The Dig Tree

by Sarah Murgatroyd

  Wright was dismayed to find that the waterholes that sustained Burke’s party on his journey north had now shrunk to an undrinkable sludge. As a result, he adopted a policy of splitting up his convoy and sending men on ahead with camels to deposit waterbags along the route. These could then be used by the horses following on behind. With such an inexperienced party, it was a disastrous strategy. The splinter groups wasted time and energy as they traipsed backwards and forwards looking for one another. By the third day, Beckler found the horses were in a ‘shocking condition’:

  The sheen on their coats had vanished, their previously rounded forms were angular and hollowed, their eyes lay fixed and lustreless in their sunken sockets. Their heads hung down almost to the ground as they were incapable of holding them upright, and they made no attempt to eat…The anuses of the poor animals lay deep between the surrounding soft parts and stood wide open. Through the opening one could see into a much larger, dark cavity whose mucous membranes were completely dried out and resembled dark red velvet. All of this was of course the result of a complete absorption of water from the tissue.

  In the end the horses became so thirst-crazed that they burnt their lips trying to sift through the embers of the fire looking for water. Each night they tried to bolt for home. One evening, as he set out to recover them, Beckler gazed at the vast landscape—but the desert that had so inspired him on his journey to rescue Lyons now gave him little comfort: ‘I remember this scene as the saddest of our journey; a waterless land and a quiet, cloudless night in a region where all native life seemed to have died out.’

  Beckler was only half-right. Life had disappeared in a drought-defying strategy that was millions of years old. The spinifex had thrust its roots deep into the soil and shrivelled its razor-sharp stems to prevent evaporation. The gum trees had dropped many of their giant limbs to concentrate their nutrients and the acacias began to use water stored in a special taproot. The kangaroos halted reproduction, leaving their embryos in a state of suspended animation to await more favourable conditions. Smaller marsupials like the fat-tailed dunnarts retreated underground in a state of biological torpor, lowering their body temperatures and living off food reserves stored in their tails. Others like the mulgara stayed alive by concentrating their urine and excreting dust for droppings. Frogs took the opposite approach; before the water had disappeared they had filled their giant bladders with excessively diluted urine, and prepared to reabsorb it during the dry season.

  Wright’s party had no such survival techniques. Heat, exhaustion and thirst took their toll physically and mentally. Beckler and Hodgkinson renewed their hostilities, with the doctor branding the young reporter ‘a gnawing worm we carried with us’. In early February the party followed Burke’s track out through Mutawintji and towards Torowoto—but Wright’s general disorganisation hampered its progress. He was incapable of establishing a routine. Packing, camp duties and animal husbandry never progressed much beyond improvised chaos. The camels contributed to the disorder by bolting, bucking, kicking and biting during the day—then vanishing every night. Burke reached Torowoto in eleven days. Wright took seventeen. He arrived on 12 February 1861, just when Burke was about to turn south from Camp 119.

  Wright’s appearance at the waterholes was greeted with exuberant ceremony by the Wanjiwalku people, the same tribe who had looked after Lyons and MacPherson. They were rewarded with tomahawks and ‘scotch twill’ shirts, prompting a night of dancing and singing in celebration. Beckler was in no state to join in. He described the local tribes as ‘ugly wretched creatures…nearly all daubed with clay…they seemed to be astonished at us and our animals and were very friendly and talkative’. The next morning, two young men were persuaded to accompany the party as far as the next waterholes at Bulloo Lakes, 150 kilometres south of the Cooper.

  This arrangement broke down almost at once when the guides indicated that the water along Burke’s route had now dried up. They pointed insistently in another direction, but Wright was reluctant to depart from the track. He needed to maximise his chances of meeting anyone heading south and was also terrified of getting lost. Without a surveyor, he could never be sure where he was or how far he had to go. The Aboriginal guides refused to follow Wright and returned to their tribes.

  Beyond Torowoto the springy green pastures that Burke had described as ‘fit to mow’ had atrophied into brittle yellow wastelands. Beckler choked in the ‘hell-like air’ and stared through the ‘sombre dusty haze’ towards ‘small, sterile hills, desolate in appearance’. Now and then ‘an eerie impetuous wind’ flung handfuls of sand into their sunburnt faces and, high above, the sun was relentless in the blue sky.

  Wright tried digging wells, then ferrying water up from Torowoto but it was such a tremendous waste of energy that he soon abandoned the scheme. Thirst dominated every hour and Beckler began to savour every drop of liquid he could scavenge:

  In these circumstances one treats this precious fluid in a quite different manner from when there is enough of it…I usually took a dessert-spoon full of water every hour, some of which I usually poured back into the container. In the evening, just before going to bed, I drank about 4 ounces through a straw with great ecstasy.

  A few kilometres further north, a new camp was established on 19 February and christened Rat Point. As its name suggested, it was crawling with vermin and flies. While most of the men searched for water, Becker and Purcell were left cowering under mouldy tarpaulins to guard the stores in temperatures that hovered around 38°C. In conditions of utter degradation, Becker still completed seven fine paintings, including one generous depiction of the long-haired rats that chewed at his feet as he tried to sleep.

  With no obvious water up ahead, the party remained at Rat Point for twenty days. Sickness was inevitable. No one had bothered to boil the water they found along the way, and soon Wright, Smith, Belooch and Hodgkinson were all suffering from various forms of ‘dysentery’. The entire party was losing weight with alarming speed. Becker, Purcell and Stone were also showing signs of beri-beri, scurvy and barcoo rot. Research now suggests that the vomiting and diarrhoea associated with the latter can be traced to the bacteria found in stagnant water. But Beckler, ignorant of this fact, continued to treat his patients with antiscorbutics. Stone had other problems. Unbeknown to anyone but Beckler, he had been suffering from advanced syphilis for some time. Now his legs swelled and pustules broke out over his body.

  With hundreds of native rats scampering over him as he slept, Becker had no trouble obtaining specimens. The rodent plague indicates the expedition was travelling in a particularly fertile season.

  The dogged Wright decided to continue north on 12 March. Sensing more work, the camels scarpered into the sandhills, forcing Beckler and Belooch to walk more than eighty kilometres to retrieve them. Soon after the party left Rat Point, Becker’s horse keeled over and died, and many of the men complained they were too ‘knocked up’ to travel any further. But stopping in the middle of the desert was not an option. They kept walking because they had to.

  The next camp at Poria Creek also degenerated into a pestilent hole. Beckler ran from one fetid tent to the other, examining his patients’ stools and administering what treatment he could. Ludwig Becker was housed with Purcell, who had descended into a delirious stupor punctuated by streams of curses and recriminations. Both men had only the vaguest control over their bowels and often lay for hours in their soiled blankets. Yet Becker continued to paint. Propping up his bloated body on some old camel bags, he sought to ‘make himself independent of all external influences by studying, writing and sketching’. Despite the ‘great ravages’ of the rats and the flies who ‘sucked the colours and inks from his quills and brushes, and threw themselves recklessly onto every damp spot on the painting’, he completed one more picture. Becker feared it would be his last. He described his state of mind as one of ‘utter misery’.

  Still Wright decided he must press on. On 26 March those men who could walk staggered towards Ko
orliatto Creek. The rest were propped on any animal still strong enough to carry them. Three days later, rain fell for the first time in weeks, filling the air with the astringent odour peculiar to deserts that have not felt water in months. It should have been a relief but the damp atmosphere and the drop in temperature only seemed to chill the men and make them sicker than before.

  The party arrived at Koorliatto on 30 March. Leaving Beckler behind in charge of the invalids, Wright set out again and found reasonable water up ahead at Bulloo Lakes. On 12 April, he sent Hodgkinson back to bring up the others, but Beckler refused, saying that Becker and Purcell could not travel. The next day, after Hodgkinson had left to return to Bulloo, Beckler realised that a sizeable group of Aborigines had gathered and seemed intent on enticing him away from the camp with what he described as ‘a visit to a black beauty’. Believing that being ‘struck dead’ was also part of the deal the doctor declined the invitation.

  Later that evening the tribesmen returned, ‘all decorated, freshly painted, shining with fat smeared over the whole body and armed with shields and boomerangs, some with spears’.

  Becker was suffering terribly by the time he completed his last sketches. While Wright took the stronger men to look for water, the rest stayed behind in their squalid, basic camp.

  They began a menacing cacophony of yelling and shouting until an elder came forward and explained with gestures that the tribe would leave now but return in four days by which time they wanted the strangers gone.

  Peace lasted only a few hours. The tribe came back early and resumed another threatening vigil around the camp. Beckler tried to placate them with presents of sugar and flour but it was obvious that in such dry conditions they resented the Europeans camping at their best waterholes. The doctor retreated to his tent and sat wondering if sickness or a spear would get him first.

  Beckler endured Koorliatto for three weeks. In filth and squalor, he tended the invalids, stubbornly refusing to move lest he should endanger their lives any further. On 21 April, when it became clear that his patients were not likely to improve, Beckler agreed to join Wright. Becker and Purcell survived the journey but only just. By the time they reached Bulloo, Purcell was hurling obscenities at anyone who approached him, Stone was defecating blood and ‘had such pains in both his knee joints that he screamed aloud’, Becker was fainting with every movement, Belooch was covered in sores, Hodgkinson had toothache and even Beckler had ‘a catarrhal eye infection’. They didn’t stand a chance of reaching the Cooper. In three months since leaving Menindee, they had covered 450 kilometres.

  One hundred and fifty kilometres north of this disaster, on the banks of the Cooper, Burke, Wills and King woke on 22 April 1861 to the chatter of birdsong in their abandoned depot. Daylight brought with it clearer recognition of their predicament. They were still trapped 600 kilometres from Menindee, cut off by a lethal tract of waterless country with only two weakened camels and a small cache of supplies.

  As they continued to gorge themselves on porridge and tea, Wills and King pleaded with Burke to follow their old track back down to the Darling River. If rescue came, they argued, it would surely arrive from that direction. But Burke had another idea. He wanted to try for Mount Hopeless, the South Australian police outpost 250 kilometres away, used by Augustus Gregory on his 1858 journey from the Cooper back to Adelaide. Burke was adamant that his party could retreat the same way. He overlooked the fact that Gregory made the journey with eight men, a string of forty horses and plenty of supplies. Even then he had struggled in the barren salt-lake country.

  To tackle such a large area of unknown terrain in the middle of the dry season was madness. Burke, however, was so insistent that Wills and King gave in. It is difficult to say just how Burke managed to make such a disastrous decision at this point in the expedition. Vitamin deficiency, malnutrition, stress and exhaustion can all impair mental clarity and Burke was at the end of his physical tether. Logic was never his strong point. Now it had deserted him completely.

  The preparations began. An examination of the camel trunk revealed that Brahe had left behind what Wills called ‘ample supplies’. There were twenty-three kilograms of flour, nine kilograms of rice, twenty-seven kilograms of oatmeal, twenty-seven kilograms of sugar and seven kilograms of dried meat and a few other ‘odds and ends’. Their main deficiency was clothing. The flannel shirts and trousers they had worn to the Gulf were reduced to shredded stinking rags. The men had no choice but to patch them with old horse blankets.

  The night before they left the depot, Burke wrote a sad, courageous note, the nearest thing to an account of their amazing journey he would ever write:

  Cooper’s Creek Camp 65

  The return party from Carpentaria, consisting of myself, Wills, and King (Gray dead), arrived here last night and found that the depot party had only started on the same day. We proceed on, to-morrow, slowly down the creek towards Adelaide by Mount Hopeless, and shall endeavour to follow Gregory’s track; but we are very weak. The two camels are done up, and we shall not be able to travel faster than four or five miles a day. Gray died on the road from exhaustion, and fatigue. We have all suffered much from hunger. The provisions left here will, I think, restore our strength. We have discovered a practicable route to Carpentaria, the chief position of which lies in the 140° of East longitude. There is some good country between this and the Stony Desert. From thence to the tropics the land is dry and stony. Between the Carpentaria a considerable portion is rangy, but well watered and richly grassed. We reached the shores of Carpentaria on the 11th of February, 1861. Greatly disappointed at finding the party here gone.

  Robert O’Hara Burke

  April 22, 1861

  P.S. The camels cannot travel, and we cannot walk, or we should follow the other party. We shall move slowly down the creek.

  Next morning, John King took the old shovel and reburied the trunk. Carefully he raked over the ground, and scattered the cache with horse dung so as not to arouse the suspicions of the local Aborigines. Then, he leaned the rake against a tree and with a broken bottle, cut out a piece of leather from the door of the stockade to repair some equipment. When he finished, he placed the bottle on the edge of the stockade.

  Just as they were ready to leave, King asked if he should carve out a new message on the tree. ‘No,’ replied Burke, ‘the word DIG serves our purpose as much as it served theirs.’ And so the three explorers left the old coolibah just as it was and started down the creek. To the casual observer, there was no sign that anyone had been there at all.

  As Burke’s party struck west for Mount Hopeless, the deaths had begun at Wright’s Bulloo camp. Stone succumbed first on 22 April. He devoted his last hours to waving his revolver and abusing the Aborigines. Purcell departed the next morning. He had been fainting for several days and after experiencing difficulty in breathing, he let out a large groan and expired.

  As preparations were made for a burial service, the Aboriginal tribes returned. They laughed, threw sticks and seemed to indicate that Wright’s men would soon be following their companions to an early grave. Beckler deflected the threats by showing them a box of matches and teaching them to light fires. This worked until nightfall, when a series of shouts pierced the darkness, convincing Beckler that the Aborigines were still intent on scaring them away with their ‘wild noise’.

  Using his limited knowledge of the local Aboriginal dialects, Wright ordered the warriors to leave the camp. Most retreated, but one young man came forward and made many attempts to communicate. Wright gave him some clothes and nicknamed him ‘Mr Shirt’. He soon became a sort of ambassador running between the native and European camps conveying messages and carrying presents—but the atmosphere of foreboding continued to grow. More warriors gathered, some with ‘reddish dogs tails bound around their heads’, giving them ‘a singularly savage appearance’. Several ran into the camp removing cooking utensils and tools ‘with unspeakable haste’. After the robbery Mr Shirt reappeared. It seemed to Beck
ler that he wanted to negotiate:

  Shirt was a born diplomat and it was one of the most interesting experiences of our journey to see an Australian savage display the same characteristics and the same behaviour that we would normally associate with the concept of a diplomat…he was serious, friendly, extremely calm, with no trace of passion, and definite and stubborn in his demands…The area belonged to his tribe. Soon they were coming here to celebrate a feast. We were not to be too venturesome; neighbouring tribes were already coming to drive us away.

  It was a reasonable request. Shirt repeated his demands but Wright, determined not to show weakness, picked him up by the neck and promptly threw him out of the camp. The stand-off continued.

  Becker spent many hours gaining the trust of the indigenous people. Included here is a depiction of ‘Mr Shirt’, the courageous Aboriginal ambassador who tried to prevent bloodshed at Bulloo Lakes.

  Overwhelmed by disease, invaded by rats and surrounded by warriors, the men crept around the camp. Wright ordered them to stack up tree branches to provide crude fortifications, then occupied himself by shooting rats. Only Ludwig Becker was oblivious to the danger. He grew weaker by the hour but still infuriated Beckler with his constant demands for attention:

  He was suffering continually from very frequent diarrhoea. He was dependent of me in every respect and a major part of the day and night was spent exclusively in tending him. My nightly rest was interrupted so much by this that I slept only very little, and hence all the more heavily as soon as I had peace, hearing neither Becker’s quiet calling nor his little bell. Nothing remained but to tie a string around my arm. This ran under the wall of the tent to his bed; by pulling it he could call me to him at any time.