The Dig Tree

by Sarah Murgatroyd

  One day in January, frustrated by the constant pilfering, Brahe drew a circle in the dirt and indicated that no one should cross the line. The warriors retreated but returned later with spears, body paint and vigorous displays of anger. Brahe fired over their heads to reinforce his point. They scattered, running through the herd of horses and yelling until they caused a stampede. Brahe rode into the melee firing his gun into the air and once again the young men retreated. It was nightfall before the horses were recaptured.

  The Aborigines could not understand why these unfriendly strangers wanted to stay so long at one of their best waterholes. A few braver souls from the tribe continued to approach the camp with gifts. Brahe continued to refuse them. These confrontations had a paralysing effect on Dost Mohomet. He had been the major supplier of ducks and fish from the creek, but he became so scared that he refused to go out hunting at all.

  When Brahe wasn’t checking over his shoulder, he was scanning the horizon looking for William Wright. He remained convinced that the relief party would appear at any moment. But the sun rose and fell each day, and still no one came. Brahe was perplexed. By March, his thoughts began to turn north instead of south. He knew that Burke would go ‘all out’ for the coast, but he also knew that the party only had rations for three months. When April arrived, Brahe began to ride to the top of the surrounding hills each day to look out for any signs of Burke’s return. There was nothing.

  The four castaways lapsed into a lethargic mechanical routine. Their food supplies were dwindling and as the days dragged by, fear began to penetrate the monotony. Patten was complaining that his gums were sore and that his legs ached. The fear turned to panic. Brahe’s party did not possess detailed knowledge of scurvy but they were familiar with ‘barcoo rot’, a scurvy-like disease that afflicted stockmen on an inadequate diet. They also knew that without fresh food barcoo rot could result in an agonising death.

  All around them the sun melted the horizons and the ground throbbed in the heat. They huddled under the shade of the giant coolibah—and waited.

  Fifteen

  The Awful Truth

  ‘Now for the run home and a desperate struggle. I wonder if we can make it.’

  Captain Robert Scott

  Up at Camp 119 there was mud everywhere. When it rained, which was often, the glutinous slime clung to their boots, blankets, camel harnesses and cooking pots. When the sun came out, it set like concrete. The monsoon turned the camp into a quagmire reminiscent of those on the journey towards Menindee. The only difference was the temperature. The warm fetid air hung about the small clearing, increasing the sense of confinement. Without tents Burke, Wills, Gray and King slept huddled under scraps of damp canvas, sweating and cursing in the darkness as the mosquitoes whined around them.

  All four were in a pitiable condition. Their bodies were thin; their hair and beards were ragged mats plastered around their gaunt features; their clothes were rotten and their boots battered and torn. The animals were little better. Billy was exhausted after his recent ordeal in the swamps. The camels were scrawny and ‘leg weary’. Would anyone finding this wretched group recognise the men from the ‘finest expedition ever assembled in Australia’?

  The oppressive heat and constant drizzle conspired to make every small chore into a herculean task. There was a strong temptation to let go and do nothing at all. The journey to the Gulf had been a great achievement—far in excess of anything Burke’s critics had predicted. But the triumph had been achieved at great cost. An audit of the remaining supplies on 12 February 1861 revealed the four men had used up nearly three-quarters of their rations. For the 1500-kilometre march back to the Cooper, they would now have to live on thirty-eight kilograms of flour, sixteen kilograms of deteriorating dried beef, two kilograms of pork, five kilograms of meat biscuits, five kilograms of rice and four kilograms of sugar. It seemed unlikely that they would have the time or the energy to supplement their food with bush tucker so Burke ordered that each man’s daily ration should be cut in half.

  As the fatigue set in, it was King who took charge of the camp. On the morning of 13 February 1861, he ‘hushed down’ the five remaining camels into the mud and packed the last of the supplies. To cut loads to a minimum, Wills sacrificed more of his instruments and ‘a considerable number of books’. They were buried with a note under a box tree and have never been recovered. The four men turned south.

  On the outward leg of an expedition, enthusiasm, obsession or sheer bloody-mindedness can bury logic and caution so deeply that the potential costs of the journey are irrelevant. Even the most level-headed explorer is susceptible to the thrill of victory or the fear of failure. In the excitement of the quest, minds and bodies are pushed further than ever anticipated and the consequences are inevitably played out on the journey home.

  For Burke, Wills, Gray and King, conditions were miserable from the start. It continued to rain. Progress became a matter of cajoling, threatening and beating the camels, as they sank into the mud. Each step was marked by a loud slurp as the beasts struggled to pull their huge round feet from the slimy morass. During the first week of the return journey, they managed just six or seven kilometres a day. As they plodded south, daily thunderstorms tore open the skies, surprising even Wills with their ferocity:

  The flashes of lightning were so vivid and incessant as to keep up a continual light for short intervals, overpowering even the moonlight. Heavy rain and strong squalls continued for more than an hour, when the storm moved off W.N.W; the sky remained more or less overcast for the rest of the night, and the following morning was both sultry and oppressive with the ground so boggy as to be almost impassable.

  For the most part, navigation was easy. They simply retraced their steps from camp to camp. On Saturday 2 March, after battling south for two and a half weeks, they found Golah waiting for them near a creek. The unfortunate animal had worn a path along the bank, walking up and down looking for his companions. The effort reduced him to a virtual skeleton but he began to eat as soon as the others arrived. The temperature continued to hover around 38°C. Combined with the humidity it sapped their energy so much that even Wills’ customary optimism deserted him:

  The evening was most oppressively hot and sultry—so much so that the slightest exertion made one feel as if he were in a state of suffocation. The dampness of the atmosphere prevented any evaporation, and gave one a helpless feeling of lassitude that I have never experienced to such an extent. All the party complained of the same sensations, and the horses, showed distinctly the effect of the evening trip, short as it was.

  Day and night ceased to matter. The routines of the outward journey degenerated into a makeshift schedule that depended on the weather, the state of the ground and the grinding necessity of making as much progress as possible before the food ran out. They started at 2 a.m. or 2 p.m., or whenever they could muster the energy to carry on.

  One ritual dominated each day’s proceedings. Morning and evening, the explorers would line up with their backs to Burke, waving away the flies until he told them to call out a number. One by one the men turned around to claim their designated plate and remove the handkerchief that covered it. Underneath they found a measure of flour or a few sticks of rotting meat. This pitiful process was all they had to look forward to each day.

  With supplies running low, food was not just important—it was an obsession. Gastronomic fantasies during times of hardship are a recurring theme in expedition literature. Hours of marching have been filled with imagining the ideal menu or the perfect meal. During Sir John Franklin’s ill-fated journey through the Canadian Arctic in 1819, the expedition’s naturalist Dr John Richardson wrote, ‘we are scarcely able to converse on any other subject than the pleasures of eating’. Once desperation sets in, anything appears edible. Franklin became notorious as ‘the man who ate his boots’. Others in his party took a more direct approach. They ignored the boots and carved up the men wearing them instead.

  Burke’s party must have suff
ered from similar culinary cravings. Despite traversing far more fertile country than Franklin’s men, they still made little effort to utilise the natural foods that thrived all around them. During his time as a shepherd at Deniliquin, Wills proved he was quite capable of filling the cooking pot with ducks and wallabies, but now he was too tired to hunt for long. King reported seeing ‘kangaroos, emues, and any quantity of ducks and pelicans’, but Wills only managed to shoot one pheasant-like bird, which proved to be ‘all feathers and claws’.

  The only living food source they exploited was portulac, a fleshy plant that covered the riverbanks throughout the channel country. Once boiled, it tasted like spinach and soon became a staple part of their diet. Wills declared it an ‘excellent vegetable’. He was right. Packed with vitamins A and C, it was all that stood between them and scurvy.

  On 3 March, for the first (and only) time on their journey, they tried a more exotic form of bush food when Charley Gray rode over a large snake. Wills wrote later:

  He did not touch him, and we thought it was a log until he struck it with the stirrup iron. We then saw that it was an immense snake, larger than any that I have ever before seen in a wild state. It measured eight feet four inches in length, and seven inches in girth around the belly. It was nearly the same thickness from the head to within twenty inches of the tail, it then tapered rapidly. The weight was eleven pounds and a half.

  That night they dined on python steaks. Wills seemed satisfied with his meal, christening that night’s stopover ‘Feasting Camp’ but he spoke to soon—the reptile had a disastrous effect on the intestines of Burke and Gray:

  Started at 2 am on a S.S.W. course, but had soon to turn in on the creek, as Mr Burke felt very unwell, having been attacked by dysentery since eating the snake. He now felt giddy, and unable to keep his seat. At 6 am, Mr Burke feeling better, we started again, following along the creek…

  The next day things improved. After several painful and undignified hours, Burke and Gray seemed to be regaining their strength, the weather lightened and the humidity dropped bringing ‘a beneficial effect to all’. Relief came too late for Golah. He had never recovered from his time alone on the creek and, even without a load, he could no longer keep up. Inexplicably, Burke and Wills didn’t shoot the ailing beast for meat but abandoned him once more in the bush.

  As the hardships of the journey took their toll, it was inevitable that tensions should begin to appear within the party. The problems began with the decline of Charley Gray. His jovial personality was disappearing, and he began to lag behind in silence.

  The largest, most robust men often fail first on an expedition, probably because of their greater calorific needs. Gray had grumbled about headaches on the journey north and, now the rations had been reduced, he complained of leg and back pains as well.

  After eating the snake, he began to weaken rapidly. ‘Mr Burke almost recovered,’ Wills wrote impatiently on 7 March, ‘but Charley is again very unwell, and unfit to do anything; he caught cold last night through carelessness in covering himself.’

  Wills’ attitude towards a companion in distress seems callous—but perhaps it was a sign that, in order to survive, each man was lapsing into his own constricted world. The journey was draining their reserves of compassion as cruelly as it wasted their muscles. A sick man, incapable of carrying out his duties, was a huge burden on such a small party and with the Selwyn Ranges looming once more on the horizon, Wills in particular began to feel resentment towards the listless Gray.

  Near the Selwyn Ranges, Wills noted ‘a single conical peak’ and a series of ‘fine valleys’. The explorers tried unsuccessfully to fit the camels with special shoes to protect them from the sharp stones hidden beneath the grass.

  Second time around, they were lucky with the mountains. Wills found a better route and the party were soon ‘safely over the most dangerous part of our journey’. On 13 March, they established themselves ‘near the head of the gap in a flat about three kilometres below our former camp’, a site that is now known as O’Hara’s Gap. That evening it rained heavily and floods forced them to take shelter in a cave. The next day they set off to find their old track to the south of the ranges but swollen creeks and waterlogged ground forced endless detours and slowed them even further.

  Wills makes no special mention of 15 March 1861 in his diary but he must have known the significance of the date. It was three months since they had left the Cooper. Their time was up. According to Burke’s instructions, Brahe was now authorised to return to Menindee if he chose. Yet Burke, Wills, Gray and King were still 1100 kilometres from the depot camp. Would Brahe wait any longer? Would he hang on for four months as Wills had implored him to just before leaving?

  To speed things up, Burke reduced their rations once more and rummaged through the packs for superfluous equipment. Men who had expected to dine at oak tables and bathe in a brass tub were now reduced to dumping their spare trousers or their extra water bottle. The cast-offs were gathered together into a bundle (reckoned by Wills to weigh twenty-eight kilograms) and suspended from a tree nearby.

  As the days dragged past, and Wills found it harder to maintain his diary, it was often the camp names that told the story of their journey. ‘Humid Camp’ was 21 March, followed by ‘Muddy Camp’, and ‘Mosquito Camp’. Each night the four men struggled to build a small fire with their damp wood and soggy matches. Wills described their efforts to cook a few small loaves of damper:

  We halted on a large billibong at noon, and were favoured during dinner by a thunderstorm, the heavier portion of which missed us, some passing north and some south, which was fortunate as it would otherwise have spoiled our baking process, a matter of some importance just now.

  After crossing the Selwyn Ranges, Burke and King began to complain of leg and back pains, but it was still Gray who was causing the most concern. On Monday 25 March, the grim unity that had sustained the party for nearly six weeks since they left the Gulf evaporated. That evening, Wills wrote:

  After breakfast took some time altitudes, and was about to go back to the last Camp for some things that had been left, when I found Gray behind a tree eating skilligolee. He explained that he was suffering from dysentery, and had taken the flour without leave. Sent him to report to Mr Burke, and went on. He, having got King to tell Mr Burke for him, was called up and received a good thrashing. There is no knowing to what extent he has been robbing us. Many things have been found to run unaccountably short.

  King remembered the incident differently. He said that Gray was terrified of admitting his crime to Burke. The sailor begged him to report the incident on his behalf. King agreed and then stood to one side as Burke lost his temper:

  Mr Burke called him, and asked him what he meant by stealing the stores, and asked him if he did not receive an equal share which of course, he could not deny; Mr Burke then gave him several boxes on the ear with his open hand, and not a sound thrashing, as Mr Wills states; Mr Wills was at the other camp at the time, and it was all over when he returned. Mr Burke may have given him six or seven slaps on the ear.

  Under normal circumstances, Gray’s crime was trivial. To four starving men in the middle of the outback, it was a major offence. Trust had disappeared. From that moment on, Gray was not allowed near the packs without supervision and King was placed in charge of the stores. Charley—the easy-going, gentle giant—had betrayed them all.

  Wills was furious. He found Gray’s weakness deplorable. Another man might have lashed out, but Wills, a model of self-discipline, followed the rules and let Burke administer justice. After further questioning, the sailor admitted that he had helped himself to extra rations ‘several times’ without permission. Wills was so incensed he even went to the trouble of examining Gray’s stools, suspecting that ‘dysentery’ was just an excuse for his crime. There were no more friendly mentions of ‘Charley’ in Wills’ diary. From now on he was only ever referred to as Gray.

  It must have been a difficult atmosphere as the men lo
aded up the remaining supplies the next morning. The weather provided the only relief. As they moved further south, the monsoon began to lose its influence and the lush tropical vegetation gave way once more to spinifex and mulga scrub. Wills noticed how areas that had been ‘so fresh and green’ were now ‘very much dried up’. For long stretches at a time, there were ‘no signs of water anywhere’.

  The terrain was now so changeable that the men did not know what trial they might face next. As the stone country reappeared, the glittering tangles of rock tore at their tattered boots. Out on the open plains, the sense of space, so exhilarating on the way north, was now a terrible reminder of how far they had to go. On 25 March a strong breeze blew up, ‘which conveyed much of the characteristic feeling of a hot wind’, but by five that evening the temperature plummeted so far that the men had to ‘throw on’ their oilskin ponchos during the night. A few hours later, it was back up to 35°C and they found themselves being blasted by a raging dust storm. Without tents, they had no protection and by morning they had to dig themselves out of the sand.

  Rations were critically low. Burke had always intended to shoot his camels for food if he had to. (It is safe to conclude that this was a plan he never revealed to the gentlemen of the Royal Society, who had signed the cheques for these expensive beasts.) Since it was now a toss-up as to who would collapse first—the men or the animals—Burke decided it was time to sacrifice the weakest camel. On 30 March, Boocha was led away from the rest of the herd and shot. His throat was cut, his skin peeled away and strips of meat were carved from the carcass to be dried. Wills was satisfied that ‘a considerable portion of the meat was completely jerked by sunset’.