The Dig Tree

by Sarah Murgatroyd

  In no time or country has any geographical pioneer more directly advanced the material interests of a colony than Mr McDouall Stuart has done those of South Australia; whilst as a geographer we especially recognise the value of the numerous astronomical observations he made under the severest of privations, by which the true features of large portions both of the interior and the north coast have been for the first time determined.

  The successful party recuperated for several weeks in the Flinders Ranges before setting off for their reception in Adelaide. The men were told to wear their ‘bush attire’, so they salvaged what was left of their moleskin pants, red shirts and cabbage-tree hats. One man counted thirty-nine patches on his trousers. ‘The explorers in this guise were like victorious soldiers,’ wrote the Register, ‘returning from a well fought field, carrying the tattered flags and dented weapons which bear witness to their valour.’

  Stuart himself was still weak, prone to violent stomach pains and choking fits, but he managed to ride unaided through the streets of Adelaide. As he passed the crowd cheered and waved their flags. Their hero had returned. ‘The poor horses,’ wrote one observer, ‘they look so tired.’

  In Melbourne, the Castlemaine band struck up ‘a most satisfactory’ rendition of ‘Dead March in Saul’ and the cortege moved forward. Around the funeral car marched the pallbearers: John King (still pale and prone to fits of sobbing), Sir William Stawell, Ambrose Kyte, Frederick Standish (Burke’s old boss), Alfred Howitt, Ferdinand Mueller and Dr Richard Eades (minus the promised ‘erect pole’).

  Six mourning carriages followed, carrying, amongst others, Nurse Dogherty (still wailing) and Sir Henry Barkly (eyes lowered). Towards the rear, there was an assortment of marchers including consular officials from nine nations and representatives from organisations as diverse as the Municipal Council to the Society of Oddfellows. The entire cavalcade was so long it occupied several streets at once and it took more than two and a half hours to march the five kilometres to the cemetery. This was the most glorious spectacle Victoria had ever seen, even more glorious than the party which had marched out of Royal Park nearly two and a half years earlier.

  A hush fell over the crowd as the funeral carriages passed by and people strained for a glimpse of all that was left of the most famous men in the colony. As the procession reached the cemetery, spectators thronged around the newly constructed vault ‘in a rather unseemly manner’, forcing the pallbearers to push their way towards the grave. When police had cleared the audience back to a respectable distance, the bodies of Robert O’Hara Burke and William John Wills were lowered into the grave and laid side by side. A police guard fired three volleys of shots as a mark of respect.

  Shops and offices closed as around three-quarters of Melbourne’s population turned out to mourn their heroes.

  In Adelaide, John McDouall Stuart dismounted and stepped awkwardly onto the stage. As he accepted the keys to the city of Adelaide, it seemed as if the whole of South Australia was cheering his name. A few streets away in the city surveyor’s office, his maps were already being scrutinised by engineers as they plotted the route for the new overland telegraph line.

  In both cities, as the crowds dispersed, the ladies fanned themselves and the men loosened their ties. The sultry northerly breeze was blowing down from the desert once more.

  Today, the same hot wind still rustles through the branches of the old coolibah at Depot Camp 65 on the banks of Cooper Creek. Floods have washed away the remains of the stockade but some engravings on the tree are still just visible locked away inside deep round scars on the trunk. The creek still murmurs as it sweeps past the cracked red earth, and the air is filled with the chattering of the parrots and the raucous shrieks of the cockatoos. The Cooper was never a silent place.

  Epilogue

  If Victoria had capitalised on Burke’s journey and annexed a new colony in the Gulf country, the map of Australia could have been changed forever. As it was, the Victorians gained nothing, politically or territorially, from the Burke and Wills expedition. The unclaimed land between the 138° and 141° meridians was officially incorporated into Queensland in 1862, and after Stuart’s journeys South Australia extended its northern boundary to take in what is now the Northern Territory. For many years Adelaide controlled central Australia from coast to coast.

  South Australia won the fight for the overland telegraph line and the British-Australia Telegraph Company began construction in 1870. An underwater cable was taken from Java and landed on the northern Australian coast near present-day Darwin. The irrepressible Charles Todd took charge of the venture, and 36,000 poles carried the wire down through the centre of the continent, following Stuart’s original route almost all the way. Once it was finished, the chief engineer Robert Patterson cut the cable so he could ceremonially rejoin it and send a message to the South Australian governor. But Patterson’s celebration did not go to plan:

  Half the party seized hold of me and of the wire, and the other half the other end, and stretched with might and main to bring the two ends together.

  All our force could not do this. I then attached some binding wire to one end. The moment I brought it to the other end the current passed through my body from all the batteries on the line. I had to yell and let go. Next time I proceeded more cautiously, and used my handkerchief to seize the wire with. In about five minutes I had the joint made complete, and Adelaide was in communication with Port Darwin.

  The first telegram from London to Adelaide was sent on 22 August 1872. Later, a road from Adelaide to Darwin via Alice Springs was built alongside the telegraph line. It is now known as the Stuart Highway.

  John McDouall Stuart never recovered from his last expedition. As he convalesced at the Seaside Family Hotel in the Melbourne suburb of Brighton, he at last received the £2000 reward for crossing the continent. It yielded an annual pension of £162 a year, barely enough to sustain him. His only other rewards were a gold watch and a Patrons Medal from the Royal Geographical Society. After several unsuccessful attempts to resume his surveying career, he gave up and sailed to London in 1865. Described soon afterwards as a ‘half-foolish…hairy, purblind, silent man’, Stuart was crippled, bad-tempered and sustained only by a continuous intake of whisky. He lived in relative poverty, cared for by his widowed sister until his death on 5 June 1866, aged fifty-one. Without losing a man, he had travelled more than 20,000 kilometres through some of the harshest territory on earth, much of it on the same grey mare, Polly. Former members of his expeditions never forgot their leader. Nicknaming themselves ‘Stuart’s companions’, they gathered once a year, until their deaths, to drink his health with a bottle of the finest malt whisky.

  In Melbourne, the Exploration Committee continued to meet for several years after the funeral, tying up various loose ends and even suggesting another search for Ludwig Leichhardt. A final set of accounts for the Burke and Wills expedition put the cost at £57,840, more than five times the original budget. The Royal Society exists today and meets in the same building in La Trobe Street.

  Tributes to Burke and Wills continued for many years. Burke was awarded a gold medal from the Royal Geographical Society in London but since only one could be made to any expedition, Wills missed out and King was sent a gold watch instead. Dick the Aboriginal tracker was awarded a brass medal and £5 for saving Trooper Lyons and Alexander MacPherson.

  A thirty-four-tonne monolith was placed over Burke and Wills’ Melbourne graves in 1864 and a giant bronze statue of the explorers was erected on the corner of Collins and Russell streets in 1865. It has now been moved to Swanston Street, where to this day you will find Burke gazing into the distance with Wills sitting by his side writing in his diary. Major memorials were erected in Castlemaine and Beechworth and the expedition is remembered with countless plaques and memorial cairns throughout Victoria and Queensland. There is even a commemorative obelisk to William Wills in Totnes, the town of his birth.

  The Victorian government awarded pensions of £6
0 a year to Nurse Dogherty, £120 a year to Wills’ mother and payments of £500 to each of his sisters. When Dr Wills senior decided to return to England, the committee couldn’t wait to hand over the £125 to cover his fare. Dost Mohomet, disabled by a rogue camel in Menindee, was given £200 and lived in the tiny outpost for the rest of his life. Charley Gray’s family received nothing.

  Hermann Beckler’s career as a doctor and explorer in Australia ended in failure. He returned to Germany in 1862 in a fit of pique, when the Exploration Committee declined to give him a reference on the grounds that the royal commission was still investigating the expedition. He settled in Bavaria and continued to practise medicine until he died in 1914.

  Ludwig Becker was remembered with affection by sections of the German community in Melbourne, but his contribution to the art and literature of Australian exploration has never been fully recognised. The beautiful sketches he made during his time with the expedition are now stored in the State Library of Victoria.

  Soon after Burke and Wills’ funeral, the controversial secretary of the Royal Society, John Macadam, sued the Argus over claims that he was drunk during the coffining of Burke’s bones, but he received the sort of derisory damages that indicated the judge was not entirely convinced of his innocence. He continued in his numerous public positions until his death from pleurisy in 1865. He was thirty-eight. Macadam is now famous for giving his name to the macadamia nut, which was discovered by Ferdinand Mueller.

  After Alfred Howitt’s successful journeys to the Cooper, he was appointed a police magistrate and goldfields warden for the Gippsland area, positions he held for the next twenty-five years. He became interested in geology and anthropology, leading many prospecting parties through eastern Victoria and writing several books on Australia’s Aboriginal people. William Brahe continued to defend his reputation for many years after he was pilloried at the royal commission. Backed up by Howitt and the German community in Melbourne, his character underwent a significant public rehabilitation. He worked for a time in Fiji and as a pastoralist in Queensland. Brahe died in Melbourne in 1912. Wills’ patron Georg Neumayer continued his eccentric scientific career. He focused his efforts on establishing the earth’s magnetic fields, but many of his experiments at the Melbourne Observatory were irrevocably damaged when the city ran iron tram tracks alongside the building.

  William Wright faded into relative obscurity as a farmer on the Darling River. In 1863, he was one of the first to mount a search party for a missing lands commissioner, but he never recovered his good name. History has judged him harshly with many books and newspaper articles branding him the principal villain in the Burke and Wills disaster.

  After Burke’s funeral, Julia Matthews gave several memorial performances for the dead explorers. In 1864 she married her manager William Mumford, a drunk who beat his wife and used her income to support his debauched lifestyle. The couple had three children. Julia sailed to England in 1867 and became the first Australian-trained singer to perform at Covent Garden. She filed for separation from her husband in 1870 and went on to tour Europe and America. Later she became a devout Catholic. She died in St Louis, Missouri, of ‘malarial disease’. She was thirty-four.

  There were calls after the expedition for more appreciation to be shown to the Aboriginal people who had cared for the stricken explorers and saved King’s life. In what they supposed to be a generous gesture, the South Australian government ‘gave’ the Aborigines 670 square kilometres of land around Cooper Creek in 1863. Of course, this generosity was meaningless to a group of people who had been living in the area for many thousands of years. The gift was soon exposed as a ruse to start a Lutheran Mission and promote the gospel amongst the indigenous population. The project collapsed and native rights to the land were revoked in 1869. By that time the cattlemen had arrived and the dismantling of the traditional cultures was under way. Many indigenous people were moved away to Christian missions and their descendants are now scattered throughout New South Wales and Queensland. Several Aboriginal groups are currently seeking to reclaim their native title rights to the land.

  As European settlement spread, camels became instrumental in opening up central Australia. They were imported from India and the Middle East and were used to carry materials for the construction of telegraph lines, railways and roads. Over the years, many escaped into the wild and there are now up to half a million roaming Australia’s interior. They make up the largest wild disease-free population in the world and are exported back to the Middle East for racing and breeding.

  Today there is little physical evidence to mark Burke and Wills’ transcontinental crossing. The exact route to the Gulf of Carpentaria has been much discussed over the years and confused by inaccuracies in Wills’ maps, misreadings of his diaries, fake ‘Burke and Wills trees’ and numerous local myths. Burketown in northern Australia is in fact far to the west of the explorers’ track and Julia Creek, commonly assumed to have been christened by Burke, is also well away from their route and was named much later. Placenames and spellings have also changed over the years. Menindie is now usually spelt ‘Menindee’ and, to conform to Australian mapping conventions, Cooper’s Creek is known as Cooper Creek.

  Some sections of the Burke and Wills route run through private land or terrain that is inaccessible, even by four-wheel-drive, but it is possible to follow considerable portions of the journey on public roads and tracks, and to see some of the genuine campsites and carved trees. Burke and Wills’ original graves on the Cooper are marked with cairns, as is the waterhole where King was found. They can be reached from the small outpost of Innamincka in South Australia. Howitt’s depot at Cullymurra waterhole remains one of the prettiest places to camp on Cooper Creek.

  Some of the desert country that the explorers encountered is still much as they would have seen it, but the introduction of cattle into more fertile regions has caused extensive soil erosion and a subsequent loss of woodland habitat. Rabbits have destroyed large tracts of land. Areas such as the Simpson Desert and the far north-western corner of New South Wales have been designated as national parks, while other parts are used for farming. Oil and gas have been discovered in the Cooper basin and sections of the desert now echo with the thump of seismic exploration.

  The Dig Tree stands on the Nappa Merrie cattle station, just inside the Queensland border. The old coolibah has survived droughts, floods and termite infestations for an estimated 350 years. Since William Brahe carved his famous inscription, it has been the subject of much speculation and argument. So many versions of the message have been included in historical accounts of the expedition that there is considerable confusion about exactly what was engraved into the tree. But, by examining early photographs and studying the testimonies of William Brahe, John King and Alfred Howitt, it is possible to decipher the original message.

  There are three separate blazes on the tree. The first faces the creek and consists of the letter B for Burke and the camp number LXV (65) underneath it. This is now the most visible of the carvings. On a lower bough, there is another engraving. This was made by Brahe just before he abandoned the depot camp and consists of the date of the expedition’s arrival: ‘DEC 6-60’ and the date of Brahe’s departure: ‘APR 21-61’. The inscription is evident in early photographs of the tree but because of extensive bark regrowth only a small deep scar remains.

  The main ‘DIG’ message is on the trunk facing away from the creek. The most common interpretation of the original inscription is that it read ‘DIG 3FT NW’, with an arrow underneath pointing from left to right. But examination of photographs taken in the 1920s and 1930s clearly shows the word ‘under’ carved into the trunk. Early settlers to the area suggested that the message read ‘40FT NW’ not ‘3FT NW’. They believed the coolibah’s root system could have made it difficult to bury the camel trunk any closer. Evidence given during the royal commission contradicts this interpretation. John King stated that ‘Mr Wills saw marked on the tree, Dig three feet north-west or north-
east, I am not sure which…’ William Brahe described the camel trunk as ‘buried near the stockade at the foot of a large tree, and marked with the word “DIG” on the tree.’ Brahe also mentioned that, when he buried the cache, it was ‘within six or seven yards’ of the stockade. Since the stockade itself was near the tree, it could not possibly have been forty feet away.

  Matters are further confused by the fact that Alfred Howitt also mentioned that he marked the Dig Tree as well, and there is an old photograph (on display near the tree) that shows the initials ‘AH’ inscribed above the word ‘DIG’. Howitt was also in the habit of using large arrows to show where he was going next. It makes sense that he added the arrow to the tree, since it points in the wrong direction to mark the cache, but correctly indicates his direction of travel. It is quite possible that he inscribed the figures ‘3ft NW’ as well to show where he had re-buried the trunk, not to point to its original position. In the light of this evidence, the original message would have read:

  DIG

  UNDER

  The Dig Tree is still in remarkably good condition but the Cooper itself is creeping ever closer and soil erosion is an increasing problem. A conservation plan has now been established to preserve the site, and a boardwalk has been placed around the trunk to protect the roots. With care, the tree should survive for many decades to come.

  John King, the only survivor of Burke’s final party, returned to live with his sister in St Kilda. He was ‘disabled for life—thoroughly shattered in body and weakened in mind, by his great sufferings’ and never recovered ‘a semblance of health or spirits’. He married his cousin Mary in 1872, but died a year later aged thirty-four from ‘pulmonary consumption’, a disease he had probably carried with him throughout the expedition. In 1863, the government granted him a pension of just £180 a year. It was not extended to his wife after his death.