At Cooper Creek there stood—and still stands—a spreading coolibah tree (Eucalyptus microtheca) now known as the Dig Tree, which stood patiently as instructions were cut into it. The first of these, carved by Brahe on April 21, 1861 before he abandoned hope and turned for home, read:
Dig
Under
3 FT NW
Wills saw the carvings only a few hours later, after he staggered into the camp with Burke and King. They were directions to find a buried trunk containing food supplies, but Burke became distressed upon seeing it, understanding, perhaps, that the tree was telling him he would soon be dead.
When the shattered group left the camp six days later, planning to walk west to Mount Hopeless (yes, really), Burke left a note in the buried trunk outlining their situation and plans. He decided not to inscribe a second message on the Dig Tree, so when Brahe returned to the camp on May 8 he saw no reason to dig and never received the message.
The Yandruwandha, whose land the Dig Tree stands on, were shocked by the incompetence of white explorers, but felt a sense of obligation to communicate the danger the men were in. Offers of help and friendship were extended but these offers were usually rebuffed. The explorers guzzled limited water reserves, fished and hunted indiscriminately and generally behaved like boorish intruders as tensions rose. Several Indigenous men, most notably a man known as Mr Shirt, were killed.
Towards the very end, in extremis, Burke, Wills and King did begin to observe the habits of the Yandruwandha and ate a porridge or bread made from the seeds of an aquatic fern called nardoo—filling, but insufficiently nutritious to sustain life in the long run. Some have argued that the nardoo actually poisoned them. Whatever the truth of this, hypothermia and other conditions such as beri-beri also contributed to their deaths.
There are multiple stories, some passed down by the Yandruwandha and some by the explorers who followed them in hope of finding members of the lost expedition. One such story concerns a fight between Wills and Burke after Burke rejected food from blackfellas. Another story is that Burke murdered Charles Gray; another that King murdered Burke. This may be literally true, or a moral story hinting that King would have been justified in killing Burke. King survived by living with the Yandruwandha for ten weeks. He fathered a child with a woman he knew as Carrawaw, who looked after him. Their descendants still live in the area today. A Yandruwandha man reported being haunted by Burke and Wills: ‘What for whitefellow not send horses and grub?’ He said their voices never left Cooper Creek.
Other than the word Dig the scars in the coolibah have begun to repair themselves: the history-eating coolibah. Trees like to eat things. There is a Moreton Bay fig in the Flagstaff Gardens that’s eaten a metal possum guard. I’ve seen a plane tree in New York that’s eaten a road sign. On Washington’s Vashon Island in the Pacific Northwest there is a tree that’s eaten a bicycle. Trees eat grenades, army helmets, entire houses.
The Dig Tree now has a heritage designation as both a cultural object and as remnant native vegetation. It grows by Cooper Creek, six kilometres from the Nappa Merrie homestead in a reserve owned by the Queensland Historical Society within a property owned by Stanbroke Pastoral Company. The Dig Tree is tourist attraction that attracts about thirty-five thousand tourists a year. (It gets four stars on TripAdvisor and many enthusiastic comments.) It is, the heritage listing notes, ‘a wonderful looking tree’.
____________________
1 ‘“Reading” the Leichhardt, Landsborough and Gregory Explorer Trees of Northern Australia’, Richard J. Martin, Cultural Studies Review, vol. 19, no. 2, September 2013, http://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/journals/index.php/csrj/index pp. 216–36.
HISTORY ON UNTHINKING FEET
I WANT to tell you about some walks I did, but first I’m going to tell you about a random thing that happened on one of my walks. After walking twenty kilometres or so, on a hot day in (I hoped, I imagined) William Buckley’s footsteps, I went to say hello to a man who was the brother of the friend who’d picked me up at the end of my walk. My friend’s brother was the ‘guardian’ of a 250-kilogram fur seal called Arcto and his job was to protect people from what was a large wild animal, not a cartoon character adept at balancing a ball on his nose. But Arcto needed protection as well—from selfie-takers who came too close, people who threw bottles, people who kicked sand in the seal’s face. Arcto was seven years old and he’d visited Dromana Beach for three years in a row. He headed out to hunt in the evening, arriving back each morning around seven. The reason I had walked from Dromana to Sullivan’s Bay then been returned to Dromana by the friend whose brother was Arcto’s guardian was that I’d begun a project of walking around and outside Melbourne with the same purpose, or lack thereof, as I’d walked cities overseas.
In Wanderlust Rebecca Solnit writes that ‘walking reshapes the world by mapping it, treading paths into it, encountering it; the way each act reflects and reinvents the culture in which it takes place’. This appealing idea suggests more conscious purpose than I ever felt. For me these excursions were a walking meditation. I set an intention, but didn’t overthink it. I was finding my way home, I was staying with the trouble. I was thinking about the way my settler ancestors took up land in this country. Few of us have been here as long as veteran river red gums, my family only slightly longer than eucalypts have been growing in California. We’re exotics, invasive, non-native.
I chased a history that shimmered, a force field of trauma, through the landscape of my homeland. On my first long walk, along the city’s boundary lines, I found myself reciting the names of the significant roads, buildings and rivers under my breath. A silent chant. The names were a mix of the descriptive, nods to political power and royalty, the wives and daughters of political men, and echoes of the languages of the clans of the Kulin Nation: Nicholson, Princes, Lygon, Trin Warren Tam-boore, Westgate, Boundary, Moonee Ponds, Racecourse, Doutta Galla, Newmarket, Epsom, Langs, Maribyrnong, Coode, Fishermans Bend, Yarra, Lorimer, Kings Way, Dorcas, Shrine, St Kilda, High, Punt, Toorak (Turruk), Victoria. In this chant I heard the echoes of a history: violent and greedy, hopeful and desirous of a civil and cultured new world. On those walks I rediscovered the Carlton Gardens, Royal Park, the botanic gardens, magpies warbling, cockatoos screeching. I returned to my habit of putting a flower in Lady Gladys’s hand every time I walked past the statue of her and her husband, Yorta Yorta man Sir Douglas Nicholls, in Parliament Gardens.
The Melbourne General Cemetery is a good spot to think about the history of this youthful city, one not yet two hundred years old. Before it was a graveyard it was a camp ground. Corroborees were danced here. Herein lies the grave of Boon Wurrung headman Derrimut, who died in 1864. Generous to a fault, he warned early settlers of an impending attack by tribesmen. His last (documented) words suggest that he regretted that: All the land ‘along here Derrimut’s once; no matter now, me soon tumble down…You have all this place, no good have children, no good have lubra, me tumble down and die very soon now.’1 You’ll find the graves of early premiers and prime ministers. The miners’ leader at Eureka Stockade, Peter Lalor, is buried here. A scan of the gravestones and monuments describes waves of immigration. The Scottish, English and Irish men who came first, and those who came not long after, with the gold rush of the early 1850s. Chinese, Jews, Italians, Greeks and Germans settled in Melbourne in significant numbers over the decades. The rise of fascism in the first half of the twentieth century, and World War II, drove even larger numbers to our shores.
My forebears were Scottish, my great-great-great-uncle, Ebenezer Syme, is buried in this cemetery—he died of tuberculosis in 1860, not so long after he arrived here, not long after buying a local newspaper called the Age. His brother David, my triple great-grandfather, lived longer, and became wealthier. He’s buried in Kew, in an Egyptian-styled crypt. David Syme first came to Victoria looking for gold, after a couple of years in California where he’d also been searching for gold. After some prevarication he took over the paper Eben
ezer had bought. He was a passionate protectionist, relentless, dour. He was a friend of Alfred Deakin, but argued against Federation. He saw that the selection of Crown lands before surveying was a means of breaking the squatters’ monopoly and creating a farming population.
Syme’s undoubted power as a publicist encouraged the quicker development of things that became an accepted part of the fabric of Victoria than might otherwise have been the case. He encouraged small farming, especially dairying, irrigation and water conservation, the opening-up of mallee lands, crédit foncier loans for farmers…[he] experimented with pasture improvement and drainage.2
Water. Everything comes back to water.
Between 1910 and 1914 Oswald Syme, David’s youngest son, bought more than nine hundred acres at Mount Macedon, land that had been the pastoral runs Turitable and Wooling—Wooling meaning the ‘nestling of many waters’. This land included a place once known as Bolobek Swamp, a rich source of food for the Wurundjeri people. Oswald, like his father, ran stock. He was also a chairman of the Age and the paper stayed in the Syme family until the Fairfax family arrived. They bought shares in the paper in 1972, and totally controlled it by 1983. The family lost control of Fairfax Media by 1993; and that company itself looks set to dissolve as I write, after a takeover by Channel 9.
Other ancestors also arrived in the mid-1800s. Some headed to Ballarat, some to Kalgoorlie. One great-great-great-grandfather, Alexander Wawn, was a weaver from Paisley, Scotland, who arrived in Victoria in 1841 and ended up in Brighton. Wawn was once spelt Waghen and the Waghens were Saxons which means that if you are really keen to stretch the point I’m descended from Vikings and other folk who lurked not far from Iceland. The Nicholls arrived in 1889 from England and settled in Ballarat. My great-grandfather on that side of the family, Percival, became editor of the Ballarat Star. His son, my grandfather Alan Nicholls, was also a journalist. He won the first Walkley awarded, back in 1956. That now graces my bookshelf. I could go on, but won’t, as intrigued as I am by such snippets of family emails as ‘your bohemian aunt shocked neighbours by having a gigantic nude painted on her back fence, and had many, many lovers…’ That bohemian aunt once said, apparently, that ‘all the Campbells suffered from melancholia’. Only my adoptive relatives (the Cunninghams), originally Irish, arrived in the twentieth century. They travelled by ferry to Glasgow, by train down to London then got on a steamer to Brisbane. That voyage took seven weeks through the Suez Canal, Sunda and Torres straits, stopping at Thursday Island, Cairns, Townsville and Rockhampton.
Two men buried at the Melbourne Cemetery who were particularly important to the opening up—aka theft—of lands in northern Australia were our old friends Robert O’Hara Burke and William John Wills. The block of granite that commemorates Burke and Wills stands in the centre of a very lovely grove of Port Jackson figs that, if the season is right, hang heavy with rusty brown fruit. The men died in June 1861 and their funeral was held in 1863, but the block of granite I looked at one wintery afternoon in 2016 was not inscribed until 1873. Squabbling attended the expedition’s beginnings and haunted it till long after the men’s demise.
A few hundred metres from the grave, across the way in Royal Park, not far from a magnificent stand of sugar gums, there’s a monument to the expedition’s departure. This was where a small group of us set off one afternoon, retracing the very modest first day of the Victorian Exploring Expedition to the Gulf of Carpentaria. That day was August 20, 1860 and the expedition then comprised six Irishmen, five Englishmen, four Indian and Afghani camel drivers, three Germans, an American, twenty-three horses, six wagons, twenty-six camels and twenty tonnes of baggage. They were carrying food to last two years and, among many other objects, a cedar-topped oak camp table and chairs, rockets, flags and a Chinese gong. I have read talk of a piano, but that strikes me as so absurd it must be a metaphor for the hubris that killed Burke and the six men he dragged down with him rather than a fact.
There were endless speeches before a crowd of some fifteen thousand and the expedition didn’t leave till 4 p.m., so we didn’t either and, like them, we walked, counter-intuitively, towards Royal Park’s South Gate. We didn’t get bogged as some in that expedition did; instead we walked briskly past what were once cattle yards near Park Drive. We turned north along Flemington Road, crossed Main’s Bridge over the Moonee Ponds Creek, and wondered exactly where the Flemington Hotel (established 1848) used to be. These days Flemington Road feeds into the Tullamarine Freeway and is a dozen lanes wide, but then it was a rutted dirt track. We veered left along Mount Alexander Road, which existed back then, having been one of the main tracks taken by those who walked to the goldfields. We walked past the tram yards, negotiated the traffic lights at Moonee Ponds Junction and headed to the Burke and Wills room at the Moonee Valley Bowling Club. We’d hoped for a counter tea, perhaps some camel steaks, but it was closed. The expedition camped in what is now known as Queen’s Park and blazed a tree at the site to mark the spot. The tree died soon after but was maintained, albeit as a grim and ivy-covered stump, out of respect to the blaze and those who’d carved it until the council finally removed the stump in 1938. We stood and admired the memorial sculptures—camel silhouettes—and, after some sushi further down the road, got on a tram and headed home. We’d walked six kilometres, tops.
Indigenous people who lived along the expedition’s route, especially those between Menindee and Cooper Creek, and Cooper Creek and Mount Hopeless, came to think of the camels on the expedition as emus because of the movement of their necks. Others decided they were bunyips. They became concerned about the litres of water the driven and thirsty animals would drink in a single session, wreaking havoc on their waterholes. They watched those camels variously die, escape and, in some cases, survive. (By 2013 there were six hundred thousand feral camels roaming central Australia, though not all of them were descendents of Burke and Wills’ beasts.) All the horses taken on the expedition died. So did Ludwig Becker, who was left at Menindee with a splinter group when Burke decided a smaller group of men had more chance of making it to the northern coastline and back before the wet set in. The Royal Society had failed to provide Becker with the proper equipment and Burke, uninterested in scientific observations, had made him do a porter’s work, which included loading and unloading the camels and carrying packs.
After that heavy labour Becker would sit up until late to complete his reports and sketches. Despite all this, he sent five full reports to the Royal Society of Victoria back in Exhibition Street, which was about five more than Burke sent. Becker made some seventy sketches, carried out meteorological observations and made notes on the Indigenous people he met along the way, including noting words of their songs. He was not paid for his efforts. His reports, including those warning the society that the expedition was failing, were ignored. He developed scurvy, dysentery and beri-beri. Ludwig Becker died on April 29 at Bulloo in the southwest corner of Queensland. An appalling end to the life of man who, when younger, had happily survived Victoria’s goldfields armed only with a sketchbook and pet bat.
Becker pops up time and time again in the history books, a cheerful, talented and well-liked figure. He sent sketches from the goldfields in the early 1850s. He corresponded with John Gould on the matter of lyrebirds and his attempts to raise them as chicks. He sketched William Buckley not long before Buckley’s death in 1856. Becker’s miniatures, his landscape sketches and his Aboriginal drawings have been described by the Director of the National Museum of Australia, Andrew Sayers, as ‘among the finest watercolours to be produced in Australia in the nineteenth century’.3 This is no exaggeration. His watercolours are highly atmospheric and even when bleak, have been achieved with the lightest touch. He drew an Indigenous man called Dick, who guided them for a while. He sketched Mr Shirt, who’d acted as a diplomat between his tribe and the men left at Bulloo Campa before being shot as Becker lay dying. He painted camels crossing the Terrick Terrick plains, ancient craters and the Mud-Desert near Desolation
Camp. He sketched dogs eating human remains. The reservoir in the Mutawintji Ranges (called Mootwanji by Becker), as rendered by him, is as primal as a Mayan fertility figure. It made me think of Courbet’s Origin of the World. His camels slide through moonlight, tropical plants glow silver white, a single meteor shoots through the sky.
Ludwig Becker and the subject of his severe portrait, William Buckley, were both open to what was extraordinary about this continent. Both died heavy of heart with the knowledge that wilful ignorance and cruelty would do their best to render the settler nation blind. William Buckley was not an explorer but an escaped convict. Nonetheless he succeeded in travelling far deeper into an understanding of the land in which he’d found himself than, possibly, any other white man in Australia’s history. Buckley escaped from the Sullivan’s Bay (Sorrento) colony with five other men back in 1803. One of his fellow convicts was shot at the outset; that left four to sprint around what is now known as Port Phillip Bay, known to the Boon Wurrung as Nairm, and known to the convicts as Port King.
They crossed the Yarra River at the Falls; two then headed north in the hope of finding Sydney, and the remaining three, including Buckley, arrived at the You Yangs (Yawyangs), in two days by Buckley’s own, possibly inaccurate, reckoning.4 They kept on going to Swan Island, at what is now known as Queenscliff. At this point the two other convicts gave up and headed back east, out of the history books. Buckley kept going to Buckley’s Cave, Point Lonsdale, mapping the land with his settler’s feet, contributing to its naming. He lived in the cave awhile—maybe a year, maybe more—living off raw shellfish, slowly getting weaker. He began to consider returning to Sullivan’s Bay as two of his fellow escapees had planned to, oblivious to the fact that the colony had been abandoned because of lack of water. As Buckley began the long trek back he found a spear driven into the ground at what is now known as Torquay. He pulled it out of what he did not recognise as a grave, to use as a walking stick. No fool, he knew there were natives around, but the spear marked him out as the spirit of Murrangurk and so Buckley was met with some ceremony by Wathaurong, at what is now the back of the Barwon Heads Golf Club. He stayed with these people on and off for thirty-two years.
City of Trees Page 16
