The Dig Tree

by Sarah Murgatroyd

  On 27 April, as Becker slipped into unconsciousness, the Aboriginal tribes returned with reinforcements. About one hundred men had divided into two groups and were moving forwards in a pincer movement along the creek. Beckler reached for his gun while Wright stood and shouted, warning them not to come any closer. Mr Shirt gestured that there was nothing more he could do and the warriors rushed forward brandishing their spears:

  At twenty paces Wright ordered us to fire. A few fell, several apparently from fright. Shirt fell right before us…He alone was severely wounded…He was a hero from head to toe. Slowly, and with difficulty, he raised himself from the ground and hurled upon us what we assumed was the curse of his tribe. It was to our advantage that it was he, the leader, who alone fell, but we all felt sorry for this noble leader and representative of his tribe. Hobbling slowly, and pressing his dirty shirt carefully to his abdomen, he staggered down to the water and disappeared into the scrub, accompanied by sinister, incoherent curses which did not, however, raise his calm to a visible excitement for a moment.

  Wright fired again sending up showers of sand. The rest of the tribe scattered into the bush. No one knows whether Mr Shirt survived the encounter but the sorrowful wails that drifted through that night air would seem to indicate that he did not. The Aboriginal ambassador was no match for rifles and revolvers.

  After the showdown, the situation reverted to an uneasy calm. The men trod warily around the camp, always with their revolvers at their side. Sleep came in restless bursts.

  As Burke, Wills and King walked towards Mount Hopeless, Wills felt a new surge of optimism: ‘We only went about five miles, and camped at half past eleven on a billibong, where the feed was pretty good. We find the change of diet already making a great improvement in our spirits and strength. The weather is delightful, the days warm, but the nights are very chilly.’ The Yandruwandha seemed pleased their visitors were on the move. As they followed the explorers offering gifts and laughing, Wills’ harsh views about the local tribes began to soften:

  We had scarcely finished breakfast when our friends the blacks, from whom we obtained the fish, made their appearance with a few more, and seemed inclined to go with us and keep up the supply. We gave them some sugar, with which they were greatly pleased. They are by far the most well-behaved blacks we have seen on Cooper’s Creek.

  This constant bartering improved the explorers’ diet, banishing their ‘leg-tied feeling’ and allowing such good progress during the next week that the incorrigible Wills began to lament the loss of his scientific instruments. Then, on 28 April, as they walked by moonlight alongside the Cooper, his mood changed.

  Linda, a perversely named bull camel, slipped down the muddy bank and became bogged in ‘bottomless quicksand’. Wills was furious. ‘Being of a sluggish stupid nature,’ he wrote, Linda ‘could never be got to make sufficiently strenuous efforts towards extricating himself.’ The unfortunate creature moaned and roared, then lay there, ‘as if he quite enjoyed his position’. Covered in mud and exhausted by their efforts to free him, the three men had no choice but to stop and camp. At dawn, they tried again, but it was no use. King shot the camel and the trio spent an unpleasant morning wading into the swamp and hacking off as much flesh as they could from the carcass.

  It was a bitter blow. ‘A man must shape himself to a new mark,’ Ernest Shackleton once said, ‘directly the old one goes to ground.’ But as Burke’s situation changed and his resources diminished, there is no evidence that he sat down to reassess his predicament and make a new plan. The three men set off once again towards Mount Hopeless, dragging their one remaining camel behind them.

  That evening, on 29 April 1861, Wright and Beckler were asleep in their tents. It was two days since Mr Shirt had been shot. In the small hours of the morning they were woken by the tinkling of horse bells away to the north. Someone was approaching the camp. Bewildered, they ran outside. Could it be Burke returning?

  In the darkness they could just make out the shapes of several horses grazing and, as morning broke, they got close enough to see the animals had government brand marks on them. Hodgkinson rode out to see where they had come from, when another horseman appeared on the horizon. It was William Brahe. Quite by chance, the two back-up parties had found one another in the middle of the desert.

  There was a lot of catching up to do. Brahe was appalled to find Wright’s party in such a wretched condition but he was also relieved that someone else was in charge. For his part, Wright was quietly thankful to learn that Burke had disappeared northwards without waiting for more supplies. Since he had failed to return to the depot, and was now probably dead or on his way to Queensland, Wright reasoned that his own failure to reach the Cooper was immaterial. There was no harm done.

  Wright and Brahe debated what to do next. The combined party may have been larger but it also contained more invalids. No one considered making another attempt to take supplies up to the depot in case Burke returned. In fact, according to Beckler, only ‘one single tenuous thread’ stopped them from turning back to the Darling immediately. Poor Ludwig Becker still clung to life in a malodorous tent on the edge of the camp. He was delirious and unable to recognise Brahe, but still turned to Beckler for comfort. ‘I want your neck,’ he moaned as he embraced the doctor for the last time. A few hours later, he died alone in his tent. He was buried on the morning of 30 April.

  The rest of the men were deteriorating fast. Smith, Patten and Belooch had advanced scurvy and beri-beri. McDonough had been kicked by a horse and was all but crippled. ‘Nonetheless,’ wrote Beckler, ‘I was not yet very worried. I hoped that we would now leave Bulloo quickly and soon arrive at the Darling.’

  With Becker dead, and Burke presumed dead, there seemed little else to do but retreat. But something continued to nag at Brahe’s conscience. What if Burke had not gone to Queensland or perished in the desert? What if he had returned to the depot camp? The German suggested that he and Wright should make a dash back up to the Cooper, just to be sure. Both men thought it unlikely that they would find anything but they were aware that, by returning to Menindee for good, they were in effect abandoning their posts. The two men saddled the best of the horses and set out for Brahe’s Dig Tree 150 kilometres away at Depot Camp 65.

  As Brahe and Wright galloped north to the Cooper, Burke, Wills and King were still trudging south-west towards Mount Hopeless. Their meagre supplies made them more and more dependent on the hospitality of the local people. The tribesmen followed them like shadows, always ready with gifts of fish and nardoo, which the explorers swapped for one of their few remaining survival tools—fishhooks.

  Four days after Linda’s accident, Rajah began to show signs of being ‘done up’. A few hours later he was trembling and sweating and, despite repeated attempts to lighten his load, he collapsed on 6 May. With the last of the camels gone, Burke should have realised that the journey to Mount Hopeless was as futile as the name suggested. But in an amazing display of denial the trio continued on, clutching just a small bundle of supplies each. As the Cooper splintered into hundreds of tiny rivulets, it is impossible to tell from Wills’ diary exactly where they wandered, but it is probable that they veered away from the main stream down a side branch now known as the Strzelecki Creek. The surveyor was in despair as he found that every channel they tried to follow headed ‘the wrong way’.

  In an attempt to forge an escape route, Wills embarked on several solo reconnaissance missions but he was constantly confronted by ‘high sand ridges, running nearly parallel with the one on which I was standing’. It was ‘a dreary prospect offering me no encouragement to proceed’. Back at camp, the surveyor reflected ruefully, ‘I suppose this will end in our having to live like the blacks for a few months.’ One afternoon, he and Burke stumbled across several men catching fish:

  On our arrival at the camp, they led us to a spot to camp on, and soon afterwards brought a lot of fish and bread, which they call nardoo. The lighting a fire with matches delights them, but th
ey do not care about having them. In the evening, various members of the tribe came down with lumps of nardoo, and handfuls of fish until we were positively unable to eat any more. They also gave us some stuff they call bedgery, or pedgery. It has a highly intoxicating effect, when chewed even in small quantities. It appears to be the dried stems and leaves of some shrub.

  On 8 May, Wills left Burke and King behind and set out once again to look for ‘the main channel’ of the Cooper. It was useless. On his way back he found that ‘my friends the blacks’ had made him a place to sleep in one of their gunyahs, and prepared a supper of fish, nardoo and ‘a couple of nice fat rats’, which Wills enjoyed, ‘baked in their skins’. As he lay down that night, exhausted from the day’s exertions, Wills finally acknowledged that the journey to Mount Hopeless was impossible. They were stranded. The last two and a half weeks struggling down the creek had been a futile waste of resources.

  That same day, thirty or forty kilometres to the east, Brahe and Wright reached the Dig Tree. They had already convinced themselves that they would find nothing and when they rode into the old camp, each officer gazed about him with the eyes of men who cannot wait to be vindicated. They took it for granted that the cache was just as Brahe left it. They attributed the mass of footprints and the remains of the campfires to the Aborigines. They didn’t notice the broken bottle on the top of the stockade, the rake leaning against the tree or the piece of leather cut out of the stockade door. Everything looked exactly as they had left it. There were no new carvings on the tree. The two men felt relief. No one had been back. Their consciences were clear. Brahe and Wright stayed for just fifteen minutes before remounting and heading south to Bulloo.

  Seventeen

  This Extraordinary Continent

  ‘Optimism is needed for survival, and realism must be its worst enemy.’

  Dr Mike Stroud

  When Wills returned from his final reconnaissance mission on 10 May, he found Burke and King still up to their elbows in camel flesh. Rajah had been cut into strips, and laid out in the sun to dry. A mood of stoic persistence still prevailed. No one was ready to give up yet, but Wills was determined to convince his leader that they must abandon their efforts to reach Mount Hopeless. He still found it hard to believe he was reduced to ‘having to hang about Cooper’s Creek, living with the blacks’, but his interactions with the Yandruwandha had precipitated a profound change in his opinions. He realised that the men and women he had despised for their ‘primitive existence’ were now his only chance of salvation. He was especially interested in nardoo, the seed he had observed the Yandruwandha grind into flour, but since he had never seen them collect it, Wills didn’t realise it grew on the ground. The next morning the hapless Burke and King conducted a futile search of the nearby trees.

  Wills’ reassessment was too little, too late. He, Burke and King tried to copy the Yandruwandha but living off the land was not as easy as they had imagined. Without fishhooks they couldn’t fish and without nets they couldn’t trap birds. Worst of all their ‘new friends’, the Yandruwandha, had moved off down the creek and disappeared.

  Despite the overwhelming arguments for abandoning the journey to Mount Hopeless, Burke still refused to give in. He knew the outpost existed and he was determined to reach it. Why did he persist with such an absurd plan? A passage from explorer Ludwig Leichhardt’s diary, written during the last stages of his struggle to reach Port Essington, provides a clue. Leichhardt found that he had become obsessed with finishing his journey:

  At this time we were all sadly distressed with boils and with a prickly heat; early lancing of the former saved much pain. The cuts and sores of the hands festered quickly, but this depended much more on the want of cleanliness than anything else. A most dangerous enemy grew up amongst us in the irresistible impatience to come to the end of our journey; and I cannot help considering it a great blessing that we did not meet with natives who knew the settlement of Port Essington at an earlier part of our journey, or I am afraid we should have been exposed to the greatest misery, if not destruction, by an inconsiderate, thoughtless desire of pushing onwards.

  Burke was still convinced that the remnants of his once mighty expedition could escape via Gregory’s route to Adelaide. On 15 May 1861, he ordered his two men to bury the last of their belongings and set off once more down the Cooper. Each man was reduced to carrying just one blanket, some dried meat, a little flour and a billycan of water.

  After their brief examination of Depot Camp 65, Wright and Brahe rejoined their companions at Koorliatto Creek on 13 May. In retreat, the party looked more like an ambulance train than a relief expedition. Men limped or rode home while the invalids clung to their horses and camels. William Patten wailed in agony as he was lashed to a makeshift stretcher on the side of a camel. Every few minutes he demanded to be lifted down to relieve himself, cursing his companions and accusing them of torture. Thomas McDonough spent most of the time unconscious and Belooch declared himself incapable of travelling. Even Beckler sunk into despondency: ‘It is well nigh impossible to describe to the reader the deeply depressing effect of this futile struggling; the yearning to be delivered on one hand and our helplessness on the other.’

  The doctor was mystified. Despite the administration of anti-scurvy medicines and a broth of a local plant (Mesembryanthemum), his patients continued to deteriorate until each night the campsites echoed with despair:

  Keeping watch in our camp each night was now pure misery. Wild dogs fought close by over the last remains of one of our horses, which had perished there previously. But the wild howling of these beasts was not half as unpleasant to the ear as the moaning and groaning of our invalids…

  They still had nearly 400 kilometres to go to reach Menindee.

  Burke, Wills and King found the creek was still fickle and difficult to follow but their spirits were lifted on 17 May, when King spotted a large patch of nardoo on the ground. According to Wills, the discovery ‘caused somewhat of a revolution in our feelings, for we considered that with the knowledge of this plant we were in a position to support ourselves, even if we were destined to remain on the creek’. That evening the men realised it was Queen Victoria’s birthday and Wills reported that they celebrated by collecting an extra large supply!

  Within a week, nardoo had become ‘the staff of life’. Each morning they toiled for several hours in the blistering sun, collecting enough seeds to pound into flour. It was an exhausting process that took up so much time and energy the men found it almost impossible to travel any further. Wills does not record the exact date when Burke at last gave up the idea of reaching Mount Hopeless, but by 27 May, a month after leaving the Dig Tree, they had travelled approximately sixty-four kilometres from the depot camp only to find the creek had shrivelled to a series of dusty channels leading nowhere. Without water, they were forced to retreat.

  As usual it was Wills who assessed the situation in practical terms. He knew their chances of survival were diminishing and announced in his diary that he had decided to return to the Dig Tree alone to deposit his journals, ‘in case of accident’. On his way back, he was reunited with his Aboriginal friends. Not only did they feed and shelter him each evening, but some even insisted on carrying his shovel and his swag ‘in such a friendly manner that I could not refuse them’. Wills was becoming fond of these gentle people and he spent his evenings amusing them with any small trinkets he had left. But his nights were wracked with agony. The new diet of nardoo and fish may have been plentiful but it didn’t suit his digestion. He suffered from stomach cramps, constipation and ‘exceedingly painful stools’.

  On 30 May, three days after leaving Burke and King, Wills arrived back at the Dig Tree. Seeing the deserted depot for the second time seemed to harden Wills’ attitude to his plight. Originally the surveyor had shown little inclination to blame Brahe for leaving his post, even crediting him with leaving ‘ample provisions to take us to the bounds of civilisation’. Now, after six frustrating weeks trying to escap
e the clutches of the desert, he buried his journals with a note that revealed a growing sense of bitterness:

  We have been unable to leave the creek. Both camels are dead, and our provisions are exhausted. Mr Burke and King are down the lower part of the creek. I am about to return to them, when we shall probably not come up this way. We are trying to live the best way we can, like the blacks, but find it work. Our clothes are going to pieces fast. Send provisions and clothes as soon as possible.

  WJ Wills

  PS The depot party having left, contrary to instructions have put us in this fix. I have deposited some of my journals here for fear of accident.

  Wills found the cache just as before. He walked away from the old coolibah to rejoin his companions, unaware that Brahe and Wright had visited the Dig Tree three weeks earlier. They had failed to leave a message of any sort and the tragic pattern continued unchecked.

  Now Wills was weakening. On several occasions he was forced to camp early ‘from sheer fatigue’. Too feeble to gather nardoo or hunt for game, he was reduced to scavenging through the native camps, picking through the fishbones for scraps. One particular Aboriginal man, nicknamed Pitchery (probably a derivation of his totem group Pitjidi) seemed anxious to assist him. He guided Wills to a camp and fed him until he was ‘unable to eat anymore’. These kind actions convinced Wills that with the generosity of the local Aboriginal people, they stood some chance of surviving. But when he arrived back at Burke’s camp on 6 June, a catastrophic scene awaited him.

  Burke and King were sitting in front of a burnt-out gunyah. Their possessions, including the last of their bedding and clothing, lay in charred tatters around them and the native camp nearby was eerily silent. Wills discovered that while he had been away, Burke and King had continued to barter for food, but when a young Yandruwandha man tried to steal a worthless scrap of oilcloth, Burke lost his temper and fired his revolver over the man’s head. A few minutes later another warrior crept up behind King, laid a boomerang on his shoulder and, in sign language, threatened to kill him if he called out. It was a warning. The tribe had had enough. The Yandruwandha could not understand Burke’s animosity. Every day they brought gifts of food, yet when they wanted something in return, even a snippet of cloth, they were fired upon. That night the tribesmen tried yet again to restore relations by bringing gifts of fish and nets, but Burke was still angry and defensive. He knocked the nets out of their hands and again fired over their heads. King later reported his leader was afraid of ‘getting too friendly with the blacks’.