by Tim Flannery
Text Classics
TIM FLANNERY was born in Melbourne in 1956. He received degrees from La Trobe University, Monash University and the University of New South Wales. In 1984 he became the principal research scientist in mammalogy at the Australian Museum in Sydney, a post he held until 1999. His groundbreaking book The Future Eaters (1994) won the South Australian Premier’s Literary Award, a New South Wales Premier’s Literary Award and the Age Non-Fiction Book of the Year award. Throwim Way Leg (1997), an account of his explorations in Papua New Guinea, was a bestseller.
In 1999 Flannery was the visiting chair of Australian studies at Harvard University, and became director of the South Australian Museum. The Weather Makers (2005), a defining work on climate change, was published around the world. It debuted on the New York Times non-fiction bestseller list, and became a bestseller in the US, Australia, Canada and Germany.
Soon after being named the 2007 Australian of the Year, Flannery took up a position at Macquarie University, Sydney, in environmental sustainability. Here on Earth was published in 2010.
Flannery has made contributions of international significance to the fields of palaeontology, mammalogy and conservation. Sir David Attenborough ranks him ‘in the league of the all-time great explorers like Dr David Livingstone’.
In 2011 Tim Flannery was appointed chief commissioner of the federal government’s Australian Climate Commission. He is a governor of WWF-Australia, a director of the Australian Wildlife Conservancy and chairman of the Copenhagen Climate Council.
ALSO BY TIM FLANNERY
Mammals of New Guinea
The Future Eaters: An Ecological History of the Australasian Lands and People
Mammals of the South-West Pacific and Moluccan Islands
Throwim Way Leg: An Adventure
The Eternal Frontier: An Ecological History of North America and its Peoples
Country: A Continent, a Scientist and a Kangaroo
The Weather Makers: The History and Future Impact of Climate Change
We Are the Weather Makers: The Story of Global Warming
An Explorer’s Notebook: Essays on Life, History and Climate
Here on Earth: An Argument for Hope
Among the Islands: Adventures in the Pacific
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Introduction and this edition copyright © Tim Flannery 1998
All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright above, no part of this publication shall be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the publisher of this book.
First published by The Text Publishing Company 1998
This edition published 2013
Cover design by WH Chong
Internal design by Anthony Vandenberg
National Library of Australia
Cataloguing-in-Publication data:
The explorers.
Bibliography.
ISBN 9781921922435.
eISBN 9781922148643
1. Explorers – Australia. 2. Australia – Discovery and exploration. I. Flannery, Timothy Fridtjof.
919.404
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Sincere thanks are due to my editor Michael Heyward who conceived the idea of this book, edited the pieces I selected, sculpted and polished my contributions, checked original sources, located new material, and asked the really important questions. George Thomas and Alexandra Szalay proofread the manuscript, greatly improving it with their suggestions. Emma Gordon Williams has been tireless in her efforts to locate the most obscure works.
Some of the most significant material herein was drawn from extremely rare books or unpublished archival records. Such material is priceless and access to it quite rightly restricted. Carol Cantrell (rare books), May Robertson (archives) and the other staff of Information Services at the Australian Museum deserve special thanks for giving me their time, and access to the material in their care. Jennifer Broomhead of the Mitchell Library, and Tim Robinson of the Sydney University Archives also deserve special thanks for their help in locating and contextualising important archival records. I am also very grateful to Des Cowley and Gerard Hayes of the State Library of Victoria who found many important books for me.
To Anna—may all your explorations be happy ones
This unknown country is the fifth part of the terrestrial globe, and extendeth itself to such length that in probability it is twice greater in kingdoms and seignories than all that which at this day doth acknowledge subjection and obedience unto your Majesty…to all the titles which you already do possess you may adjoin this which I represent, and that the name TERRA AUSTRALIS INCOGNITA may be blazoned and spread over the face of the whole world.
PEDRO DE QUIROS, REPORT TO KING PHILLIP III OF SPAIN, 1610
CONTENTS
This Extraordinary Continent by Tim Flannery
Willem Jansz, 1606
Jan Carstensz, 1623
François Pelsaert, 1629
Abel Tasman, 1642
William Dampier, 1688
Willem de Vlamingh, 1696–97
William Dampier, 1699
James Cook, 1770
Joseph Banks, 1770
Arthur Phillip, 1788
Arthur Bowes Smyth, 1788
Watkin Tench, 1791
John Price, 1798
Matthew Flinders, 1802–3
François Péron, 1802
Francis Barrallier, 1802
Nicholas Pateshall, 1803
Te Pahi, 1805–6
Páloo Máta Môigna, 1806
Gregory Blaxland, 1813
George Evans, 1814
John Oxley, 1817
John Oxley, 1818
Hamilton Hume, 1824
Jules Dumont d’Urville, 1826
Charles Sturt, 1830
George Augustus Robinson, 1831
John Lhotsky, 1834
George Frankland, 1835
John Batman, 1835
Thomas Livingstone Mitchell, 1836
John Graham, 1836
George Grey, 1838
Warrup, 1839
Edward John Eyre, 1841
William Wall, 1844
Ludwig Leichhardt, 1844
Charles Sturt, 1845
John Ainsworth Horrocks, 1846
Jackey Jackey, 1848
John MacGillivray, 1848
Gerard Krefft, 1857
John McDouall Stuart, 1858–60
William Wills, 1861
John King, 1861
Alfred Howitt, 1861
W. P. Auld, 1862
Georg Neumayer, 1862
Alexander and Frank Jardine, 1864
Peter Egerton Warburton, 1873
Ernest Giles, 1874
John Forrest, 1874
Robert Logan Jack, 1879
Emily Caroline Creaghe, 1883
Carl Lumholtz, 1883
David Carnegie, 1896
Lawrence Wells, 1897
Louis de Rougemont, 1899
Hedley Herbert Finlayson, 1931
Michael Terry, 1932
Olive Pink, 1933
Cecil Madigan, 1939
Robyn Davidson, 1977
W. J. Peasley, 1977
Sources and Further Reading
THIS EXTRAORDINARY CONTINENT
by Tim Flannery
Drunken camels were the bane of the Burke and Wills expedition. They consumed prodigious quantities of rum, better used perhap
s to soothe the pillows of the doomed explorers. The only female member of Ernest Favenc’s expedition to Queensland’s Gulf country in 1882–83 never got to publish her remarkable story of endurance in the face of sickness, death and privation. Her journal lies all but forgotten in the archive of Sydney’s Mitchell Library, the list of baby clothes at the back suggesting she was pregnant for at least part of the journey. In February 1869 G. W. Goyder, surveyor-general of South Australia and martinet, was dispatched to survey and found the settlement of Darwin. He was watched by the Larrakia people who, when they decided it was safe to contact the strangers, held a corroboree, giving pitch and word perfect renditions of ‘John Brown’s Body’, ‘The Glory, Hallelujah’, and ‘The Old Virginia Shore’. This ‘white-fella corroboree’ had been traded from the Woolna people, who memorised the tunes while lying prone in the wet grass at night, spying on surveyors who were working near the Adelaide River. Who, in this instance, were the explorers?
It’s an illustration of just how rich the stories of Australian exploration are that neither the Larrakia’s corroboree nor Burke’s camels made it into this book. In assembling these accounts I had wanted to offer the reader the experience of being a fly on the wall at exemplary moments in Australia’s history. To be there, looking over Governor Phillip’s shoulder as he chooses the location for the infant settlement of Sydney; to accompany John McDouall Stuart in his moment of triumph at reaching the centre of the continent; and to join the young William Wills as he lies alone, dying of starvation on a full stomach, at Cooper Creek. But then I discovered that the records of Australia’s explorers offer so much more. In them, the unexpected is commonplace. So much that is new and extraordinary, both trivial and profound, crowds in on the reader. Events, glimpsed across the barriers of time, language and environmental alienation, continue to puzzle weeks later. One finds humanity at its extreme; acts of unimaginable cruelty are juxtaposed with those of compassion and self-sacrifice. George Evans played games with frightened Aboriginal children to cheer them up. Other explorers were murderers.
Why were the explorers there? What made them do it? The answers are as varied as the explorers themselves. Some were simply obeying orders. Others had set out in search of new grazing land, illusory cities or imaginary seas. Some were careful calculators of risk, while others played a terrifying sport of brinkmanship with their own lives. Some were looking for lost comrades, while a few were made explorers by fate, having set out to do something completely different.
For all its wonder, Australia’s exploration history has been bowdlerised, debased and made insipid for generations of Australians by those with particular political and social agendas. In my last year of primary school I fidgeted whenever stern Miss Conway raised the topic of the explorers. A map of Australia would be produced, across which ran a confusion of dotted, dashed and coloured lines. I was bored because I did not know the country the map represented. The men were just names, their journeys snail-trails across paper. No attempt was made to bring exploring to life, perhaps because the inconvenient details about Aborigines and barren wastes would have simply got in the way of the main message: that the Europeans had triumphed. Somehow, those lines granted possession of a continent. And in that message, all of the subtlety, the excitement and wonder of exploration was lost.
Perhaps it is the very realisation that exploration was a sort of conquest which has caused it to fall so far out of favour with many contemporary Australians. It is now commonly thought of as a kind of abomination—the penetration of a fragile continent by ruthless, rough-handed, pale-skinned men who probed, desecrated and killed in their quest for personal vainglory. Yet as I read the words of the men and women, black and white, who carried the endeavour, I find that this is as far from the true heart of Australian exploration as were the deadly boring history lessons of my childhood.
For me, Australian exploration is a very different thing. It is heroic, for nowhere else did explorers face such obdurate country; and it depended on black people far more than on white. In the end it was a failure, for few discovered the fertile soil and abundant water they so yearned for. Yet it has enriched us immeasurably, for it turned the lens on that most fascinating other—a whole continent as it was on the day of European arrival. A continent that, through vast transformations, was to become my home.
With one notable exception, all of the accounts included here are by eyewitnesses. Some were written on the moment, by the light of a candle after a punishing day’s work, in unbearable heat or flooding rain, or with the author unable to sit because of massing ants. Only those who know the total exhaustion that such work brings can understand the sheer effort of will needed to write in such circumstances. Other narratives are reminiscences, made fragrant by the smoky atmosphere of Victorian reading rooms or beery hotels. There are precious few accounts by female explorers, and even fewer were ever published, but they are often luminous and fresh and different. For once we see the Aboriginal child, wandering lost and frightened as his parents are held at gunpoint. For once we get the whole-body fear, the loss of nerve that all explorers must have experienced at times of crisis. And we get to hear about the barely edible hairy beef, the loathing at not having washed in a week. Creaghe, Pink and Davidson are names to watch out for.
Australian exploration does not lack light relief. Figures like John Lhotsky and William Wall can be thought of as the comic explorers whose exploits are more suited to a Gilbert and Sullivan opera than the hard grind of exploration. Mark Twain said that Australian history was like so many beautiful lies, but it all actually happened. There is no fiction in this book except for one outrageous hoax, published as a factual adventure in 1899 by the pseudonymous Louis de Rougemont, who claimed, amongst other things, to have found the lost explorer Gibson. He describes new kinds of animals, discovers gold and marries an Aboriginal wife during his bizarre mind-travels. His is the pastiche jewel deliberately threaded on the necklace, so that the genuine diamonds can shine all the more brightly.
Australian exploration literature is so vast and varied that ten volumes the size of this could be filled with riveting accounts. The selection of materials presented here does not pretend to be comprehensive. Rather, it consists of fragments that pleased me, either for their lucidity, their drama or their ability to surprise. Some were chosen because they speak about the greater, evolving Australia, and some are here simply because they are old friends.
Many of the explorers knew they were writing in a mainstream tradition: they knew their journals were as important as their walking boots. There are some wonderful writers in this book who were aware that a thing is not truly discovered until it is written about, for only then does it take shape in the minds of those who have no direct experience of it. Giles, Eyre, Mitchell, Leichhardt and Sturt are marvellous describers. Giles’ account of the death of Gibson is one of the most powerful things in our literature. Sturt, a plain and sturdy writer, memorably tells us how in the grotesque desert heat his horses lacked ‘the muscular strength to raise their heads’. Eyre, despite exhaustion and illness, seems always to have been able to see another’s point of view, and to write beautifully about it.
But what to make of Mr Gosse, who wrote, ‘I was compelled to turn south, crossing Mr Giles’s track several times…and on to a high hill east of Mt Olga, which I named Ayers Rock’? Mr Gosse was the first European to lay eyes on the largest rock on the planet: Uluru, an epicentre of Aboriginal dreaming, a place almost hallucinogenic in its grandeur. Any account which could call such a place ‘a high hill’ finds no home in this book.
European explorers got to carry the ink, pens and journals, and you could easily get the impression that they were the most indispensable members of any expedition. Yet a careful reading of these accounts reveals that Aborigines were the real, albeit unacknowledged, explorers of much of Australia. They generally carried the guns that fed and defended the expedition, they found the water, and they made the peace. In tribute to them, I have coloured the mix
of this anthology as far as the written accounts will permit. Sadly, it is rare to hear an account of exploration from an Aborigine’s own mouth. The exceptions are usually cases where the Europeans perished, and only the Aboriginal explorer remained to tell of the fate of the party. Their accounts are startling, unforgettable. They come from the ancient tradition of oral storytelling, and they have a liveliness, rhythm and drama all of their own. Lest anyone imagine that Aboriginal explorers’ first hand accounts were relegated to the rubbish bin of history because they were somehow inferior to those of literate Europeans, just listen to Jackey Jackey on the death of John Kennedy in 1848:
I asked him, ‘Mr Kennedy, are you going to leave me?’ and he said, ‘Yes, my boy, ‘I am going to leave you.’ He said, ‘I am very bad, Jackey; you take the books, Jackey, to the captain, but not the big ones—the governor will give anything for them.’ I then tied up the papers. He then said, ‘Jackey, give me paper and I will write.’
I gave him paper and pencil, and he tried to write, and then he fell back and died, and I caught him as he fell back and held him, and I then turned round myself and cried.
There is a certain moment in Australian exploration which has always transfixed me. It is the instant when white looks on black, and black on white, for the first time. Neither knows it, but such meetings bridge an extraordinary temporal gulf, for they unite people who became separated at least 50,000 years ago. That’s 40,000 years longer than people have been in the Americas or Ireland, 20,000 years before the Neanderthals finally surrendered Europe to my ancestors, and 25,000 years before the worst of the last ice age turned most of Australia into a howling desert, a vast dunefield. No other cultures, meeting on the frontier, have been separated by such an unimaginable chasm of time.
The thing that fascinates me about such meetings is just how clearly both sides managed to make themselves understood. A smile, anger or fear are immediately comprehended—as if the separation of the millennia never existed. That understanding is a tribute to the great commonality of experience that shaped humanity on the African savannah for a million years before the diaspora of the late Pleistocene brought people to Australia. It speaks to me of a common humanity that makes differences in colour, race and culture almost invisible in their triviality.