A vigorous though authoritarian surgeon, magistrate and farmer named Charles Throsby, and a Parramatta-born bushman named Hamilton Hume, forcing their way south from Sydney through coastal gorges, came into the Kangaroo Valley, and Macquarie then sent Throsby south-west to find more pasture and open up the plains which had been named after Undersecretary Goulburn. The natives of the Goulburn Plains told Throsby of a great lake and of a river named Murrumbidgee (meaning ‘big water’), lying far to the south beyond the lake. Throsby discovered the lake in 1820 and called it George (what else?), and at last found the under-strength Murrumbidgee, reduced by seasonal drought.
A few years later, Allan Cunningham, a botanist who had worked in Brazil on the orders of Sir Joseph Banks, and had now been sent by Banks to investigate the country beyond the mountains in New South Wales and Van Diemen’s Land, was ultimately dispatched by Governor Brisbane, first of all to find an easy way into the Liverpool Plains, which he managed to do but not to the governor’s satisfaction, and then to look to the far north—to Moreton Bay and the Darling Downs to its west, whose lusciousness as pasture and farming ground pleased all parties.
The young Australian-born bushman, Hamilton Hume, had now squatted at Lake George—to be a squatter one had not only to have some capital but also to be born at a fortuitous time, and to be on site, if not before the official discoverers, then following their fresh wagon tracks. Governor Brisbane soon devised an expedition for him; he decided that one of the ways to find new grazing and a way through the challenging mountain ramparts would be to maroon a gang of convicts on the far northern coast under Hume’s supervision and have them work their way south to Sydney. The 27-year-old Hume, who knew well the difficulties of New South Wales terrain and, indeed, of intervening tribes, explained the impossibility of such a project to the governor and refused the job, and fortunately for convict lives the project never went ahead. In any case Hume did not wish to explore northwards. He wanted to go south-west from his Lake George homestead. Brisbane declared that Spencer’s Gulf in present-day South Australia should be the target of such a journey. Hume disagreed with him and wanted to end the journey in the Port Phillip area. Hume was supported by William Hovell, an English settler at Narellan, to the south-west of Sydney, who agreed to put in resources and money and to accompany Hume as long as he was acknowledged equal leader. Hovell was a former mariner, and had worked for many years as a master for Simeon Lord. He was a robust and determined man and had navigational skills.
For Hume’s part, he sold some of his farming effects to raise his side of the money, and Brisbane at last gave some equipment. Hume and Hovell took with them six convict servants on the promise of freedom, one of them a noted bare-knuckle boxer, Claude Bossawa. Their aim was to reach Westernport on Bass Strait, where in 1804 David Collins had briefly made a settlement for Governor King, before abandoning it and shipping everyone to Van Diemen’s Land and the site of Hobart.
To the south of the plains of ‘Canberry’, they found the Murrumbidgee River in full rage, but Hume and a convict named Thomas Boyd swam it, creating a ferry rope with which they could tow stores, men and animals across. They could see the snow-streaked Australian Alps but steered away south over scrawny hills which gave onto excellent grass, and natural lagoons full of fish and fowl.
Hovell and Hume had soon begun quarrelling, Hume being contemptuous of Hovell’s navigational capacities. It was a conflict between British technical skill and raw Currency bush-lore. Bickering away, they encountered all that one would expect: grass fires, carnivorous insects and declining amounts of food. They mounted a hill from which they saw not pasture but jagged terrain heavily covered with forest running away to the west. They called it Mount Disappointment.
Hume and Hovell ended by going on alone, Hume limping from a gash in his thigh, Hovell still highly motivated. He who found pasture became a pet of governors and a darling in his community.
Ultimately, they came to a gap from which they looked down on far-off plains stretching away to the ocean. Coming down to the coast, they believed they were at Westernport but in fact they were at Corio Bay in Port Phillip on the site of the future town of Geelong. Looking to the west, at plains stretching away in that park-like manner which convinced settlers that the Divine Hand had designed them for grazing, would have tempted any man to believe in his own immortality.
Returning to camp they found their men grown mutinous. A promised pardon seemed meaningless out here, in comfortless bush country which seemed to have a lien on their bones. Yet their return journey to Sydney took only five weeks and their news of wonderful new pastoral land around Westernport created a rush by squatters. Negative reports, however, came back from pastoralists who had decamped with livestock to the true Westernport. Hovell’s navigational mistake of one degree would go on confusing people for some years yet, but it convinced Governor Brisbane to send a small party of convicts and soldiers to settle Westernport, as King had done twenty years before, for fear that the French would do it first. But what Botany Bay was to Port Jackson, Westernport would be to Port Phillip—less satisfactory water sources, anchorages and hinterlands would typify the two lesser ports.
The quarrels which characterised the journey now continued in the press, for whomsoever had been the true leader of the expedition would be counted a transcendent colonial, and even imperial, figure. The emancipist Australian stood up for the virtues of the native-born Mr Hume, declaring, ‘Mr Hovell lacks all the qualities befitting a bushman.’ But the Sydney Gazette lauded Hovell. Without his navigational skills, said the Gazette, the party would have been lost. The dispute would continue another thirty years and beyond, English contempt for his colonial-born status souring Hume’s old age.
By now another governor, Ralph Darling, after the inadequate rainfall of the winter of 1828, authorised an Indian-born English officer, Charles Sturt, to go back to the Macquarie River and to follow it to its outfall, since the great barrier of reeds and swamp that had stopped others must now be in drought as well. Sturt was old enough to have served under Wellington in the Spanish campaigns against Napoleon and had also seen service on the Canadian border. He had arrived in Sydney in May 1827 in command of the military escort on the convict transport Mariner. On that ship he had noticed an interesting phenomenon: when being towed out to sea, many of the women prisoners fell into a state of unconsciousness, with an ‘undisturbed countenance and a placid, tranquil pulse’.
A new Surveyor-General, Major Thomas Livingstone Mitchell, was on his way from England to Sydney Cove, and the fact that Darling sent Sturt off without waiting for his arrival caused rancour between the two men. Sturt made his starting point the depot at Wellington Valley on the Macquarie River, which Darling had instituted to protect more urbane convicts from brutalisation, and set out from the station in the heat of the Australian summer on 7 December 1828. He had Hamilton Hume with him, a number of soldiers and seven convicts, and a boat fitted out with sails and carried on a dray drawn by ten oxen. This boat was designed to be the first to break the waters of the inland sea which everyone believed lay beyond the great reed beds of the Macquarie. They were as well provided as a provident officer could make a party in such a situation and still be able to carry everything, the spare shoes and blankets, the horseshoes, rope and tents.
Where Oxley had earlier given up the attempt to penetrate the reed-clogged waters of the supposed inland sea, the reeds still grew three metres high, and beyond them one entered a huge plain with scattered runs of water. Sturt launched his boat in one of the small rivers but got only thirty kilometres before he was stopped by reeds. The local Aborigines cut ahead of them and set fire to the reeds in their path, while leeches and ticks afflicted them intermittently. A crowd of what Sturt called kangaroo flies descended upon the party and bit them crazy in what Sturt later said was the ultimate ‘day of torment in my life’. It was indeed a resistant country, as resistant and potentially dark in its effects as Africa. Sturt was left to repeat the sentimen
t of Oxley—none of this could become the haunt of civilised man.
They were working along a branch of the Macquarie, which would later be called the Bogan, and at last it moved into a noble river, very broad, deep-banked, beguiling and crowded with bird life. Naturally he named it for the governor— Darling. But the water was salty. They would have all perished had not Hume found a pond of fresh water, but in the meantime the saltiness of the Darling convinced Sturt that they were close to the inland sea. However, Hume soon discovered salt springs in the river. They turned back to the drying Macquarie marshes and then found a dried-up river they named for Castlereagh, the Secretary of State. It was meant kindly for a man despised by his many English critics, all of whom would have been amused to find no water in its bed.
The tribespeople in this harsh season brought forward their children and begged for food and Sturt wondered how they could avoid dying out in this withering landscape.
He followed the Castlereagh to its junction with the Darling, and found himself on a plain surrounded by beautiful semi-arid hills. The landscape seemed to call up a vast desert ocean; the distance shimmered like water. But there was no sea. He turned back. His management of the expedition had been impeccable. But he was confused. He had not found a meaningful outfall for the westward flowing rivers.
By the time he got back to Sydney, Major Thomas Mitchell had arrived. He would be the ultimate industrious surveyor, but Darling ignored him and gave Sturt the next westward journey—to trace the Murrumbidgee to its outfall, hoping it would lead into the great inner sea or something else significant. Sturt left Sydney in November 1829. It was his destiny to penetrate the interior distances in their harshest season. Again he took with him soldiers, convicts pursuing a promise, and a dismantled whaleboat carried in drays.
After reaching the site of what is now Gundagai, they followed the Murrum-bidgee through sand and desolate country, where, in tune with his reading of the landscape, Sturt found the Aborigines ‘sad and loathsome’. At last he took to the river, having his men fashion a mast in the wilderness from a cypress tree. He divided his company in two, taking with him the red-headed George Macleay, son of the Colonial Secretary in Sydney, three soldiers and three convicts. After two days the skiff they were towing, which was loaded with supplies, hit a hidden log and sank. The pork was contaminated and only fit for the dogs. When they camped at night the local natives soundlessly invaded their tents and made off with cutlasses, tomahawks and frying pans. Suddenly the river picked up its pace and tossed them down through narrow banks into a noble watercourse, which Sturt named after the British Colonial Secretary, Sir George Murray. Sturt was not aware that Hume and Hovell had already crossed this river and called it the Hume, but a Colonial Secretary in any case gazumped an Australian-born bushman.
On the banks of the river war-like natives appeared, clashing spears against shields and uttering chants. Fortuitously for the Europeans, young red-headed Macleay was mistaken for an ancestor, possibly because of a missing tooth. An Aboriginal came forward to be the party’s protector and strode along the riverbank beside the whaleboat, until it was swept away by increasing current.
They hoisted sail for the first time on 23 January 1830. There was a war party on a spit running out into the river ahead of them, but their accompanying warrior from up the river swam to them and took the leader by the throat and pushed him to the ground. The party made a remarkable sight. Many of them had delineated their ribs with white clay and looked like dancing skeletons. Others were ochre and yellow, highly impressive figures of threat. But now it all turned into a show of hospitality.
They passed the mouth of the Darling and so rowed down into the estuary of the Murray, by now subsisting on damper and tea. They came in February 1830 to a lake which Sturt named Alexandrina, the first name of a princess who would later become Queen Victoria. They could hear the murmur and thud of the surf of the Southern Ocean to the south, into which their river ran. They found it impossible to get to the entrance to the sea, dragging their boat over sandbanks and through shoals, so they turned back in a blistering February. Sturt sent a party under Captain Collett Barker to investigate the various channels of the Murray, and the leader, swimming a narrow inlet towards the eastern sandhills of the river, vanished over the horizon. There he was killed by three tribesmen, a compass strapped to his forehead, which his killers feared was a third eye. The tribesmen dragged the body to the beach in sight of Barker’s party, pulled out their spears, mutilated the corpse and sent it swirling out to sea.
It is not to belittle these Australian expeditionary journeys to say they would always become penitential excursions because of the brackishness or absence of water, dwindling supplies supplemented by the occasional protein bonanza from a hunted kangaroo or felled native birds, and disappointments as the party fought its rearguard action back to the safety of Sydney. With Sturt the salt ran out, which they needed so much in the extreme heat. The air was full of glorious birds they could not get close enough to bring down. Handsome native women appeared to entice the men ashore into ambush. And rowing up the Murray, they found their depot deserted.
The men were now dying on their ration of flour. The Irishman Macnamee was raving. Sturt sent two of his soldiers to walk more than two hundred kilometres to the nearest station to find the missing party from the depot upon whom their lives depended. A relief party from Hamilton Plains arrived just as Sturt was pouring out the last of the flour.
The light of the interior had damaged his eyes. He would become blind in the end. It was like a parable. This was what the great suns and spaces of Australia did to the European eye.
DUST AND ENDURANCE
To a people who had brought the dreaming of livestock with them from England, Scotland and Ireland, the man who found new pasture became an Antipodean demi-god. Major Thomas Livingstone Mitchell, a Scots veteran of the Peninsular Wars against Napoleon’s armies, was an exemplar of the pasture-seeking kind of explorer, but he did not always succeed in that search. Come to New South Wales as Assistant Surveyor-General, he became Surveyor-General after the death of John Oxley, and his first task was to upgrade the roads of New South Wales, including the one from the Blue Mountains west towards Bathurst. These roads remain in place to this day, though few travellers are aware of Mitchell’s part in them. He would ultimately die from pneumonia caught while surveying a breakneck road across the Great Dividing Range from Braidwood, south-east of present-day Canberra to Nelligen near the coast. In his surveys and throughout his more famous explorations, he proved a determined and not always obedient officer, famous for his quarrels with governors from Darling in the late 1820s to Sir William Denison in the mid 1850s.
Mitchell’s first endeavour into the interior, after his bête noire Governor Darling had gone home, was based on the report of a recaptured convict, George Clark, alias the Barber, who had lived some time with Aboriginal people in the manner of many escaped convicts. To save himself from punishment the Barber announced that there was a river in the north-west named the Kindor, which flowed through wonderful plains to an inland sea.
Mitchell at last came upon the Gwydir and the Barwon rivers but neither of them looked to be mighty streams flowing to a sea. He concluded they flowed into the Darling River, which, of course, had already been discovered by his hated and younger rival, Charles Sturt, with the help of Hamilton Hume. Some of Mitchell’s theorising about the interior rivers of Australia had already been disproven by the handsome and personable Sturt.
Soon after Sturt’s return to Sydney from his second expedition in 1831, he expressed a desire to settle in Australia, but the damage to his sight forced his repatriation. The rest of his life would not be easy, either in terms of health or prosperity, but Mitchell remained envious of him. He had found new well-watered pastures along the interior waterways while Mitchell had merely been duped by the Barber. Later, having recuperated and regained his sight, Sturt would penetrate the interior of Australia again looking for the non-existent
inland sea, trying to breed cattle in country near the Murray but running out of food and needing to be rescued by Edward John Eyre.
Sturt’s blindness returned and that, and the sufferings of his men, served once more as warning that the interior was perilous to European bodies and souls. His Australian farm having failed, Sturt was honoured for his sufferings with the post of Colonial Secretary of New South Wales and ultimately retired on a pension of £600, spending his last days in well-watered Cheltenham, a charming English spa town.
In the meantime, Mitchell’s second expedition did not earn the gratitude of pastoralists either, but his third, in 1836, to follow the Darling to the sea or discover if it entered into the Murray, was the one which made his name. In fact, he failed to explore the entire length of the Darling River which ran in a great arc through what is now western New South Wales. But south-west of the Murray he turned away and rode into the great pastures of Australia Felix, the western part of modern Victoria. He was lauded by the pastoralists who followed his wagon tracks to the area where previously on the coast the Henty brothers, entrepreneurial Englishmen who farmed at present-day Portland, and their men had been the sole permanent settlers.
Another explorer who, like Sturt, was honoured for his endurance rather than his discoveries was a young Englishman named Edward John Eyre, who was liberal with respect for Aboriginal Australians and their title in the land and whose tough, if sometimes ambiguous, partner in exploration was the Aboriginal Wylie whom Eyre had earlier brought east to South Australia by ship.
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