‘Yes.’
‘Therefore if you had had fifty horses and fifty camels you would not have started until your appointment was confirmed?’
‘I should not—’
‘Then it is to be presumed that the commission may consider that you have no answer to make to reconcile the statement in this dispatch with your garbled statement made to the committee?’
‘I have no particular answer to make to that question.’
‘It should be pointed out to you that unless you can answer that question satisfactorily, you stand in an awkward position before this commission.’
Wright was silent. The commissioners had won. He stepped down, his head bowed and his reputation in tatters.
The last word went to Ferdinand Mueller. After studying Wills’ diaries and maps, he had reached a startling conclusion. Burke’s party hadn’t reached the Albert River as they and everyone else believed. In fact they were one hundred kilometres to the east on the Flinders River. The mistake may have been due to the surveyor’s failure to factor in the six-degree magnetic variation of his compass, but there was another possibility. When one of the camels rolled over fully loaded on 7 January 1861, Wills mentioned that some of his instruments were damaged. If they included his chronometer, then all his subsequent calculations of longitude would have been inaccurate. One unruly camel could have caused the explorers to investigate an entirely different slice of the continent from the one they had imagined.
Before the inquiry broke up, there was one more embarrassing matter to deal with. It was revealed that despite repeated requests from John King, the Exploration Committee had failed to pay his wages. Victoria’s returned hero was living on the charity of his sister. According to the assistant secretary Robert Dickson, the reason for ‘this scandalous negligence’ was King’s failure to apply for the money. The commissioners ordered him to pay up at once. It was not the only humiliation Mr Dickson would have to deal with.
Later it was disclosed that Burke’s pistol, which he intended to leave to his sister, had been pawned by Dickson. The matter came to light in October 1862 when Dickson’s landlord found the pawn ticket and then told the newspapers that Burke’s famous pistol was now ‘in hock’. Dickson pleaded poverty, claiming he had not been able to extract even his own wages from the Exploration Committee. The next day he was arrested for theft.
While the commissioners retired to consider their verdict, another Burke-inspired pantomime had started at Melbourne’s Theatre Royal. The performance featured ‘The Apotheosis of the Victorian Explorers’ and, as dancers twirled palm fronds above their heads, a huge image of Burke on horseback appeared and a winged angel descended to crown him with ‘fame’. It was the first in a long series of melodramas, dioramas and waxworks that captivated Melbourne for many months.
The inquiry reconvened in February 1862 to deliver its findings. The commissioners were aware that too little censure of the committee would cause a public outcry and too much would embarrass some of the most powerful men in Melbourne. Their report was a balancing act. It blamed Burke on four counts: he ‘most injudiciously divided’ the expedition at Menindee; it was ‘an error of judgement’ to appoint Mr Wright without ‘any previous personal knowledge of him’; he ‘evinced a far greater amount of zeal than prudence in finally departing from Cooper’s Creek…without having secured communication with the settled districts as he had been instructed to do’; and if he had bothered to keep a written journal or issue formal instructions to his officers then ‘many of the calamities of the expedition might have been averted’.
William Brahe was also reprimanded but less severely than expected. His conduct ‘in retiring from his position at the depot’ was ‘deserving of considerable censure’ but the committee was of the opinion that ‘a responsibility far beyond his expectations devolved upon him’. The Exploration Committee was criticised for ‘overlooking the importance of the contents of Mr Burke’s dispatch from Torowoto’ and in ‘not urging Mr Wright’s departure from the Darling’. These were deemed ‘errors of a serious nature’.
But it was Wright who bore the heaviest burden. His ‘fatal inactivity and idling’ was ‘reprehensible in the highest degree’; he ‘failed to give any satisfactory explanation of the cause of his delay’, and this caused ‘the whole of the disasters of the expedition, with the exception of the death of Gray’. This public scapegoating of William Wright and to a lesser extent William Brahe deflected most of the criticism away from the Exploration Committee. Many of its members were guilty of ignorance and arrogance. Others, the men who appointed Burke to fulfil their own ends and encouraged him to get to the north coast first, at any cost, were a good deal more culpable than that.
The commission branded Burke’s division of the expedition at Menindee as his greatest crime and history has concurred with this opinion. Burke made many mistakes but, in the light of the evidence that there always was a secret official plan to split the expedition, this is one area where Burke can now be largely exonerated. Confident that he would be receiving the back-up of a second surveyor from Melbourne, Burke was merely following a pre-determined plan earlier rather than later.
Many mysteries still remain, the greatest of which is why Burke was so insistent that Wright would be ‘up in a few days’ when this was a practical and geographical impossibility. Perhaps, in the grip of his obsession to cross the continent first, he was deluding himself. Maybe he was so sure of his second surveyor and back-up from Melbourne, he assumed Wright would be able to mount his relief party without any problem. There is also, however, a more sinister theory.
Perhaps Burke knew he was deceiving his men. Unless they believed that support was on its way, Brahe and the rest of his men would never have agreed to stay behind, stranded indefinitely by the Cooper. It is quite conceivable that Burke was well aware it would take Wright several months to contact the committee and organise sufficient supplies and transport. Therefore he made a secret agreement with Wright to meet him back at the Cooper depot around the end of March, three and a half months after his departure. To prevent a mutiny amongst the men, this plan was never revealed.
There is even a clue that at least some members of the Exploration Committee were aware that this was Burke’s intention. In the middle of the arguments about who was to blame for the expedition’s failure, the Argus reported that ‘the Committee knew that it was a necessary part of Burke’s scheme that Wright should be at the depot by the end of March at the latest’. Without further documentary evidence, it is impossible to prove this theory. At best, Burke failed to think through the consequences of his actions and disregarded the safety of Brahe and his men. At worst he deceived them and left them to their fate, knowing that back-up would not arrive for several months.
Once the inquiry was over, William Wright retreated to Adelaide in disgrace. For many, he was the man who killed Burke.
The royal commission had managed to apportion blame relatively evenly between all the relevant parties, but if they thought this approach would satisfy public criticism, they were wrong. If anything, the anger towards the Royal Society intensified. Most people dismissed the whole inquiry as a cynical exercise in political expediency.
There was one other issue the commission failed to deal with—the death of Charley Gray.
Perhaps because Gray was an underdog, an ordinary man who died through the folly of others, sympathy for him had begun to grow. Newspapers began to wonder why Gray’s remains were not being brought home from the desert. The discussion provoked a number of conspiracy theories. Rumours began to circulate that Gray’s death was not accidental. King had admitted that Burke had struck the sailor in his hour of weakness. Had Burke hastened or even caused Gray’s demise? Perhaps his body was being left in the desert in case it proved Burke’s guilt? Was his death actually murder?
Twenty-One
An Unmanly Action
‘We think of the unfortunate travellers whose bones, bared by dingoes and polished by sand, lie s
cattered on the central Australia wastes.’
J. W. Gregory
It was John McKinlay who made the grim discovery on 21 October 1861.
We started at once for the grave, taking a canteen of water with us and all the arms. On arrival removed the ground carefully, and close to the top of the earth found the body of a European enveloped in a flannel shirt with short sleeves—the flesh, I may say completely cleared from the bones, and very little hair but what must have been decomposed…Description of body: Skull marked with slight sabre cuts, apparently two in number—one immediately over the left eye, the other on the right temple, inclining over right ear, more deep than the left; decayed teeth existed in both sides of the lower jaw and right of upper…body lies head south, feet north, lying on face, head severed from body.
McKinlay had left Adelaide on 16 August to search for Burke and Wills. He was on his way to Cooper Creek when a group of local Aborigines guided him towards a waterhole they called Kadhibaerri, in the Coongie Lakes region.
The next day he found a crudely scratched-out grave on the shores of the lake about 110 kilometres north-west of the Dig Tree. Of course he knew nothing about the discovery of King a month earlier, and assumed that Aboriginal tribesmen had slaughtered Burke’s entire party. He christened the waterhole Lake Massacre.
As McKinlay investigated further, he was mystified to find a second grave, ‘evidently dug with a spade or shovel’. There was no body but closer examination revealed ‘a piece of light blue tweed and fragments of paper, and small pieces of a Nautical Almanac…and an exploded Eley’s cartridge’. Nearby lay a ‘pint pot’ and a ‘tin canteen similar to what is used for keeping naphtha in’.
When news of McKinlay’s discoveries reached Melbourne, it provoked a furious debate. Had he discovered the body of Charley Gray? If he had, why did the skeleton bear scars around the head? Had Burke’s thrashing been violent enough to cause Gray’s death? The controversy was fuelled by Burke’s detractors. William Lockhart-Morton suspected a cover-up:
To strike a weak sick man, in any way and under any circumstances must ever be regarded…as an unmanly action…there has been much concealment of the facts so that the whole truth cannot be known.
According to Lockhart-Morton, King told Howitt’s party that, after Gray was caught stealing, he had been ‘knocked down, kicked, and so ill-used, that he [King] would have shot the leader, if he had had a pistol’ and that ‘poor Gray was never again allowed to eat his meals with the others’. An anonymous letter to the Register claimed King had also stated that ‘Gray was thrashed unmercifully by Burke when near to death’s door’, and that he had died soon afterwards. King denied the reports. He maintained that Burke had never been cruel to his men:
The fact is that poor Gray died on the 17th of April 1861, which was twenty-two days after he was chastised by Mr. Burke for pilfering from the little store on which we all depended. There is a discrepancy I admit between the record in Mr. Wills and my statement before the Royal Commissioners, but I may say in explanation, that I was present and Mr. Wills was not…it is possible that Mr. Burke told him [Wills] that he had given Gray ‘a good thrashing’ to satisfy him that conduct so dishonourable and cruel had been duly noticed and corrected…During the period that intervened between the chastising that Mr. Burke gave Gray and his death, nothing could surpass the kind attentions of both Mr. Burke and Mr. Wills to him, after it was found that he really was ill; and on the last evening of his life Mr. Burke assisted Wills and I to make the poor fellow as comfortable as we could by covering him with our blankets, such as we had, to keep him warm, in the hope he might rally a little by morning. But he died in the night—died from sheer exhaustion. I wish that those who are now so cruelly attempting to blacken the name and the memory of Mr. Burke saw him on the morning of the next day weeping over the corpse, as only a brave and generous man could; declaring that if he had thought he should have lost even one of his party, he would never have entered on so perilous an exercise. [italics added]
King’s response went some way to exonerating Burke, but there was general suspicion that he was now just a mouthpiece for the Royal Society. Since the inquiry he had changed his views on many things. Previously King had declared that Burke’s journey north was too disorganised and too hurried for the men to supplement their provisions with bush foods. Now he asserted that Burke had planned the journey ‘with judgement’, constantly adding to their supplies by fishing and hunting. He also maintained that his leader trusted and respected the Aborigines at all times and made strenuous efforts to foster relations with them. No one was convinced.
In the years since the Burke and Wills expedition, there has been much speculation about whether McKinlay really did discover Gray or whether the corpse was a member of a different expedition (possibly even Leichhardt’s party) or even just an unfortunate settler lost in the desert. The most important opinion available was that of John King. Given the body’s scars, he had every reason to deny it was Gray’s, in order to protect Burke from accusations of murder. Yet King was convinced that the corpse was Charley Gray from McKinlay’s description. He described how he and Wills, ‘tied the body up in a flannel shirt, trousers and a large piece of oilcloth’ just as McKinlay found it and he even remembered the pint pot and the tin canteen discovered nearby.
Today, with the passage of time and the shifting of the landscape, the evidence is harder to assess. The matter is complicated by the fact that more than one area has been called Lake Massacre over the years. Descriptions given by King, and by Wills in his diary, show that it is geographically possible that Gray was buried on the shores of McKinlay’s Lake Massacre. Given King’s certainty, it is fair to conclude that the body was Charley Gray. But, if it was him, several intriguing questions remain.
Why were two graves discovered adjacent to one another? Why was Gray discovered in the shallow scratched-out hole and not in the other deeper grave, which had been dug with a shovel? Why was he laying face down, when the Christian burial position is face up? Why was his head severed and his flesh completely decomposed after only six months buried in a hot dry climate?
Five main factors influence the decomposition of a corpse: its depth underground; environmental temperatures; type of soil; accessibility by necrophagic organisms; and the extent of injuries allowing points of entry for bacteria and carrion insects. Although it is not possible to be exact about the rate of decomposition of Gray’s body, expert opinion points to the fact that, after six months buried in desert conditions, the body should still have had some flesh attached to it.
A body needs to be buried at least a metre deep to prevent animals from digging it up. This would have been a difficult task for John King to achieve in his exhausted state, so the most likely explanation for the lack of flesh and the severed head is that animal scavengers attacked the corpse, hastening the rate of decay. It is also possible that Burke, Wills and King removed flesh from the body before burial to supplement their failing rations—not something they would have admitted in their diaries.
So how did the body get back into the second grave? Did local Aboriginal people rebury the disturbed corpse out of respect for the dead man? There is another possibility. Gray was originally buried near an important waterhole. This would have been unpleasant for the local people, as it meant that an unknown spirit inhabited the area. It is important in Aboriginal culture that the proper burial practices are carried out in order to release the spirit. Since these would have been neglected in Gray’s case, his body may have been dug up by the Aboriginal people so that the appropriate rituals could be observed. It is also possible that during this process, flesh was removed from the bones and eaten for ceremonial purposes, before the body was reburied in a shallow grave.
As for the scars on Gray’s skull, Burke’s critics suggested these were evidence that he had been beaten far more severely than anyone admitted. In rejecting these accusations, King pointed out that the marks were described as ‘sabre cuts’ when the party
had not so much as a knife left between them, let alone a sword. Yet we know that Burke had access to a shovel because King used it to dig Gray’s grave, and he could have used it as a weapon to beat his subordinate. The mystery is only increased by the fact that several pages of both Wills’ diary and Burke’s pocketbook were removed before the official diaries were printed. We will never know if those pages contained more information about Gray’s death.
As it is, there is not enough conclusive evidence to charge Burke with murder, but he had a history of losing his temper and, if he did strike Gray, who was already a sick man, then a blow or blows to the head may have hastened his death. Several expeditions have been mounted in recent years to find the remains of Charley Gray. While the location of the camp where he died has almost certainly been established, the body has never been found.
There is one final mystery. McKinlay noted that the Aboriginal man who led him to the corpse also had a recent wound on his knee:
He showed how he had been shot, by pointing to my gun, and carried from the spot on another native’s back. Besides the wound on his knee, there was another bullet-mark on his chest, reissuing between his shoulders, and four buckshot still protruding from the centre of his neck.
The man was wounded before McKinlay’s party arrived, but who shot him? Had a skirmish taken place at the lake to which Burke, Wills and King never admitted?
John McDouall Stuart was convalescing from his hand injury in Adelaide when he heard of Burke’s success in reaching the north coast and of his tragic death on the way home. The news did not dampen the Scotsman’s enthusiasm to cross the continent himself. If anything, it made him more determined—like most South Australians, he believed that Adelaide could still grab the overland telegraph. Besides, Burke’s route did not technically allow the Victorians to claim the £2000 prize for crossing the continent, since Burke’s track was too far east of ‘Stuart’s country’.
The Dig Tree Page 30