Australia's Strangest Mysteries

by John Pinkney

  When his father’s financial support proved inadequate he cultivated other patrons – all anxious to bask in the reflected glory of the great botanical and zoological discoveries their protege seemed destined to make. Of all the sponsors Leichhardt sponged off, none was more generous than a wealthy young Englishman, William Nicholson. In 1840 the pair travelled through a series of sunless German forests collecting plant and lichen specimens. Beside their campfires at night they discussed what had become a shared ambition: to map the seemingly impenetrable Australian continent.

  William would provide the money; Ludwig the courage.

  TO LEICHHARDT the tiny colony of New South Wales was a blend of hell and heaven. Nothing in the old British colonist’s pale drawings had prepared him for the intensity of light, colour and sensuousness he found here. His first glimpse of Sydney Harbour – green, deep and sparkling under a cloudless sky. The sandstone cliffs, their carved steps spilling down to jetties where small boats bobbed. The wooded hills with their sweeps of melaleuca, searingly red.

  Ashore, this primal bliss was tempered by stench and suffering. Rats and ragged children roamed the swampy streets. A lash cracked, recoiled and cracked again, propelling strips of bloodied flesh torn from a malefactor’s back into the jaws of squabbling dogs.

  Repelled by the squalor and savagery he found everywhere in the settlement, Ludwig soon began to explore the ancient forests that loomed unsullied around Sydney. His letters home were filled with rough sketches of shadeless eucalyptus forests and of the thousands of Xantorrhoea plants, most of them over three metres tall and as warm with hovering, honeysucking birds.

  He stood at the edge of a continent odder and more mystical than the moon – and was determined to penetrate and map it.

  LUDWIG EXPLORED vast tracts of the eastern coast in solitude, preparing himself in mind and in spirit for what he described as ‘the destiny’ he believed to be awaiting him. His state of mind during these prolonged excursions is revealed in a letter he wrote to his friend John Murphy, who would subsequently become mayor of Sydney:

  Yesterday I returned from a very fatiguing walking expedition to Point Stephens. I was four days in the bush and found only once a hut where I could restore my exhausted strength. The heat was intolerable; fresh water scarce... the deep silence only interrupted by the browsing wallabis [sic] rustling through dry leaves.

  The first night however, I was at the seaside and the roar of the breakers lulled me into sleep. Such silences as I experienced make you feel your weakness and approaches you more to the heavenly father than the finest sermon in a full church... this awful silence, which makes you almost hear the beating of your own heart.

  Yesterday I was travelling along a sandy beach 20 miles long. There was not a drop of fresh water and I had eaten nothing for the past 24 hours. I found a bed of shells, of which I devoured a dozen, but they were so briny that my thirst increased. When my strength was almost exhausted I found a cask on shore, perhaps thrown overboard by a vessel in danger. To my joy and wonder I found it full of fresh water.

  Next week I hope to go to Patricks Plains. I want, sadly, a good companion who has the same interest as I have...

  Early Australian sketches like this depiction of a kangaroo fascinated young Ludwig Leichhardt, prompting him to explore the Australian continent -- where he met his mysterious fate.

  The more time he spent in the abyssal hush of the bush, the more the young naturalist hungered for human company. But going home was not an option. He knew that on returning to Prussia he would promptly have been jailed for avoiding his obligatory military service. Instead he found friends and admirers in the Australian wilderness.

  With his wild beard and chimneypot hat adorned with beetles, leaves and creepers Leichhardt cut an increasingly eccentric and celebrated figure. Aboriginals regarded him as likeable and unthreatening – and most settlers found his conversation so entertaining they were happy to accommodate him for nights or even weeks. Within 18 months he had established such a network of allies and friends that he was able to raise funds for his first expedition: a 10-man 4800-kilometre trek to find a new route from Jimbour Station on Queensland’s Darling Downs to Port Essington near Darwin.

  The explorers rode out in high spirits, singing God Save the Queen. They would successfully complete their long journey. But 15 months of near-starvation spent scrabbling for edible lizards and birds beneath the harsh gong of the sun irrevocably changed them, stripping away their health and youthful heedlessness. Most affected by the ordeal was the 32-year-old Leichhardt himself. His odd appearance remained unchanged. But about him now was an aura of authority and strength born of suffering.

  Henry Turnbull, who would join Leichhardt’s second expedition, scrawled in an exercise book a description of their first meeting:

  I was encamped on the banks of the upper Barnard River. My black boy called out, ‘White fellow coming!’ He advanced...a tall handsome man with a jet-black moustache and an immense beard, clad in what had once been a coat and a pair of thick woollen trousers. This, added to an old cabbage-tree hat with one half of the brim torn away and a pair of thick boots with the front off one, through which a stockingless foot struggled, made up the attire of the most extraordinary-looking biped I have ever seen... With a most graceful bow he said he was a naturalist on his way to Sydney, 250 miles distant.

  There was something about this man (and I have heard others remark the same) that completely won you over...completely subdued you... Such a magnitude of intelligence in that lofty, noble, thoughtful brow: such an earnestness and sincerity of soul in that observant seeing eye, looking far beyond the mere ordinary range of vision into the very secret of things.

  ...(Later) he told me the whole history of his life, even from his boyish days. One thing I well remember he advised me to study was self-control. ‘You ought,’ he said, ‘to have such control over your feelings as to be able, when your mouth is parched with thirst, to lift a glass of water to your lips and dash it aside without tasting a drop.’ That Leichhardt could do this I know full well.

  In 1846 the hero-worshipping Henry Turnbull joined an assortment of fellow-admirers to accompany Leichhardt on his second foray. It was planned as a journey from the Darling Downs to the continent’s western coast and ultimately to the Swan River and Perth. But teeming rain, malaria and famine proved almost fatal to the expedition’s members. On their return the survivors recalled drenching storms that had ripped their tents, massed attacks by paper-nest wasps – and horses bleeding profusely from insect bites.

  Leichhardt was undaunted. In March 1848 he tried again to pioneer his dreamed-about route from east to west. Heading a massively equipped seven-man party, accompanied by 20 mules, 270 goats (for milk and meat), 12 horses and 50 bullocks, he set out a second time for Australia’s western coast. The expedition was carrying enough food, medicine and ammunition for two years.

  Most observers expected the lumbering procession of explorers and animals to encounter problems along the way. No one imagined that the party would – or could – simply vanish from the face of Australia. Inexplicably however, it happened. Ludwig Leichhardt and his companions were last seen at Mount Abundance, near Roma, on 4 April 1848. And then – silence.

  Leaders of the early search parties were confident they would find some evidence of what had occurred – even if it comprised no more than corpses, butchered by Aboriginals defending their territory. The searchers argued that even if the bodies had been buried or spirited away, it would be beyond belief if small traces of the expedition’s mountains of equipment did not remain.

  But as years, and then decades, passed, nothing was found. There were false alarms, of course, like the shin bone, trumpeted as ‘possibly’ Leichhardt’s that was promptly shown to have belonged to a man at least 45 centimetres shorter. As repeated quests for the lost expedition failed, the mythology grew. According to one persistent story, Aboriginal medicine men had ‘sung’ the German invader’s party into oblivion, a
s a warning to all other white intruders trespassing on sacred native land. Other bizarre theories had Leichhardt and his associates somehow plunging lemming-like into a deep ravine – and alternatively, robbed of their supplies, dying of hunger and thirst under furious sun, leaving neither clothing, nor boots, nor bones behind.

  Historians could make no sense of it. In 1893, 45 years after the disappearance, Alfred Russel Wallace wrote:

  A letter from Ludwig Leichhardt, dated from McPherson’s station on the Coogon River, was the last ever heard of the explorer or of his entire party.

  The total disappearance, both of his men and animals, and of all his stores and implements, is one of the mysteries of the Australian interior. Had they been simply destroyed by attacks of the natives some relics would long since have been recovered, if only the iron of the implements they had with them.

  Wallace’s words inspired searchers in the 20th and 21st centuries. Advancing technology, they hoped, would succeed where dogged 19th century persistence had repeatedly failed. They scanned likely areas with batteries of metal-detectors, took thousands of photographs from the air, employed Aboriginal trackers – all to no avail.

  Aborigines preparing to attack Leichhardt’s camp near the Gulf of Carpentaria

  The most recent search for the missing adventurer was conducted in September 2000 by his great-great-great niece and nephew: Carrie and Ben Williamson of Kentucky, USA. The brother and sister, travelling in a four-wheel-drive vehicle, scoured 6000 kilometres of barren landscapes crossed by crocodile-infested rivers. Acting on information that their ancestor and his party had been speared to death by Aboriginals at a waterhole near Birdsville, they hoped to find his remains and conclusively confirm his identity with DNA tests.

  But despite their skilled human guides, and hi-tech help from satellite navigation and aerial film, the Williamsons, like hopeful hundreds before them, discovered no more than a dead-end.

  What really happened to Ludwig Leichhardt? Of all the theories put forward, the scenario created by 19th century scholar Ernest Favenc in his History of Australian Exploration ranks among the most powerfully potent:

  Once across the waters that wend their sluggish way into the lake district, Leichhardt and his followers would be in the great region of rivers and creeks pursuing no definite courses – always delusive and disappointing. Here they were left no other chance but to push forward into the unknown.

  Probably it was one of the cycles of rainless years that periodically visit the continent. Led on mile after mile, following the dry bed of a creek to lose it in some barren flat, knowing that to retrace their steps was impossible...making at last for a hazy blue line in the distance that turned out to be spinifex and stunted forest, still struggling forward, weak and disorganised.

  Then would come the beginning of the end. As they pressed on, the forest became scantier and the spinifex higher, spikier and harder to march through. One by one their animals had fallen and died, and the desperate resort of drinking the blood had been tried by some. What little water they had in their canteens was fast evaporating.

  Still some of them would keep heart. The ground was getting stonier...surely they were getting to some higher country. They hoped the ground would break away at their feet in deep gullies and ravines, shading some quiet water hole. How anxiously they looked for any sign of life... but none could be seen. It was useless to stop to rest. The ground was blistering to the touch and there was no shade anywhere.

  Some lost their reason, and all lost hope. Then came the end. They separated and straggled away in ones and twos, and fell and died. Day after day the terrible and pitiless sun looked down at them lying there and watched them dry and shrivel into mummies, and still no rain fell on the earth.

  Years may have passed. Higher and higher grew the spinifex, and its long and resinous needles entangled themselves in each other. No black hunters came there in that season of drought, and the men’s bodies lay, scorched by the seven times heated earth beneath and the glaring sun above. Untouched by the ants, those scavengers of the desert, or the tiny bright-eyed lizards.

  At last, the thunder clouds began to gather afar off, and when they broke, a Jew wandering natives ventured into the woods, living for a day or two on the uncertain rainfall. They retired, leaving perhaps behind them a trail of fire. This fire, fed by the huge banks of powerful spinifex, the growth of many years, spread into a mighty conflagration, the black smoke covering half the heavens.

  The great silence that had reigned for so long was broken by the roar and crash and crackle of a sea of flames; and beneath this fiery blast, every vestige of the lost explorers vanished forever.

  When on the blackened ground fell heavy rain once more, the spinifex sprang up fresh and green. In spots where a human body had fertilised the soil, it was greener than elsewhere.

  ...Or perhaps there was an entirely different explanation.

  Mystery of the German Map

  ALMOST THREE CENTURIES before Ludwig Leichhardt began his doomed journey of discovery, an earlier German scholar drew a map of a landmass he dubbed Australia’.

  The history-challenging chart, published in Frankfurt in 1545, appears in a book bought by Australia’s National Library in 2004.

  The map’s existence suggests that Matthew Flinders might have been copying a Prussian predecessor when he gave Terra Australis its ‘new’ name, Australia, in 1804.

  But some experts doubt that Flinders knew about the long-dead cartographer’s work. Probably, they say, he decided quite independently to name our embryonic nation Australia – the proper noun form of the Latin Australis.

  It just happened that the same thought had occurred to a German geographer 259 years before.

  * * *

  The Arrow ‘Carved from Captain Cook’

  In 1779 Captain James Cook – then thought to be the discoverer of Australia – was beaten to death by angry tribesmen in the Sandwich Islands (today’s Hawaii).

  More than four decades later, the island’s dying king presented a gruesome gift to one of Cook’s relatives, the British surgeon William Adams. It was a war arrow which, the sovereign said, had been carved from Captain Cook’s thigh bone. In 1895 the family presented the macabre weapon to the Australian Museum. Over the ensuing 109 years tens of thousands of visitors stared appalled at the arrow, convinced it had been torn from a great explorer’s body.

  But in 2004, legend collided with fact. Forensic scientists in Australia and New Zealand conducted independent DNA tests on the arrow – and found that it was the stuff, not of a ship’s captain, but of a deer’s antler.

  Although a major misconception about Cook has been corrected, a mystery persists. Official Admiralty records say he was buried at sea – but some historians believe a part of his body was interred in the Hawaiian islands. They hope still to find those long-forgotten remains.

  * * *

  Strange Case of the Shining Crosses

  Extraordinary Phenomena

  It was the most terrifying moment of Fred Whitehead’s life. In February 1988, while he was driving home along a busy Melbourne freeway, a large truck slewed out of control and hit his Holden Commodore, reducing it to a mass of crushed metal. Police – convinced that no one could have survived the accident – were astonished when Fred stumbled shocked but unhurt from the wreckage. And that was only the first in a bizarre chain of events. Two days later, large ornate crosses, shining so brightly they dazzled the eyes, mysteriously appeared in the windowpanes of his bayside villa. Glass experts described the crosses as ‘inexplicable’...

  SAFEWAY STOREMAN FRED WHITEHEAD was the first person in his family to notice the strange light. Still shaken by the crash that had almost killed him two days earlier, he was strolling down a darkened corridor of his redbrick house – when ‘something brilliant’ registered in the corner of his eye. The radiance was coming from the bathroom. He stepped inside and was confronted by a white glowing cross, about two feet in height, shining in the window. [see p
ictures]

  At first I thought it was just a trick of reflection, caused by the moon,’ Fred subsequently told me. ‘But when 1 looked harder it was very clearly a cross of the kind you see in churches, quite detailed and surrounded by a halo.’

  Fred summoned his wife Pat, who was as bewildered as he was. ‘Just like my husband I thought it must be an effect created by the moonlight,’ she said. ‘But then I remembered that our bathroom window had never been replaced in the five years we’d lived in the house. In that time we’d had plenty of bright moonlit nights, but no cross had ever appeared in the glass before.’

  Next morning two new crosses had appeared in windowpanes at the rear of the family’s villa in Frankston, Victoria. The Whiteheads, desperate to make sense of it all, tried initially to convince themselves that warps had somehow appeared in the glass. ‘But we had to abandon that idea,’ said Pat. ‘The three crosses are identical – and it’s impossible to believe the same kind of warp could have distorted three different sheets of glass that had been sitting there for years.’

  This photo, taken in August 1988 in El Monte, Los Angeles, shows that window crosses are an international phenomenon.

  Over the following four months the crosses shone nonstop, day and night. Despite the couple’s attempts to keep the spectacle secret, the story spread – and soon scores of uninvited visitors were knocking at the door. Several of the sightseers tried unsuccessfully to demonstrate that the phenomenon was a hoax, but the general reaction was one of awe.

  I DROVE to the Whiteheads’ house, hoping to find an explanation. Accompanying me in the car was a photographer, Jim McFarlane. Jim predicted en route that the ‘marvel’ would prove to be a furphy. But after spending an hour photographing the panes, he was less sure. ‘Frankly, I haven’t a clue what could be causing this in all three windows,’ he said. ‘But whatever the crosses are, they’re inside the windowpane and are equally as visible and bright from both inside and outside the house.’