The Dig Tree

by Sarah Murgatroyd

  Burke was no exception. Keen to fulfil the expectations of his patrons, he wrote to his uncle with misguided enthusiasm:

  What we have done up to this will cause a great sensation as we have passed some very fine sheep grazing country not before known for which when my report goes down immediate application will be made. We are now encamped upon a creek not before known. Grass nearly fit to mow…

  With the journey progressing so well, Burke was increasingly impressed with William Wright’s abilities as a bushman. At Torowoto, he decided to make Wright his third-in-command and the next morning he lined up the men and announced his intention to proceed to the Cooper at once. Wright was to return to Menindee with his Aboriginal trackers and retrieve the remainder of the stores. Burke outlined his plan, then offered each man the chance to turn back if they wished. All refused.

  As usual Burke did not issue written instructions. In this case they would have been superfluous since Wright was nearly illiterate. Nevertheless, he did send a dispatch to the committee ‘explaining’ his decision:

  Mr Wright returns from here to Menindie. I informed him that I should consider him third officer of the expedition, subject to the approval of the committee, from the day of our departure from Menindie, and I hope that they will confirm the appointment. In the mean time I have instructed him to follow me up with the remainder of the camels to Cooper’s Creek, to take steps to procure a supply of jerked meat, and I have written to the doctor to inform him that I have accepted his resignation, as, although I was anxious to await the decision of the committee, the circumstances will not admit of delay, and he has positively refused to leave the settled districts. I am willing to admit that he did his best until his fear for the safety of the party overcame him; but these fears, I think, clearly show how unfit he is for his post. If Mr Wright is allowed to follow out the instructions I have given him, I am confident that the result will be satisfactory; and if the committee think proper to make inquiries to him, they will find that he is very well qualified for the post, and that he bears the very highest character. I shall proceed on from here to Cooper’s Creek. I may, or may not, be able to send back from there until we are followed up. Perhaps it would not be prudent to divide the party; the natives here have told Mr Wright that we shall meet with opposition on our way there. Perhaps I might find it advisable to leave a depot at Cooper’s Creek, and go on with a small party to examine the country beyond it.

  Under any circumstance it is desirable that we should be followed up. I consider myself very fortunate in having Mr Wills as my second in command. He is a capital officer, zealous and untiring in the performance of his duties, and I trust that he will remain my second as long as I am in charge of the expedition.

  The men all conduct themselves admirably, and they are all most anxious to go on; but the committee may rely upon it that I shall go on steadily and carefully, and that I shall endeavour not to lose a chance or to run any unnecessary risk.

  The letter was alarmingly imprecise and ominous in its use of the word ‘perhaps’. It failed to clarify whether Wright was to wait until his appointment was confirmed before bringing up the stores or whether he would be receiving extra pack animals to boost his transport arrangements. Burke’s accompanying letter to his uncle only increased the confusion:

  I shall proceed on from here to Cooper’s Creek or the Victoria River as it is sometimes called, and from thence to Carpentaria as straight as I can go and if I can go…It is very possible that I may leave half the party behind and push on with the rest if I find I cannot get through with them all.

  With the promise that a second surveyor would be sent from Melbourne, Burke might have been justified in assuming that his rearguard party would at least be able to navigate to the Cooper. But he seemed to have forgotten that he had left just a handful of exhausted camels and horses in Menindee—hardly enough to haul tonnes of supplies for 600 kilometres through the desert. Relishing his role as an adventurer in an unknown land, Burke seemed unconcerned about the precariousness of his plan. In the uncluttered landscape of the interior, it was proving all too easy to consign the complications of Menindee and Melbourne to another world.

  As Wright dissolved away into the horizon, so did the expedition’s last link with civilisation. A man who had been running a sheep station two weeks earlier was now Burke’s only lifeline.

  Ten

  The Dead Heart

  ‘Desert: 1) A dry barren often sand-covered area of land.

  2) An uninteresting or barren subject, period, etc. eg cultural desert.

  Adjective: barren and uncultivated; uninhabited.’

  Modern Australian Oxford Dictionary

  The heart of Australia is not dead. Its pulse is just less regular. The seasons do not arrive in convenient quarterly bundles, but stretch through decades in erratic cycles of drought and flood. When conditions shift, they do so in spectacular style, rearranging the landscape with astounding ferocity. The result is a patchwork of boom and bust—an unpredictable environment that demands flexibility and patience.

  About one third of Australia receives an average of less than 250 millimetres of rain a year. Geographically, it is classified as desert but, as Charles Sturt had discovered, it is not all wrinkled sandhills and tree-lined oases. The dunes are mixed with expanses of clay, dust, black soil, scrub, salt lakes and stones. This stark collage is broken up by mountains, creeks and even forests, features made all the more astonishing by the bleakness that surrounds them. On occasion the desert creates real surprises: the thermal wetlands of Dalhousie Springs, a huge quartz pillar near Alice Springs, a giant monolith such as Uluru or the most extensive cave system in the world under the Nullarbor Plain. An appreciation of these contrasts entails a shift in perception, an acceptance of emptiness, space and scale. For Burke, trapped in his European mindset and brought up on the green, compact, agricultural landscapes of England and Ireland, they were difficult concepts to grasp.

  Today the desert captivates or repels. To some it will always be desolate and barren. For others it is a different form of beauty, simpler and more arresting than any other on earth. Either way, it is deeply affecting, even from within the air-conditioned security of a modern four-wheel-drive. People can still die here from drowning or dehydration. Burke and Wills passed through the landscape oblivious to these brutal possibilities. Their task was relentless, but they were lucky enough to be travelling in an unusually benign season and, contrary to most stereotypical desert treks, they were short of water for just one day on their entire journey.

  The eight men toiled northwards towards the Cooper with their camels slapping across the claypans and crunching over the rock-strewn plains. After twenty-three days, on 11 November 1860, they entered an undulating area of stony rises, little realising that the desert was about to perform one of its most startling transformations. The clues were subtle—a faint green sheen on the horizon, the rustle of a lizard in the scrub, a flock of birds in the distance.

  After an excess of space and light, the rich green environment that suddenly confronted the party was a revelation. Ahead was Cooper Creek, winding its way through the wilderness like a fat orange snake. The tired and dusty convoy of men, horses and camels plunged down its banks, and threw themselves into the water. The sludgy reddish liquid was cool, refreshing and too good to resist. The men were exultant; they were almost halfway across the continent and in terms of European exploration they were nearing the edge of the map.

  Burke and Wills had reached one of the world’s most remote and elusive river systems. Modern topographical maps show the Cooper as an enticing maze of blue lines, which thread their way through the dunes to a series of lakes strung out across the desert. But the maps are deceptive. Most of the time the Cooper is a series of transient waterholes fed by a network of sluggish, muddy streams bleeding away in the relentless heat.

  Defying convention, the water flows away from the coast. Fed by tropical downpours sweeping over the Great Dividing Range, it c
reeps inland through thousands of small arterial channels. Sometimes the creeks braid together to form a billabong, before splintering once more to drizzle away and vanish into the earth. All around, the terrain is scarred with channels gouged out by floods that have long since evaporated. Every year the baffling labyrinth changes according to the rainfall patterns, frustrating map-makers and confounding travellers.

  Central Australia is dominated by anti-cyclones coming in from the west. These cells of high pressure provide clear skies, intense summer heat and low rainfall. But the region is also subject to the vagaries of the El Niño Southern Oscillation Effect, a complicated weather system that can produce violent bursts of rainfall and floods interspersed with long periods of drought. In an ‘average season’, the giant Cooper system might flow for just a few hours or a few days, but in an exceptional year torrents of water are disgorged down the myriad channels, cascading into one another, and spilling out into lakes up to 100 kilometres wide. Perhaps just once or twice in a century, the deluge rushes south with such momentum that it sweeps across more than a thousand kilometres of arid land to fill Lake Eyre—one of the world’s largest salt lakes. Briefly, the mythical inland sea that fascinated Charles Sturt becomes a reality.

  The huge expanse of glaring white salt is overwhelmed by floodwater, and this giant ephemeral oasis becomes inundated with birds and animals. Frogs, fish and shrimps, dormant for years buried in the mud, emerge through the dissolving salt crust and catapult a temporary food chain into action. Mats of floating plants spread over thousands of square kilometres of water and photosynthesise so rapidly that they become too hot to touch. For several months everything from the pelican to the dingo embarks on a reproductive frenzy, but this outburst of fertility does not last. The blazing sun reasserts its stranglehold, the floodwaters recede and the desert returns.

  The Cooper Creek basin is a land of extremes. One season may yield a beautiful chain of waterholes, bristling with life; the next will leave a series of glutinous mud-holes harbouring the skeletons of those unable to find sanctuary elsewhere. Once a drought takes hold it can last for many years. The weak will perish, and the strong must retreat and retreat, until they are clinging to the few remaining permanent billabongs. In summer the temperature is stupefying, soaring through 45°C and combining with furnace-like winds to paralyse all activity. In winter, the mercury can plunge to freezing point. Southerlies penetrate the desert, leaving the earth raw with frost.

  The explorers arrived at Cooper Creek on 11 November 1860, at the beginning of the hot season. Wills noted temperatures ‘generally exceeded 100°’ with the highest being ‘109° in the shade’.

  Everything here is on a scale the human mind finds either exhilarating or crushing. Writing during her travels through the cattle stations of the area in the 1930s, journalist Ernestine Hill gave this haunting insight into the cruelty of the landscape:

  Three hundred cattle were grouped about the borehead, in horribly lifelike attitudes, except that the eye sockets were empty. They had been dead for three years. Many had died standing and sitting, and sunk down only a little deeper in the sand. Hides and horns were mummified in that dry air. They were denied the mercy of decay.

  Yet the Cooper is also a place of great beauty, especially in the cool air and the soft light of the early mornings, or when the vivid sunsets of red, purple, orange and pink streak across the horizon and light up the evening sky. When Burke arrived here at the beginning of the summer in 1860, he found the Cooper resplendent in lush green foliage. Huge river red gums and coolibahs were flourishing along the banks of the creek and grass carpeted the red earth. Little realising how lucky they were, Wills decided the sudden outburst of fertility reminded him of England. ‘Imagine a creek or river somewhat similar to the Dart above the weir,’ he wrote to his family, ‘winding its way through those flats, having its banks densely clothed with gum trees and other evergreens.’

  After the relative silence and emptiness of the desert plains, the Cooper was crowded, noisy and brimming with life. While pelicans and spoonbills patrolled the creek, turtles and water rats foraged along the banks. Echidnas snuffled through the grass looking for insects, while parrots, lorikeets and rosellas chattered in the branches above, and goannas and water dragons warmed themselves in the sun. Sliding through the undergrowth were some of the world’s deadliest snakes: the king brown, the death adder and, most dangerous of all, the fierce snake, whose fangs could inject enough venom to kill a hundred men.

  In the early evening, dingoes, wallabies and kangaroos crept down to the water’s edge to drink, and the trees were filled with flocks of cockatoos, shrieking as they bickered over their favourite branch. Even the nights were noisy, as small marsupial mice, possums and bilbies scurried through the grass looking for insects, and the air became choked with the calls of cicadas, crickets and frogs.

  Surrounded on all sides by an unforgiving terrain, the Cooper attracted creatures from hundreds of kilometres around to take advantage of the season. Burke and Wills were camped on the same thread of fertility that had for thousands of years kept the land and its people alive.

  For the local Aboriginal tribes, the recent rains had produced a feast along the creek. Despite the unpredictability of their environment, indigenous people had lived and thrived around the Cooper or Kini-papa for more than 20,000 years. There were four main groups in the area, each comprised of about five hundred people: the Ngurawola, the Wangkamurra, the Yawarrawarrka and the Yandruwandha. The last two groups were closely related and it was their land that Burke and Wills were exploring as they moved up the creek.

  The explorers found a tall, athletic people, who used nothing more than a simple string girdle or a smearing of goanna fat to protect themselves from the elements. Many decorated themselves with necklaces and bangles made from brightly coloured seeds, shells and even human teeth. The men dressed their hair with feathers and knotted their beards into a distinctive loop tied with fur string. On ceremonial occasions they painted their bodies with red ochre, charcoal and white clay.

  Danbidleli was a member of the Yandruwandha tribe. As a young man he helped Burke and Wills during their last days on the Cooper.

  Each tribe was headed by elders—men of power and influence, who had reached their position over the course of many years by undergoing various stages of initiation. They rose in status only when they were judged worthy of knowing the stories and myths that accompanied each level of wisdom. The signs of initiation included circumcision, the removal of two front teeth (the lateral incisors) and parallel scars on the torso. The elders enforced strict tribal laws, including complex rules governing marriage and procreation. This ensured that, despite the small size of each tribal group, there was no inbreeding and little incidence of genetic disease.

  The strength and preservation of each tribe depended on a complex family structure. The Yandruwandha were divided into several distinct dialect groups. The first were the Murnpeowie Yandruwandha or Tingatinga blacks, who lived around Lake Blanche and up to Merty-Merty station. The second group were the Parlpanadramadra Yandruwandha who lived on the eastern extremity of the Cooper, around the Baryulah waterhole. The third group around the Cullymurra waterhole were the Nirrpi people. The fourth group were the Thayipilthirringuda people, from ‘the land of the stone chips’ near the present-day outpost of Innamincka.

  Within these family groups, each person was assigned to a ‘skin group’ or kamiri, which determined certain aspects of identity and also governed who could marry. In addition, everyone belonged to a particular totem group, a practice common across nearly all Australia’s Aboriginal tribes. The Yandruwandha had between twenty-four and twenty-six totemic groups linked to various aspects of the environment such as the kangaroo or tjukurru group and the sand goanna or mangali group. It was considered taboo to eat the animal that had given you your totemic identity.

  All the tribes were nomadic hunter-gatherers, moving around in small groups as their water and food supplies allowed
. Possessions were limited, perhaps just a fire-making stick, a dish and a digging implement. Tools and weapons were also kept to a minimum, but the men made stone knives, chisels and adzes, and carved wooden spears, boomerangs, shields and clubs. Women collected local plants and fashioned the stems into string for fishing nets, cradles and bags.

  They lived in temporary shelters made of branches and known by the Europeans as wurleys, gunyahs or mia-mias. Sometimes when the seasons were favourable, the people built substantial villages near waterholes, constructing solid beehive-shaped huts, which were thatched and then covered in earth.

  As the Cooper provided permanent water, it was the hub of a busy trade route through Aboriginal Australia and long journeys were undertaken to procure goods from as far afield as the Flinders Ranges in South Australia and Boulia in Queensland. Gatherings of more than a thousand men were held to the south at a meeting place known as Kooperamana, where neighbouring tribes traded their prized red ochre for shields, axe heads, wooden bowls and the narcotic shrub, pituri.

  Traders thought nothing of travelling across hundreds of kilometres of desert for ceremonial or commercial purposes. They were experts at finding water, digging in exactly the right spots in the dried-up creek beds or tracking animals and birds to rock pools and soaks. If all else failed, they could get water from certain roots and plant stems, even a particular type of frog, which was dug up and squeezed judiciously until its bloated body yielded a stream of precious liquid. If a man left his camp to hunt by himself, he would leave behind a small, decorated wooden object known as a toa. It depicted the natural features of the area and acted as a message-stick to friends and relatives.