear to possess a full police uniform and he was known to rush around borrowing clothing from his colleagues whenever a local dignitary was due in town. On or off duty, he didn’t care what he looked like, and was often seen wearing check trousers, a red shirt and a threadbare jacket covered in patches. Underneath a peculiar sombrero-type hat, his hair was unkempt and his face obscured by a black beard, over which he was sometimes said to dribble saliva.
But the real gossip centred on Burke’s bathing habits. Neighbours whispered he was ‘as fond of water as a retriever’, and that he often spent hours lying in his outdoor bathtub, wearing nothing but his police helmet, reading a book and cursing the mosquitoes. In the heat of summer the local constables were startled to find their inspector stretched out in the water working on his police reports. In order not to embarrass his housekeeper, Burke constructed a screen with a trapdoor in it so that food and drink could be passed to him as he reclined. Several people wondered if he was perhaps ‘a trifle insane’. Burke did nothing to counter the impression. Once he tired of administration, he would leap from his bath and indulge in frenetic bouts of exercise—taking long walks in the forest by himself or setting about the local trees with an axe. At least he undertook these activities fully clothed.