He was simply a marvel for horseback traverse. His map was so correct that we used simply to put a protractor and scale on it, get the bearings and distance and ride on with the same confidence as one would ride from Gawler to Adelaide. If we did not find the old JMDS tree we never thought Stuart was out but that we had made the mistake, and we always found it.
These meticulous efforts demonstrated just how different Stuart’s relationship to the land was from Burke’s. The Irishman relied on someone else to interpret and record his new environment for him and therefore he could never know it in any depth. Most of its danger and its potential passed him by.
In the lush oasis of Newcastle Waters, with ducks boiling in the pot and fish baking on the coals, Stuart’s men began to perk up. The respite was short. Further investigations revealed that beyond the waterholes, the scrub closed in once again. In five months, Stuart had travelled only 250 kilometres further than on his last journey north and he was loath to give up now. He made at least ten desperate forays to the north but, by early July 1861, he knew he must turn for home:
I must give up all hope of reaching the Victoria, and am unwillingly forced to return, my horses being nearly worn out…We have now run out of everything for that purpose, and are obliged to make all sorts of shifts. We are all nearly naked, the scrub has been so severe on our clothes; one can scarcely tell the original colour of a single garment, everything is so patched. Our boots are also gone.
In the midst of such adversity the race to the north coast seemed frivolous and parochial. On 5 July, a week after Burke’s death, Stuart named a small watercourse Burke’s Creek ‘after my brother explorer’.
Fifteen hundred kilometres away from Stuart’s party, on the banks of the Cooper, Robert O’Hara Burke’s body lay rotting in the sun. As requested, John King had left it unburied and set off down the creek in search of salvation. His survival hinged on small things, a patch of nardoo, a piece of fish or a place to shelter on a cold night. For two days, King lay in an abandoned gunyah recovering his strength and pondering his fate. As he did so, one thought kept surfacing through the despair. Was it possible that Wills had managed to cling on for just a few more days? King took his rifle and shot two crows. Perhaps some fresh meat might revive his dying companion?
On 1 July, King walked back to Tilka waterhole in trepidation. He arrived to find his friend:
lying dead in his gunyah…the natives had been there and had taken away some of his clothes. I buried the corpse with sand, and remained there some days but finding my supply of nardoo was running short…I tracked the natives who had been to the camp by their footprints in the sand.
Later that day, when John King stumbled into the Yandruwandha camp, the Aborigines seemed pleased to see their ‘old friend’. They cooked him some fish and pointed out a place in one of their own gunyahs for him to sleep. Several of the men indicated in sign language that they knew Wills was dead, but they kept asking where the third man was? When King signalled that he too was gone, several of the tribe began to cry. That night they brought extra food for the stricken survivor.
The Yandruwandha were bemused by their new visitor. Most of the time they kept him supplied with fish and nardoo but, every now and then, they grew frustrated and gestured that he should return south. Some of the tribe grew so angry that they threatened to kill King, but others felt sorry for him. One woman named Carrawaw took particular care of him, building him a shelter and preparing his meals. One day he found a way of repaying her generosity:
One of the women, to whom I had given part of a crow, came and gave me a ball of nardoo, saying that she would give me more only she had such a sore arm that she was unable to pound. She showed me a sore on her arm and the thought struck me that I would boil some water in the billy and wash her arm with a sponge. During the operation, the whole tribe sat round and were muttering to one another. Her husband sat down by her side, and she was crying all the time. After I had washed it, I touched it with some nitrate of silver, when she began to yell, and ran out crying, ‘Mokow! Mokow!’ (Fire! Fire!) From this time, she and her husband used to give me a small quantity of nardoo both night and morning, and whenever the tribe was about to go on a fishing expedition he used to give me notice to go with them. They also used to assist me in making a wurley or breakwind whenever they shifted camp…Every four or five days the tribe would surround me and ask whether I intended going up or down the creek; at last I made them understand that if they went up I should go up the creek, and if they went down I should also go down; and from this time they seemed to look upon me as one of themselves.
Carrawaw became King’s particular ngumbu or friend. Arran Patterson, who traces his ancestry back to Carrawaw’s family, believes that the woman was telling King she was Karrawa, which means she was from the eaglehawk totem group. Stories passed down through the generations tell of the Yandruwandha’s compassion for King’s predicament, stranded alone in the desert. Arran’s ancestors have told him that the tribe had always preferred him to the other men, especially Burke, who was hostile and arrogant. Sometimes they joked that King was more like a woman than an explorer because he did most of the work around the camp and because the others were always telling him what to do.
Skin groups, family names and totems are important in Aboriginal culture because they dictate so many aspects of life: a person’s custodial duty towards the land, their position in the tribe, their responsibilities towards others and their choice of ‘marriage’ partners. Any outsider must be given an identity by the elders in order to be integrated into daily life. Since King was with the Yandruwandha for more than a few days, it is likely that he too was assigned a ‘name’ and identity. In effect this meant he became part of a specific family, who then had a special responsibility to look after him. In theory it also gave him the right to consort with a certain woman in the tribe.
The Yandruwandha seemed anxious to know where Burke was, so King decided to show them. At the waterhole, he was touched by their grief and their respect for Burke’s body:
On seeing his remains, the whole party wept bitterly, and covered them with bushes. After this they were much kinder to me than before, and I always told them that the white men would be here before two moons; and in the evening when they came with nardoo and fish they used to talk about the ‘whitefellows’ coming, at the same time pointing to the moon.
But the moon waxed and waned and still no one came. King continued to deteriorate physically and mentally. As the weeks passed, he trudged up and down the creek, following his hosts and clinging to the hope of rescue.
Accompanied by William Brahe, Alfred Howitt collected the bulk of his party from Swan Hill and marched straight to Menindee on 30 July 1861. The whole enterprise was a model of efficiency. There were no stray animals, no splinter groups, no transport problems and no dissension in the ranks.
Menindee had changed even in the months since Burke had passed through. Speculators, prospectors and pastoralists in cabbage-tree hats now propped up the bar and Howitt realised that the tiny outpost was already ‘an explorer’s township’.
While he gathered information from the bushmen, his men were plundering the stores Burke had left behind. As they sorted through boxes containing everything from harnesses to hog’s lard, they were amazed to find that he had thrown out so many essentials including lime juice, medicines and fishing gear. Once Howitt was satisfied with his party, he spent the last evening, on 14 August, writing dispatches, telling his family:
Do not frighten yourselves about me—I am certainly going into a part of the country which has a very bad name…but we are starting at a good time and…besides I have a very great objection to run myself into a place when I cannot see my way out again…My hair and beard are ragged and my face is the colour of a boiled lobster!!…tomorrow morning into the desert. I feel a sort of presentiment that I shall come back alright.
Howitt’s journey from Menindee to the Cooper gave him every reason for confidence. He reached
the creek with incredible ease in just twenty-five days, arriving on 8 September. Five days later, his men found camel tracks—the first signs of Burke’s expedition. Soon he and Brahe were following the trail of discarded tins, scraps of oilskin and abandoned saddlebags that led them to Depot Camp 65 by the old coolibah tree. The word ‘DIG’ stared out at them from its trunk. Yet again the instruction was ignored.
Brahe and Howitt could see no signs of any recent disturbance to the cache so they assumed no one had been back to the tree. Howitt admitted that the mass of conflicting clues in the area ‘puzzled me extremely, and led me into a hundred conjectures’. He left the depot, oblivious to the fact that all the answers lay just beneath his feet in an old camel trunk.
The rescue party continued downstream and set up camp at a place Howitt named Cullymurra, from the Aboriginal name Kaliumaru or ‘wide lake’. It is a splendid waterhole, alive with birds and circled with rocks carved with sacred Aboriginal symbols. These showed that it was an important place of ceremony for the Yandruwandha and other tribes such as the Wangkamurra and Yawarrawarrka.
On 15 September, Edwin Welch was out on a reconnaissance mission downstream from the depot camp. His horse Piggy was jittery, and the surveyor soon realised that he was being watched by a group of local Aborigines. As they scattered into the bush, Piggy shied. Welch regained his seat and saw that a scarecrowlike figure had remained in the clearing. It was a man wearing the remains of a cabbage-tree hat. As Welch rode closer, the man dropped to his knees and raised his hands skywards as if in prayer. Welch stared in astonishment. Beneath the grime was a white man. ‘Who in the name of wonder are you?’ Welch asked. ‘I am King, sir,’ the man replied. The name meant nothing to Welch who only knew the officers on Burke’s expedition. ‘King?’ he repeated. ‘Yes sir,’ croaked the figure, ‘the last man of the Exploring Expedition.’ And with that the scarecrow broke down and wept.
For the rest of his life, John King celebrated his birthday on 15 September. He believed it was the day that God had returned his life to him. It was a year and twenty-five days since he had ridden out of Royal Park.
Howitt’s Aboriginal guides, Sandy and Frank, ran back to Howitt’s camp with the amazing news: ‘Find ‘im whitefella; two fella dead boy and one fella live.’ A few hours later the ragged figure was carried back to Cullymurra—’a miserable object and hardly to be distinguished as a civilised being’. The Yandruwandha followed their charge back to Howitt’s camp. They were overjoyed he had been reunited with his companions and stood around the camp ‘with a most gratified and delighted expression’.
King was almost too weak to stand. Sunburnt, emaciated and clothed in the greasy vestiges of a pair of flannel trousers and a shirt, he wore a leather pouch around his neck. It contained Burke and Wills’ pocket watches and their last letters home. He had clung to them for two and a half months since their deaths.
Howitt’s physician Dr Wheeler took charge and prescribed his patient small meals of sugar and fat. King began to improve almost immediately but he found it difficult to tell his story without breaking down in tears, and it was often hard to understand him. With a growing sense of horror, Howitt pieced together the jigsaw of coincidence and lost opportunity that had led to the deaths of Burke and Wills.
Somehow the terrible news had to be conveyed to Melbourne. Howitt turned to the carrier pigeons but found their tail feathers had been worn away by their wicker baskets. Undeterred, he shot some wild pigeons and spliced new feathers onto the stubs with cobblers’ wax. After a successful trial flight within the main tent, the birds were released in the open. But it wasn’t just Howitt’s men who had been watching the experiment. Several hawks swooped and carried away the pigeons in their talons. Only one messenger survived the ordeal. It had wisely refused to take off at all.
On 18 September, King felt strong enough to return to Wills’ gunyah at Tilka waterhole. Howitt found the surveyor’s body in a sorry state. The sand was criss-crossed with dingo tracks and the corpse had been partially dismembered. Some grinding stones and a small supply of nardoo lay nearby, indicating that Wills had died before his food supply had run out. Howitt’s men dug a proper grave nearby and laid Wills to rest with a short Bible reading. The grisly ritual was repeated the next day with the discovery of Burke’s body lying intact under the coolibah tree at Yidniminckanie waterhole. He was clutching his rusting pistol in his right hand. It was loaded and cocked but had not been fired.
William Brahe dug Burke’s grave, a grim task for a man who knew he would surely be blamed for his leader’s death. The day was hot and oppressive. As sullen grey clouds piled up on the horizon, Burke’s body was wrapped in a Union Jack and interred while Howitt read from St John, Chapter 11.
Several men wept as shovelsful of red earth were thrown onto the flag. An inscription was carved into the tree nearby and the men returned in silence to their camp. Even Howitt, who was not easily moved, said later: ‘It is impossible to describe the feelings of sadness and awe that filled our minds as we gazed on the spectacle—the remains of brave Burke.’
Ernest Shackleton once declared, ‘the line between death and success in exploration is a fine one’. Through a combination of bad luck and bad management Burke’s expedition had collapsed. John McDouall Stuart’s party was still intact—but only just. When the Scotsman turned back on 12 July 1861, his men were weak, short of food and still faced a trek of nearly 2000 kilometres to reach Adelaide. Stuart knew he had pushed his resources to the limit:
The men are failing, and showing the effects of short rations. I only wish I had enough to carry me over until the rain will fall next March…I had no idea that the hills would terminate so soon in such extensive level country without water…they completely deceived me.
Stuart’s last comment was an acknowledgment that the Australian outback was inscrutable even for an experienced explorer like himself. It was an environment that could never be mastered.
The return journey was torture. Rations were low, winter had set in and the desert sparkled with frost. Stuart was suffering more than most of his men and, as the journey wore on, he became ever more reliant on his officers. The expedition staggered south, reaching Chambers’ Moolooloo station on 7 September 1861. A week later, as Howitt was rescuing King on the banks of the Cooper, Stuart was on his way back to Adelaide.
He slipped back into the city to present his findings to the Chambers brothers and South Australia’s governor, Sir Richard MacDonnell. He was surprised to find a gold medal waiting for him from the Royal Geographical Society. Stuart accepted it without ceremony. His mission to cross the continent was incomplete and, of course, he wanted to try again. Hiding the fact that his health was fragile and his eyesight wrecked, Stuart began to plan his next expedition. His backers were anxious that he should ‘finish the job’ as soon as possible. Money, men and horses were all procured with lightning speed.
Just over a month later, on 25 October 1861, Stuart left Adelaide with the beginnings of his third transcontinental party but, as the cavalcade stopped at an inn named The Heart and Hand, disaster struck. One of the horses panicked after catching its bridle in another harness. It reared high in the air and struck Stuart on the back of the head. He lay on the ground unconscious, the flailing hooves crushing his right hand and breaking several bones. Stuart returned to the city for six weeks of treatment but he never fully recovered the use of his hand.
On 24 September 1861, nine days after discovering King, Howitt was ready to leave Cooper Creek. A line of Aborigines waited patiently just outside the camp, summoned to receive their rewards for the compassion they had shown. One by one, they came forward. Each man collected a tomahawk, a knife or perhaps some rope or leather. The women received rations of sugar wrapped in Union Jack handkerchiefs and the children had pink ribbons tied in their hair. Carrawaw received an extra gift of twenty-five kilograms of flour. ‘I think,’ remarked Howitt, ‘they understood that these [presents] were given to them for their kindness to the whit
e men, and especially to King.’
As Howitt handed out trinkets, his surveyor Edwin Welch was busy letting out John King’s trousers for the second time. The explorer continued to make good progress but his mind was still frail. The re-interment of Burke and Wills had disturbed him greatly. Often King stared into the distance, and when questioned he would burst into tears.
Having presented their gifts, the white men departed. Carrawaw and several other of the Yandruwandha sobbed as King was lifted onto his horse and led away. For now, life on the Cooper returned to normal but its secrets were exposed. The prospect of permanent water and large tracts of grazing land would soon bring the land speculators and the cattlemen in the explorers’ wake.
On his way back to Menindee, Howitt passed through Burke’s old depot camp once again. This time he took heed of the word carved into the trunk. The rescue party belatedly found the journals, letters and maps that would tell the Burke and Wills story. Over the next few days, Howitt read them with grim disbelief.
As the rescue party travelled south towards Menindee, King defended Brahe on several occasions. He also made numerous remarks about the ‘neglect and mismanagement’ of the expedition, which his companions interpreted as referring to the Exploration Committee.
Still apt to become hysterical, King suffered terribly on the journey home. Weak and self-absorbed, he was often strapped to his horse for hours on end. River crossings were especially traumatic. He refused to swim, so Howitt resorted to tying him to the tail of a quiet mare and towing him through the water. Afterwards the whole party halted while he was rubbed down with brandy inside and out. Progress was so slow that William Brahe rode on ahead. Someone had to break the news to the rest of the world.
The Dig Tree Page 27