The Dig Tree

by Sarah Murgatroyd

  It is ironic that the failure of Burke’s expedition led to far greater geographical discoveries than its success ever would have done. The achievements of the rescue parties were outstanding but they worked against Victoria’s interests. Throughout 1862, the colony petitioned the British government to annexe a new territory on the Gulf of Carpentaria. It was to be called Burke’s Land. To strengthen the claim, Melbourne’s Department of Lands ignored the evidence of Wills’ diaries and produced several duplicitous ‘official’ expedition maps. These showed the explorers’ return route well to the east of their outward journey. It was a deliberate attempt to make it seem as if they had covered more territory than they actually had. But the British had more important things to think about than the allocation of obscure corners of northern Australia, and in government circles the matter was ignored. Once again, it was private enterprise that dictated events in Australia’s north.

  Queensland’s squatters soon realised that the country around the Gulf was not as hostile as they had feared. Hundreds took matters into their own hands and poured in from the east coast to colonise the area. Thousands of kilometres away, the Victorians could only sit helpless as ‘those wretched sheep farmers’ overran one of the most promising agricultural areas in Australia. All thoughts of telegraph lines, railways and northern ports vanished in the desert haze. ‘Like the monkey in the fable,’ commented the Argus, Queensland has ‘made off with the whole of the roasted chestnuts’ while taking ‘care not to burn her paws in the operation’.

  Today the expedition stands in a very different light. The venture was a product of a wealthy and complacent colony. It belonged to a peculiarly British tradition—one that valued breeding, and the courage to have a go, above ability and experience. With its unshakeable faith in military training, the empire had been dispatching legions of improbable explorers to unsuitable destinations for decades. It was a practice that saw soldiers delivered to the Arctic without learning to ski and naval officers consigned to the Sahara in full dress uniform. Armed with only a commanding gaze and an inflated sense of their own importance, they blundered around and died miserable deaths from nothing more glamorous than a dose of scurvy, a bout of tropical fever or a well-placed spear. Given the history of British and early Australian exploration, it was not surprising that the Victorian Exploring Expedition was, at times, a fiasco. Once Burke had been chosen as leader, the die was cast. The enterprise was doomed before the first camel was ever saddled.

  Burke was proof that, in exploration, bravery is rarely an alternative for experience. As Ernest Shackleton’s biographer H. R. Mill pointed out, there is no substitute for an innovative and capable leader in the field:

  The best explorer is the man who can both ‘conceive and dare’, who carries his organizing committee with him on his own feet, and knows that there is no one to blame for his failings but himself. To such an explorer is due on his return the undivided praise for plan and execution.

  Burdened with ill-chosen staff and cumbersome supplies, Burke did not have the knowledge or the skills to reorganise the expedition. An explorer such as Stuart would never have set out with such an unsuitable outfit in the first place. As Alfred Howitt noted:

  It is evident to me that at no time was there the necessary means of conveying the 21 tonnes of equipment and stores from Menindie to Cooper’s Creek. This could only have been done if an organised train of packhorses or camels, or both, had been arranged, and the most important parts of the loading conveyed there first, leaving such as spare supplies, duplicates, &c. to the last. But such an organised service neither Burke nor anyone else in the party was, so far as I know, competent to arrange.

  Once on the road, Burke’s inexperience was aggravated by his impulsiveness. With good organisation his divisions of the expedition may have proved successful, but his flimsy management skills only produced a morass of confusion from which his subordinates never managed to extricate themselves. To a great extent Burke’s mistakes were due to his inability to think through the consequences of his actions. He compounded his errors by leaving his safety in the hands of men who had neither the authority nor the resources to ensure his instructions (whatever they happened to be that day) were carried out.

  Burke’s all-or-nothing attitude and his fascination with dying a heroic death made him a dangerous leader. His failure to establish any kind of foundation to his life gave him something in common with Stuart. Both men were lonely bachelors who had never found their place in society, and felt the need to escape in order to prove themselves. The critical difference was that, while Stuart risked all based on his extensive knowledge of the Australian landscape, Burke had no such experience to fall back on.

  There is a perception in Australia that Burke and Wills were victims of a vast waterless desert. In reality it was too much water that contributed to their deaths, not too little. The constant rain on the way to Menindee delayed the expedition and the heavy monsoon weather up in the Gulf country took a heavy toll on the men and their animals. The explorers died next to one of the greatest permanent watercourses in central Australia. Thirst was never a serious problem.

  As a feat of endurance, Burke and Wills’ trek to the north coast and back was an amazing achievement. When in 1977 Tom Bergin and Paddy McHugh re-created the journey from the Dig Tree to the Gulf using camels, their theory was that if Burke had undertaken the trip in the cool season, he could have completed the task with relative ease, perhaps even inside the ninety days he had originally predicted. But even though they travelled in the winter months, with the benefit of tracks, wells and advance knowledge of the terrain, their outward journey took about the same time as Burke’s had done. By the time they arrived at the Gulf, their camels were in poor condition and needed several weeks to recover. They abandoned their expedition because they did not have the time or the resources to get back to the Dig Tree.

  The experiment proved that trying to complete the journey as fast as possible was a major factor in Burke’s downfall. He pushed his animals beyond their limits and reduced his party’s ability to supplement its rations with bush foods. Why did he set himself such impossible targets? The pressure on him to win the race with Stuart brought out the worst aspects of his character. In the end Burke became a victim of ‘an excess of bravery’. Once in the desert he seemed to lose touch with reality, until he was oblivious to the disasters that loomed before him. Blinkered by the conventions of his era, Burke found it impossible to embrace the expressions of generosity shown by the Aboriginal people he encountered. His innate sense of superiority made it difficult for him to understand his new environment and so he starved to death in an area where indigenous people had thrived for thousands of years.

  Despite all his failings, there is still something romantic about Burke. He was a flamboyant, charismatic man who had never really lived up to his own self-image. He was a man motivated by emotion, and his passions had found their object in Julia Matthews. As William Howitt (Alfred’s father) commented later, Burke was ‘suffering under the irritation of disappointed love, which made him moody, fitful…restless at nights, hasty in the day and apparently undecided what course to pursue’.

  Burke’s fatal flaw was his talent for mistiming events. He missed the height of the gold rush in Victoria, the war in the Crimea and the riots in Buckland. His arrival at the Dig Tree just a few hours after Brahe had left seemed almost predestined. The twentieth-century Arctic explorer Vilhjalmur Stefansson believed that any adventures that happen during an expedition prove only that something has gone wrong; that adventure is interesting enough in retrospect (especially to someone who wasn’t there), but that it constitutes a very disagreeable experience derived from poor planning. But what makes exploration of any sort so fascinating are the factors that cannot be controlled even by people like Stefansson. Good expeditions also fail.

  Burke’s errors of judgment were exposed by a run of misfortune. Good planning would have overcome some of his mistakes, but equally, just a tiny
piece of good luck could also have saved him. Once events began to spiral out of control, the Burke and Wills saga became the expeditionary equivalent of the Titanic. No one believed that such a magnificent enterprise could end in such tragedy. Complacency was the final mistake. Overwhelmed by mismanagement and ineptitude on all sides, perhaps the most striking thing of the Burke and Wills expedition is not that it failed, but how close it came to success.

  On 21 January 1863, the day dawned bright and filled with sunshine. As the morning of the funeral wore on, the air grew warmer and the atmosphere heavy. Ladies ordered their maids to lay out their black dresses, their largest hats, their fans and their parasols. All over Melbourne people prepared for the largest public event the city had ever seen. Visitors poured in from around the colony. The trains were packed and the pubs were full.

  From early in the morning, people jostled for the best position along the procession route. Some scrambled up trees, shinned up lampposts or climbed onto rooftops. The pavements ‘looked like a forest of umbrellas’ as onlookers sought to shade themselves from the sun. By midday, government offices, businesses and shops were closed. Estimates put the crowd somewhere between seventy and one hundred thousand. Several hotels draped their facades with swathes of black crepe, cherubs decorated balustrades and banners were festooned across the roadways. Stalls were set up selling Burke and Wills souvenirs, including commemorative pamphlets, medals, portraits, poems, even ‘Burke Exploring Hats’.

  As with any event overseen by the Exploration Committee, the funeral had already created controversy. After some initial confusion about whether Burke was Catholic or Protestant (he was Protestant), it emerged that organisations with even the remotest connection to the explorer were desperate to bask in his reflected glory. More than 200 public bodies applied to take part in the procession. Only a few were chosen. Since Burke had served as a soldier and a policeman, a row broke out over whether the police force or the army should play the most prominent role in the ceremony. A sub-committee was appointed. Perhaps, it was suggested, the Castlemaine Volunteer Corps could supply a military band while the police could perform the gun salute over the coffin?

  But who was to stand for Wills? The Ballarat Cavalry saw their opportunity and volunteered to take part, but when the government offered them single railway passes to Melbourne (the Castlemaine contingent was offered returns), they not only pulled out but threatened to disband permanently. The same generous offer of return railway passes was extended to the councillors of Beechworth but they declined, owing they said ‘to the absence of the railway itself’. Georg Neumayer boycotted the ceremony when it was announced that no one from the Melbourne Observatory was included in the official cortege.

  Given the public hostility towards the Royal Society, it was feared that some members of the Exploration Committee would be too embarrassed to attend the funeral at all. A proposal was put forward that all members should walk together as a sign of solidarity. Dr Richard Eades responded enthusiastically. He was not ashamed, he said, of belonging to the ‘much maligned’ committee. In fact he was so proud that he decided to ‘carry a pole erect, indicating he was a member of it’.

  At 1 p.m. on 21 January 1863, a hush fell over the crowd around the Royal Society Hall. People removed their hats, as the undertakers carried the explorers’ coffins outside to the funeral carriages and the police began to clear a way forward. Led by the Castlemaine Rifle Volunteer Regiment and the Castlemaine Light Dragoons, the procession would make its way towards Parliament House before turning down Bourke Street, then into Elizabeth Street and out towards the Melbourne Cemetery.

  The centrepiece of the cavalcade was the funeral car, a magnificent vehicle modelled on the carriage used for the Duke of Wellington, who had started quite a fashion in elaborate state funerals. It was five metres long, seven metres high, and pulled by a team of six horses sporting elaborately decorated harnesses and black plumes. The Argus noted that:

  The wheels, four in number, are bronzed, and in the space between them the panelling of the car descends in graceful curves and pillars nearly to the ground. The front panel bears the royal arms and on the back the inscription ‘Carpentaria’. On the top of this framework, about eight feet from the ground, rested the two coffins, surmounted by a canopy bearing plumes of feathers, and supported by four silver columns springing from the body.

  Not everyone was so impressed. One observer branded the vehicle ‘that hideous affair’, and closer inspection revealed that the carriage was only a poor imitation of Wellington’s. His funeral car cost £11,000. Burke’s was knocked up for less than a thousand. As the coffins were slid into place, the police contingent came forward, raised their rifles to the sky and fired a volley of shots. The crowd fell silent once again. The funeral procession was about to start.

  On the very same day in Adelaide, crowds were also gathering around the city. Since dawn, workmen had been hammering decorations in place until the streets ‘presented a truly gay appearance’. Pavements were cleared of rubbish and water carts were towed up and down the main avenues to dampen down the dust. Giant drapes of tartan adorned many buildings, flags flew from every lamppost and in front of the Treasury building was a ‘splendid arch of palms, laurels and evergreen shrubs’ leading to a specially constructed platform. Nearby, variegated lamps spelt out a message: ‘Welcome’. By noon, the streets were full and the balconies and rooftops ‘well sprinkled with ambitious spectators anxious to get a bird’s-eye view of the whole demonstration’.

  The clattering of hooves silenced the crowd and a procession appeared. At its head, a horseman carried a flag embroidered with the initials JMDS. Behind him was a small, wizened, hairy figure mounted precariously on a packhorse. John McDouall Stuart was coming home.

  Stuart’s successful journey across the continent was a triumph of determination and stamina. It had taken him more than a month to complete the last 300 kilometres through the Kakadu area to the north coast. Slowed by a maze of mangroves, mud and marshland, he had finally approached the ocean on 24 July 1862. Even then, he kept his suspicions of success to himself:

  At eight and a half miles coming on a plain I could hear the wash of the waters and seeing a dense heavy bushy scrub on the other side of the plain, I knew it at once to be the bounding of the sea…Thring and I rode forward a yard or two and were on the beach delighted to see the broad expanse of salt water. I immediately dismounted, walked into the water, or rather dipped my feet into the Indian Ocean as I promised Sir Richard MacDonnell I would do if I got the chance, and not only did I do this but I washed my hands and face in it as well.

  Thring got so excited at first sight of it that he could not restrain himself but called out, the sea, the sea, the sea, which so took the rest of the party by surprise that they seemed quite bewildered, and he had to repeat the words two or three times before they could understand him.

  Stuart celebrated his crossing by raising a Union Jack lovingly embroidered with his name by James Chambers’ daughter Mary. Stuart named the area Chambers Bay.

  At length, understanding what was meant they commenced cheering at a terrible rate which lasted some time.

  Stuart had emerged on a headland now named Point Stuart. It flanks a small bay nestling behind glorious forests of palms and cycads. The ocean is turquoise, the sand fine and white and the beach is dotted with turtle nests.

  Stuart’s men were elated and tumbled into the waves. After a ceremony to raise the Union Jack and toast the British empire, they approached their leader to ask for an extra cup of tea by means of celebration. Stuart refused.

  One of his men said later that although their leader was ‘in their black books for a few days’, they realised that Stuart denied the request because he thought it unlikely he would survive the return journey. He wanted to be sure there would be enough rations for the rest of his party to get home. From now on speed was essential. For the first few days Stuart was strong enough to lead the march south but scurvy was beginning to take
its toll once more and his eyesight was now so afflicted that he could not see at all after dark.

  In early October 1862, as the party retraced their steps past Attack Creek, Stuart was finding it hard to sustain the necessary twelve-hour days in the saddle:

  What a miserable life mine is now. I get no rest night or day from this terrible gnawing pain, the nights are too long and the days are too long, and I am so weak that I am hardly able to move about the camp…I am afraid soon I shall not be able to sit in the saddle and then what must I do?

  Stuart now had to be lifted on and off his horse. He could barely walk and strips of rotting flesh inside his mouth made it difficult for him to eat. By 18 October, the situation became critical:

  While taking a drink of water, I was seized with a violent fit of vomiting blood and mucus, which lasted about five minutes and has nearly killed me…I have kept King and Nash with me in case of my dying during the night, as it would be lonely for one young man to be there by himself. Wind south-east.

  The next morning Stuart was unable to stand. His men constructed a stretcher, which they tied between the two quietest horses, and it was in this giant sling that the explorer was carried south. For the last few days of the journey home, Stuart’s men were convinced their leader was dying. He lay semiconscious in his stretcher and was only just lucid when the emaciated party arrived back at the outpost of Mount Margaret Station on 27 November 1862. It had taken three attempts but John McDouall Stuart had at last achieved his dream. He had crossed Australia from coast to coast.

  News of Stuart’s success did not reach Adelaide until the end of December 1862. When he heard of the triumph, Sir Roderick Murchison, president of the Royal Geographical Society, hailed the explorer as a hero: