It was late in the evening before the first of the wagons rolled into Essendon. Much of the gear that had been loaded just a few hours earlier now had to be unpacked all over again. Men grappled with unfamiliar equipment, struggled with unruly animals and discovered that everything took longer than they had anticipated. As darkness settled around the campsite, John Drakeford prepared supper. Soon large metal pots bubbled over campfires and the men began to line up with their tin plates and mugs.
It was Charles Ferguson’s job to supervise the camp. Officers were not expected to trouble themselves with day-to-day matters, so a reliable foreman was required. ‘Reliable’ was hardly the first word that came to mind when describing Ferguson. ‘Rogue’ might have been more appropriate.
Ferguson was an American from Ohio. He had fought and plundered his way through the Californian goldfields before chasing his dreams to the diggings in Victoria. When Australia’s most famous rebellion broke out at Eureka in 1854 as the miners revolted over the cost of their licences, Ferguson found himself being arrested and handcuffed to one of the ringleaders, Raffaello Carboni. Once he had talked his way out of the resulting criminal charges, Ferguson went on to dabble in cattle trading and horse breaking. A vocal critic of Australian cuisine, he later started up an American-style steak restaurant in Ballarat. Presumably the Australians were equally unimpressed with American food—the enterprise went bankrupt after just a few months. He found himself breaking horses once more, claiming he could ‘reduce the wildest colt to perfect submission’ within three hours.
Ferguson was in the goldfields of Kiandra in New South Wales when he heard of the Victorian Exploring Expedition. It is unclear just how he came to join the party since his autobiography is a dubious catalogue of extravagant tales. By his own account, he was so essential to the operation that both the Exploration Committee and Burke invited him to join up. Ferguson claimed that on his way to Melbourne, he fell and sprained his ankle just outside the town of Albury. Determined to complete his journey, he hijacked a cart at gunpoint and forced the driver to take him the rest of the way.
Whatever the reality or the lawfulness of Ferguson’s travel arrangements, he turned up in the city eager to join the expedition. After bargaining hard over his pay, he signed up as foreman on a salary of £200 per annum. Not everyone was impressed with Ferguson. Just before the expedition departed, one of Burke’s fellow police officers warned him, ‘You’ll have to shoot that man yet.’
By any standards the expedition was a disparate group. Fletcher, Creber and Cowan had been sacked before the party left Royal Park, leaving five Irishmen, four ‘Indians’, three Englishmen, three Germans and an American. None had any real exploration experience. As the men began to size each other up, it became clear that the party was an uneasy fusion of personalities and motivations. Burke’s mission to reach the north coast first had become an obsession. Just before leaving Melbourne, he told his friend Charles Saint, ‘I have only one ambition, which is to do some deed before I die, that shall entitle me to have my name honourably inscribed on the page of history. If I succeed in that I care not what death, or when I die.’
In contrast, his surveyor William Wills along with the artist Ludwig Becker and the expedition doctor Hermann Beckler were expecting a genuine scientific examination of the continent. Landells cared little for either pursuit, as long as his own reputation remained intact, and it soon became clear he was volatile, stubborn and easily upset. Ferguson was a loose cannon and the remaining men were little more than enthusiastic amateurs. It was not a combination calculated to achieve that most elusive of exploration goals—a cohesive group of men who would pull together in times of trouble.
Oblivious to his responsibility for cultivating team spirit, Burke had already deserted his officers to satisfy a more powerful urge. As his men struggled to set up their first camp in Essendon, the Irishman galloped back to Melbourne to see Julia Matthews perform one last time at the Princess Theatre.
In the days before the expedition’s departure, Burke’s infatuation with Julia had only intensified. On 18 August 1860, he called together two of his confidants—Richard Nash, the government storekeeper, and John Macadam, the Royal Society’s secretary—to ask them to witness the following document:
This is my last will and testament. That I Robert O’Hara Burke do here direct Mr R. Nash in case of my death whilst in charge of the Expedition to pay all monies belonging to me (after just debts have been defrayed) to Miss Julia Matthews (Actress) now of Melbourne and presently engaged at the Princess Theatre in this colony. And all other of my effects to the said Julia Matthews.
For an unmarried gentleman to leave all his worldly goods to an actress less than half his age was a shocking gesture. Only Burke’s closest friends including Sir William Stawell knew about the will, and since it had the potential to cause considerable scandal they all agreed not to discuss the matter further.
After the performance Burke went backstage to declare his love yet again. He presented Julia with a miniature portrait of himself and asked her to marry him, even offering to give up the expedition or postpone its departure if she would become his wife. To Burke’s distress, Julia refused to give an immediate answer but after further persuasion she agreed to reconsider the offer once he returned. There was, at least, some hope. Newspapers noted that it wasn’t until the next morning that the leader returned to his camp in Essendon. Robert O’Hara Burke set out the next day with a lock of Julia’s hair in a pouch around his neck and reputedly with one of her tiny kid gloves in his pocket. His quest had begun.
Seven
No Tea, No Fire
‘I feel that failure would, to me, be ruin; but I am determined to succeed, and count on completing my work within a year at farthest.’
Robert O’Hara Burke
As Burke led his cavalcade through the towns and villages to the north of Melbourne, the ‘Australian Sahara’ must have seemed a million miles away. The rain was heavy and prolonged. Some days the hailstones were the size of billiard balls. At night, frost crept into the valleys, freezing the water in the billycans and leaving the camels dejected and shivering. The men huddled around their campfires, smoking and sipping tea—but no matter how close they sat to the flames, their flannel trousers and woollen tops never really dried out. The canvas tents were saturated, and their sodden equipment was twice as heavy to lift.
Every day the roads deteriorated and the wheel ruts deepened. While the camels slithered through the bogs, the wagons ground to a halt. The expedition was in black soil country, a seemingly innocuous geographical feature, which is still responsible for many an abandoned vehicle across Australia. In dry conditions the dark earth bakes like concrete but rain transforms it into a natural skating rink. In the worst areas, the wagon wheels disappeared and the drivers were forced to wade into the quagmire, dig the axles free and lay branches in the wheel ruts to provide traction. If that didn’t work, they had to unhitch the horses from the wagons behind and attach them to the stranded vehicle. This back-breaking routine resulted in an average speed of between one and five kilometres an hour.
The camels’ progress was faster but equally precarious. The horny pads on their feet were designed for deserts, not swamps, and they slipped constantly. Fearing for their safety, Landells ordered that they were not to be ridden, prompting Ludwig Becker to complain that ‘it is very tedious and tiring work to lead on foot a camel through such ground and at the same time taking good care that no branch overhead or on the ground interferes with walking or rather skating’. On 22 August as the party headed for the village of Lancefield, sixty kilometres from Melbourne, Becker trudged for ten hours through the mud. That evening he wrote in his diary: ‘No tea, no fire; we slept in the wet.’
Ludwig Becker had not expected to rip his hands to shreds leading camels and loading boxes each day. He was an officer, a biologist and a painter charged with recording the expedition’s progress for posterity. He was also an early victim of the Royal Society�
��s muddled objectives. Scientists and trailblazers tended not to mix. Even Captain James Cook struggled to contain his displeasure when he saw the botanist Joseph Banks heading for the Endeavour with trunks full of scientific instruments, an entourage of servants and a couple of pet greyhounds. Scientists travel slowly—their deviations infuriate the pioneers determined to conquer as much new territory as possible before the supplies run out. In general, the magnitude of an explorer’s tolerance towards a scientist was inversely proportional to the hostility of the terrain being traversed. Augustus Gregory grew so frustrated with the botanist Ferdinand Mueller that he vowed never to take a scientist out in the field again.
With its enormous procession of wagons and camels, the Victorian Exploring Expedition had all the appearances of a genuine scientific survey party. Indeed, many Royal Society members were still under the impression that a thorough investigation of the continent was about to take place. Others realised that Burke’s appointment as leader had already destroyed any veneer of scientific credibility. If it hadn’t been for the Royal Society’s German contingent, Burke would have dispensed with the scientists altogether. But as a compromise he agreed to take Ludwig Becker to serve as ‘artist and naturalist’ and Hermann Beckler, a doctor and amateur botanist who could fulfil a dual role.
Hermann Beckler was born in the Bavarian market town of Höchstät in 1828. After studying medicine in Munich, he arrived in Australia in 1856. Inspired by the travels of his compatriot Ludwig Leichhardt, Beckler dreamed of a career as a biologist and botanist. For many years he tried to establish a medical practice to fund his passion but he struggled to earn a living, let alone undertake any journeys of his own. After a poorly paid but otherwise rewarding stint collecting specimens for Melbourne’s botanical gardens, Beckler secured the backing of Mueller and applied to join the expedition. He wrote in his application that, in addition to his duties as a medical officer, he ‘would be gratified to serve further in the capacity of botanical collector’.
Hermann Beckler, doctor and botanical collector, feared that the expedition’s scientific achievements would be ‘few and ambiguous’.
Beckler’s appointment should have been straightforward but there was some anti-German feeling in the press at the time. The appointment of a foreigner ‘bestows little credit upon the scientific qualifications of our own people’ sniffed the Leader. Since Beckler couldn’t afford a medical licence, he had to suffer the ignominy of having his abilities vetted by Professor McCoy from the Royal Society and Victoria’s chief medical officer. Both pronounced him ‘a well educated medical man’ and the controversy subsided but it left Beckler in a defensive mood as he embarked on the expedition.
The only member of the Royal Society to join Burke’s party was Ludwig Becker, the man who suggested all the leadership candidates should sit an ‘exploring exam’. Born in Darmstadt in 1808, Becker was a charming eccentric who spent several years in the goldfields armed with a sketchpad and a pet bat. He was the kind of ‘universal man’ whose armoury of talents delighted friends like Lady Denison, the wife of Tasmania’s lieutenant-governor:
He is a most amusing person, talks English badly but very energetically. I have sometimes great difficulty in keeping my countenance when I see him struggling between the rapidity of his ideas and the difficulty of giving them utterance, repeating to himself…and helping all out with an abundance of most expressive gesticulation; but I would not for the world let him see me laugh, poor man, for he is rather shy and sensitive; but with all that he is very pleasing. He is one of those universal geniuses who do anything; is a very good naturalist; geologist etc., draws and plays and sings, conjures and ventriloquises and imitates the notes of birds so accurately that the wild birds will come to him at the sound of the call. He is very fond of children, amuses and astonishes us to a great extent by his conjuring tricks and ventriloquism, and being very oddish-looking besides, with a large red beard.
Becker might have been an entertaining genius but he was always broke. He dabbled in the production of drawings and lithographs for various scientific publications in Melbourne and, when he got desperate made a little extra by drawing likenesses and caricatures.
Burke was not impressed by Becker’s character or his talent. He saw the fifty-two-year-old German as an encumbrance foisted on him by Mueller. After all, if a middle-aged scientist could cross the continent, Burke could hardly claim it was a colossal physical achievement. It was only the influence of Victoria’s governor Sir Henry Barkly that persuaded Burke to accept the appointment at all.
The Royal Society’s instructions to the scientists were as daunting as they were unrealistic. Hermann Beckler was expected to keep a diary of all the flora he observed, collect specimens in various stages of development, detail plants used by Aboriginal tribes as food and medicine, and undertake as many side-trips as possible to record the maximum number of new species. Ludwig Becker was to sketch the general terrain (with particular reference to watercourses and mineral formations) and collect and sketch specimens of all mammals, birds, fish and fossils found en route. Presumably he was expected to forgo sleep—the instructions also suggested he should pay particular attention to nocturnal mammals.
William Wills bore the heaviest burden. By day he was to keep detailed records: of distance travelled, general terrain, watercourses, water quality (including samples), geological formations, soil types (including samples), and occurrence of minerals or gems (including samples). He was to sketch specimens, draw updated maps daily, measure compass variations and record meteorological conditions, including rainfall, temperature, wind speeds, whirlwinds, thunderstorms, dust storms, mirages, refraction and magnetic observations. By night, while Becker was up collecting bats, Wills was expected to make astronomical observations including the ‘paths of meteors’ and the ‘patterns of twinkling stars’.
Ludwig Becker was appointed against Burke’s wishes as naturalist and artist. Forced to work in secret, he nevertheless produced a series of exquisite paintings and sketches.
Just in case Wills found himself with an idle moment, he also had to navigate the party across the continent. He was, after all, the only member of the party fully conversant with taking star sightings and the only man practised in using a compass and sextant. Undeterred by this impossible workload, Wills soon devised a way of working as he rode:
Riding on the camels is a much more pleasant process than I anticipated, and for my work I find it much better than riding on horseback. The saddles, as you are aware, are double, so I sit on the back portion behind the hump, and pack my instruments in front. I can thus ride on, keeping my journal and making calculations; and need only stop the camel when I want to take any bearings carefully; but the barometers can be read and registered without halting. The animals are very quiet, and easily managed, much more so than horses.
Not everyone found the camels so appealing. According to Charles Ferguson the merest sniff of the new creatures caused havoc along the route:
The caravan caused no little commotion in traversing the settled portion of the country embraced in the first few hundred miles. Cattle and horses along the route stampeded from terror at the sight, and even at the smell of the camels, wafted on the breeze in advance of their appearance. It was said that some wild horses on the ranches ran thirty miles before stopping, such is their instinctive aversion to and terror of the camel.
With the rain continuing to pelt down, no one was giving much thought to science. On the third day one of the sepoys, Samla, resigned. As a Hindu he was not allowed to eat the salt beef that was a staple of the explorers’ diet. The poor fellow had suffered in silence for two days on bread and water, before asking Landells if he could be discharged. Ludwig Becker watched as Samla ‘touched with his fingers mother Earth and then his fore-head, and blessing Mr Landells and the men near him, this good man went his way towards Melbourne, his eyes full of tears’. Four of the original recruits had now left. Burke’s response was to hire general labourers on a c
asual basis. Three men, Brooks, Lane and McIlwaine joined the party after it left Melbourne.
As the expedition inched north, the wagons broke down daily and the semi-submersible dray developed ‘an alarming lean to the right’. During the first week alone, it cost £83 in repairs. Everyone who watched the expedition totter past reached the same conclusion: Burke’s party had too many supplies and not enough transport. The expedition carried eight tonnes of food but this was not an excessive amount considering it had to last nineteen men between eighteen months and two years. Although Burke had the final say, it was Ferdinand Mueller who drew up the original list of supplies, based on a formula devised by Augustus Gregory. He had discovered that the minimum daily ration required to keep his men healthy was: 500 grams of salt beef or pork, 500 grams of flour, twenty-one grams of coffee or seven grams of tea, eighty-five grams of sugar and a small measure of vinegar and lime juice to prevent scurvy. Mueller’s list allowed for much the same nutritional intake but with more variety.
It was the other twelve tonnes that really slowed things down. The mounds of useless equipment were the result of an inexperienced commander with a free hand and an open chequebook. Were twelve sets of dandruff brushes and four enema kits really necessary?
Stores had been ordered in such an ad hoc manner that no one could be sure the expedition had what was essential. Even the prisoners at Melbourne’s Pentridge jail were set to work making clothing, harnesses and ironmongery. In addition, there were six tonnes of firewood, 200 kilograms of medications for the camels and horses and enough ammunition to win a small war. Luxuries were well catered for: a large bathtub, an oak and cedar table with two oak stools and forty-five yards of gossamer for fly veils. Yet the party took just two sets of field glasses, two watches and only twelve water bottles.
The Dig Tree Page 9