by Tim Flannery
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 that 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’ firsthand 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 that 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.
That magic second of reunion between black and white in Australian exploration has resolved itself in as many different ways as there are explorers. James Cook watched the Aborigines behave as if it never happened. They simply kept fishing or walking, not looking up, as the Endeavour passed by a few hundred yards offshore. Sometimes, a spear or a gun saw this remarkable reunion terminated in bloodshed and shame; yet, at its best, the moment was followed by a celebration, a gift or a song.
And then there were the eccentric, almost comic, responses. John McDouall Stuart records that one fine morning in 1858 near Lake Torrens he surprised an Aboriginal man who was hunting: ‘What he imagined I was I do not know…in an instant, he threw down his waddies, and jumped up into a mulga bush…He kept waving us off with his hand…I expected every moment to see the bush break with his weight.’ What, indeed, did he imagine this white spectre on a horse was? Did the hunter divine (correctly as it turns out) that horses could not climb?
Robert Logan Jack, geologist explorer in north Queensland, records an even more astonishing encounter. What in heaven’s name were the Aboriginal women he met near Coen trying to convey to him? They stood in a line and began a chant, then ‘all at once each caught hold of her breasts and squirted milk towards us in copious streams’.
The reactions of the Europeans were frequently just as peculiar. Sir Joseph Banks is reputed to have taken a handkerchief (moistened with saliva at one end, one imagines) and applied it to the skin of an Aboriginal man, to discover if the blackness rubbed off. Tasman’s party heard gongs and trumpets, and found evidence of giants on the strange mountainous island they called Van Diemen’s Land, while several explorers mistook campfires or cremations for evidence of cannibalism.
But the most delightful if confused European response is surely that of Surgeon W. H. Leigh ‘maggot-hunter extraordinaire’. Leigh travelled to Kangaroo Island in 1836, where he:
observed…that the natives frequently stopped and examined a tree…I watched one of them, and found that he forced a little stick into a hole in the tree, whence he drew it two or three times, and sucked the end of it. I had little doubt that he had discovered wild honey, but resolving to ascertain the fact I got a little twig resembling his, and used it as he did. When I withdrew it, I saw nothing on the end of it; yet not trusting to sight alone I put it to my tongue, but it had no taste. Supposing therefore that I had not guided the stick aright, I made two or three more attempts with as little success.
My black squire was all the time watching my movements, and when he saw me suck the bare end of the stick and look so wise about it, he laughed to that degree that he was unable to support himself. I now began to suspect that it was all a joke; but on seeing me turn to go away, he pulled me back, and was about to introduce his stick when I discovered that it had a little fish-bone hooked at its end; and the reason he put it into his mouth appeared to be to keep a bit of grass firm with which it was bound on. He now forced it far into the tree as it would reach and, on withdrawing it, there was on the end an enormous maggot.
That maggot, of course, was a witchetty grub. But such easy relations between the races were impossible two centuries earlier when Australia was first discovered by Europeans. The earliest explorers were Dutch mariners, and they had a terror of the Aborigines. Their main objective seems to have been to kidnap them for interrogation and removal to Java. At this time, Australia was a land of boundless possibilities. In 1688 Dampier did not even know whether it was ‘an island or a main continent’, but had at least realised that it was not joined to Asia, Africa or America. The seventeenth-century Dutch navigators fully expected to encounter such marvels as mermaids, giants and other human monstrosities in the South Land, for the
se creatures regularly appeared on maps, and even in scientific texts of the time. As late as 1697 Willem de Vlamingh found ‘a miraculous fish, about two feet long with a round head and arms and legs of a kind, nay even something like hands’.
There is a lacuna in Australian exploration between 1699 and 1770. There were no European visits. The Dutch had lost interest and economic muscle, and the English and French were yet to regularly travel so far. So Australia remained as it always had been, an isolated land, unvisited by the outside world except perhaps for adventurous Macassans in search of trepang.
With the establishment of a European beachhead in 1788, the pattern of Australian exploration changed, for a frontier had been created. By 1791 sufficient relations had been established between Europeans and Aborigines for a partnership in exploration to commence. In the early days, the Aborigines had the upper hand. Watkin Tench records a joint expedition in search of the Hawkesbury River in 1791. Colbee and Boladeree, both Eora men from Sydney Harbour, accompanied nineteen Europeans, including Governor Phillip, on a trip inland. From the beginning, the Europeans were the packhorses for, as Tench explains, the Aborigines refused to carry their own supplies, yet laughed to excess when any of the heavily laden Europeans stumbled. ‘Our perplexities afforded them an inexhaustible fund of merriment and derision. Did the sufferer, stung at once by nettles and ridicule, and shaken nigh to death by his fall, use any angry expressions with them, they retorted in a moment by calling him by every opprobrious name which their language affords.’ Tench explains that their general term of reproach was gonin-patta—shit-eater.
To Tench’s chagrin, he also found that the Eora knew nothing of the country inland from the harbour. Instead of helping, they plagued him with laments. ‘“At Rose Hill,” said they, “are potatoes, cabbages, pumpkins, turnips, fish and wine; here are nothing but rocks and water.” These comparisons constantly ended with the question of “Where’s Rose Hill? Where?”’
Despite this unpromising start, European explorers continued to take Aborigines with them who often earned the undying gratitude and admiration of their fellow expeditioners. Yet it never earned them the respect of society at large. Typical of their fate in this respect, perhaps, is Tommy Windich, guide and closest companion of John Forrest during his three arduous expeditions through the worst of Australia between 1869 and 1874. Upon their arrival in Adelaide, after crossing the southern margin of the continent from Perth in 1870, a banquet was given in honour of the party. During the official speeches a Mr Barlee arose to salute the explorers and, after some opening remarks, mocked Tommy Windich, accusing him of excessive pride in his achievement. Windich, he said, claimed to be ‘the man who had brought Mr Forrest to Adelaide, and not Mr Forrest him’, and intimated that it was an act of condescension for Windich even to look upon a man such as Barlee. The speech elicited roars of laughter.
It was doubtless considered inappropriate for a savage to eat at the same banquet table as Europeans, so Windich was probably spared the embarrassment of Mr Barlee’s arrogant speech. But, after reading Forrest’s account, I’m sure that Windich was justified in his statements. He repeatedly found water for the party when they were in dire distress, provided most of the fresh meat they consumed, and risked his life in confronting other Aborigines who wished to deny the expeditioners passage. Windich probably could have made the journey alone. I doubt that any of the Europeans in Forrest’s party could have done the same.
The relationships between the European explorers and their Aboriginal companions varied enormously. Sometimes an Aboriginal guide was simply dragooned into accompanying an expedition. Inevitably, such people had to travel beyond their own country into the territory of enemy tribes where they were in far greater danger than the Europeans. Other explorers picked up local guides who volunteered their services, leaving them and acquiring a replacement at a tribal boundary. Wherever they went, explorers in this country were almost always setting out to enter someone else’s territory—another person’s home. Like any visitors, their manners and the introduction they brought with them often determined the reception they got.
There is no clearer illustration of this than the experiences of Charles Sturt on his exploration of the Murray in 1830. The exploring expedition had been passed from group to group by Aboriginal emissaries who smoothed the way for them, but at one point Sturt’s boat moved faster than the emissaries could make their way along the banks. Arriving unannounced, they were on the point of being massacred until, at the very last possible second, their belated emissary arrived.
Of course, the European forays across the frontier into Aboriginal lands are only half of the story, for Aborigines were constantly crossing the frontier in the opposite direction. The greatest of all eighteenth-century Aboriginal expeditions were Bennelong’s visit to Norfolk Island and his journey with Yemmerrawanie to England. Yemmerrawanie was to die during his peregrinations in the English wilderness, and was buried near Eltham in Kent. Bennelong, however, survived two years in England, and returned to his native home.
Almost nothing is known of his visit, except that he met King George III at St James, and that he was ill and was nursed by a Mrs Phillips, Lord Sydney’s steward, who resided at Frognal near Eltham.
One slender thread of firsthand evidence of Bennelong’s travels survives. It is a letter headed ‘Sidney Cove, N.S. Wales, Aug’st 29, 1796’. Bennelong doubtless used an amanuensis. Apparently directed to Mr Phillips, the letter reads in part:
Sir,
I am very well. I hope you are very well. I live at the governor’s. I have every day dinner there. I have not my wife; another black man took her away. We have had murry doings; he speared me in the back, but I better now; his name is Carroway. All my friends alive and well. Not me go to England no more. I am at home now.
I hope Mrs Phillips is very well. You nurse me madam when I sick. You very good madam; thank you madam, and hope you remember me madam, not forget. I know you very well madam. Madam I want stockings, thank you madam. Sir, you give my duty to Ld Sydney. Thank you very good my Lord; hope you well all family very well. Sir. Bannelong.
If only we could include here some of Bennelong’s tales about England, told round a campfire on Sydney Cove to entranced listeners. Alas, none survive.
Other unexpected explorers have emerged during the compilation of this anthology. One recounted that for him and his companion ‘life was so uncomfortable, that they wished to die’. No, this is not a quote from a dying Burke or a lost Leichhardt, but the words of quite another kind of explorer who was quietly doing a perish in the vicinity of George Street, Sydney, in 1805. Paloo Mata Moigna and his wife Fatafehi had left the comfort of a royal existence in Tonga, and had set off to explore the new society that they heard had been established on the shores of Port Jackson. They were possibly Australia’s first royal visitors, but barriers of language and prejudice meant that they were accepted by Governor King only as lowly black freeloaders. Starving, exhausted and disoriented in an apparently barren and hostile land, their wanderings round Circular Quay in 1805–6 almost cost them their lives. But unlike Burke and Wills, who actually did perish amidst plenty, the Tongans adapted, and lived to return home and tell their tale to King Finau.
I make no apology for including Paloo’s rather unconventional tale of exploration in this anthology, for in its own way it is a story as noble, courageous, even heroic, as those of Mitchell or Sturt. But the story of the Tongans is important for another reason. It makes plain that explorers cannot exist without a frontier, and the frontier of Australian exploration has almost always been between two cultures. True it is that Australian exploration in the Antarctic, or even on Lord Howe Island, has involved the penetration of a truly virgin, uninhabited land, and that the exploration of Kangaroo, Flinders, and a few other Australian islands has involved the investigation of a place that has lain uninhabited for a few thousand years. But pure geographic exploration in this sense is a relative rarity in Australasia.
Behind the European-Aboriginal-Pacific frontier developed a series of other, lesser frontiers; for throughout the nineteenth century Australia was developing its own distinctive culture. For this reason, I consider the visit of François Péron to Sydney in 1802 as a form of exploration. Exploration, indeed, continues even today, but now it is largely the natural frontier—between humanity and nature—that provides the challenge. The principal frontier—between Aboriginal and European Australia—closed in 1977 when William Peasley went in search of the last of the nomads, removing them from their desert home and bringing them to Wiluna. His account is the last entry in this anthology.
Earlier generations of Australians viewed the continent’s exploration very differently. They knew what an explorer was—and he certainly wasn’t an Aborigine or a Tongan. To them, the famous figures of the classic phase of exploration—from about 1817 to 1874, that is from Oxley to Giles—were celebrated as the makers of modern Australia. They were seen as being in the very vanguard of the inexorable European advance and, by traversing the land, they were transferring tenure to the Europeans.
Even these classic explorers, however, tend to fall in and out of fashion. Sir Thomas Mitchell seems to be the latest to suffer a fall from grace. During my primary school days, he was held up as a paragon, an explorer of the first water. Yet in the last few years he has been severely criticised. Some suggest that his meticulous measuring of distances and directions indicate that he did not instinctively ‘know’ where he was, and he has been castigated as a Luddite for travelling with bullock drays rather than horses. Most recently he has been pilloried as a monster for shooting at an Aboriginal war party. So what was this man—a fool, a savage?