BURKE AND WILLS SET OFF
Landells was still to be second-in-command. Burke also took 11 other men, including the three camel handlers, a former sailor, William John Wills, and a young Irish ex-soldier, John King.
Landells dressed up in oriental costume on one of the camels, and, leading the other camels, the three cameleers rode behind him.
They set out from Melbourne on 20 August 1860, with their 20 tons of baggage on the wagons and the camels. They were cheered off by 15 000 people.
It was the biggest, best-equipped expedition in Australian history. (It was also possibly the dumbest.)
Burke got £500 a year; Landells got £600 a year; the other European explorers got £10 a month and the ‘sepoys’—the most expert men in the expedition—only got £3 a month.
They only made it to the outskirts of Melbourne before there was trouble. The horses hated the smell of the camels.
So Burke divided everyone into two lines, with the camels in single file on one side, the horses and wagons on the other, and Burke riding his horse Billy in the middle.
This time they made it to Swan Hill, where Burke decided to dump lots of equipment and some of the men he didn’t get on with.
By then one of the cameleers, Samla, was almost starving. He was a Hindu, and wasn’t allowed to eat beef—and that was what everyone else had been eating. Samla had been surviving on dry bread. He asked permission to leave.
By the time they got to the Darling River, Burke had quarrelled with Landells. Local shearers had stolen some of the camels’ rum. Burke blamed Landells and smashed all the rum. Landells resigned and went back to Melbourne. He said Burke was just plain mad.
Burke promoted William Wills as surveyor and second-in-command. Wills was a quiet, well-educated man.
At Menindee, Dr Beckler resigned. He had been trying to tell Burke that it was crazy to travel into the desert in the hot, dry summer. But Burke wouldn’t listen.
Most of the expedition stayed at Menindee, to make a base camp where there was good food and water. One of the cameleers, Esan Khan, stayed there, too.
The (now much smaller) party reached Cooper’s Creek on 20 November 1860. Burke decided that he, Charles Gray, Wills and King would set off by themselves for the Gulf of Carpentaria. If they didn’t go straightaway they might not be able to go till the end of summer—and someone else might win the race to get across the continent first!
William Brahe was in command of the party that stayed behind at Cooper’s Creek—including the only other camel handler, Dost Mahomet, as well as 14 camels and 10 horses.
Burke, Wills, King and Gray headed north, with six camels and Burke’s horse Billy. None of these men had ever handled camels before. They slogged through sandy deserts, stony deserts and dry scrubland for two months, with just enough waterholes and grass so they and their animals could survive.
The land grew soft and swampy and finally they made it, on 11 February 1861. They were the first Europeans to cross Australia from south to north.
They didn’t even make it to the sea itself; just to a tidal channel and mangrove swamps.
But could they get back again?
Heading back was worse. Storms made it impossible to do more than stagger through the mud. But at least there was good grass for the camels and Billy. Food was getting desperately short when Burke found that Gray had sneaked off to eat a gruel of flour and water behind a tree. Burke lost his temper and beat him up.
Now the storms had stopped, but there was no green grass for the animals. Men and animals were weak from hunger. Burke shot a camel called Boocha. They cut it up and ate as much as they could.
The desert we now know as Sturt’s Stony Desert was still between them and the men and supplies at the camp. Ten days after shooting Boocha, Burke shot his horse Billy and they ate him too.
They started off through the desert, but Gray couldn’t keep up. They tied him to the saddle of his camel and kept on going. But he died on 16 April. The three men remaining spent a day digging a grave.
They had another 43 miles to go.
They staggered on, found another waterhole, drank desperately and ate the last of their dried meat. Late on 21 April, they made it back to the camp.
BRAHE CAN’T STAND IT ANYMORE
It had been hell for Brahe’s party at Cooper’s Creek. They had been joined by the others from Menindee—but the waterholes dried up, the camels strayed and there was almost no feed for the animals.
By June the men were desperate—ill with scurvy and dysentery, starving, thirsty. Burke’s party had been gone for four months—surely they had died!
Brahe led the others back to Menindee, to food and water. One man died on the way. Both cameleers were seriously ill—they had borne the worst of it, constantly seeking lost camels that had broken loose to try to find food.
THE ‘DIG’ TREE
So Burke and his party made it back to Cooper’s Creek—to find that Brahe and his men had left only that morning.
The only sign of them was a carving on a tree:
So they dug and found 50 pounds of flour, 60 pounds of oatmeal, 22 pounds of rice and 15 pounds of dried meat.
What should they do now? Try to catch up to Brahe?
Burke decided instead to follow Cooper’s Creek until they reached a police outpost at Mount Hopeless, 150 miles away. They buried another note under the ‘dig’ tree saying where they were going.
But Cooper’s Creek was dry. One of their camels got bogged in quicksand; the other died of exhaustion. Wills went ahead and reported that there was no more water ahead either. Things looked hopeless.
SAVED!
But then the people who really knew not only how to survive, but live comfortable lives in the heat and desert arrived—some of the Yandruwandha people. They gave the explorers fish, fat rats and a kind of bread made from nardoo seeds. But when the Indigenous people left them, the three men couldn’t collect enough food to survive. Burke decided to make a desperate dash to Mount Hopeless.
They got 40 miles with no water, gave up and went back to their last waterhole.
Meanwhile Brahe had come back to the ‘dig’ tree. He dug up the boxes and saw that Burke and the others had been there—but Burke hadn’t thought to put another blaze on the tree to tell them to dig under the boxes. So Brahe missed Burke’s note saying which way they’d gone.
Brahe left no more messages at the ‘dig’ tree. So when Wills came back to see if anyone had come looking for them, nothing seemed to have changed.
Wills headed back to Burke and King and met the Yandruwandha people, who gave him more food. He found that these people had been looking after Burke and King, but Burke had frightened them off by firing his pistol at a man ‘stealing’ some oilcloth.
The Yandruwandha man wouldn’t have thought it was stealing. He’d have assumed that the explorers would share what they had, just as his people had shared their food with the explorers.
The men tried to survive on nardoo. By 22 June, Wills couldn’t stand and his arms and legs were just skin and bone. Only King had the strength now to gather food—but he couldn’t gather enough nardoo to feed the three of them.
Mobile phones would have made life a lot easier!
In desperation he and Burke left Wills to try to find the Yandruwandha people again.
Wills left a last letter to his father, written just before he died. He said he thought he might live another four or five days. But his spirits were excellent.
They walked back along the dry creek bed. But on the second day Burke collapsed and died the following morning. He left a final note saying that they’d fulfilled their task, but that the depot party had abandoned their post.
King staggered back to Wills, to find that he was dead, too.
Finally King found the Indigenous people again. They looked after him till Alfred Howitt, anthropologist and bushman, led a rescue party that found him on 28 September 1861.
King led the rescue party to Wills’s shal
low grave. Burke’s body had been partly eaten by dingoes or goannas. They wrapped it in the English flag and buried it under a tree.
The Yandruwandha people fled when a rescue party arrived. But King threw up his hands in a gesture of prayer, then collapsed on the ground.
There was another tragedy from the expedition, too—the cameleer Dost Mahomet. An accident with a camel left his arm useless. The Victorian government gave him £200 compensation, but that was all. He was only 23 and unable to work.
He protested to the government, saying that Landells had told him he’d be paid the same as the rest of the expedition, and that he’d also be sent back home when it was over.
But he got nothing. He died soon after, the first Afghan to be buried in Australia.
The four search parties sent out to look for Burke made their own discoveries. William Landsborough and his expedition were put ashore at the Albert River and worked their way south. They found a rich plateau he called the Barkly Tableland.
Frederick Walker’s party started at Rockhampton and went west. John McKinlay and his party started from Gawler and went north. They found Gray’s grave, then made it up to the Gulf, hoping to find the ship sent to find Burke. But it had left. They lived on shark, boiled crow, bullock hide and finally ate their camels. They made a raft to escape from crocodiles on the Burdekin River and finally arrived at Port Denison (Bowen).
STUART DOES IT TOUGH
Now someone else was going to cross Australia—and he would come back alive. John McDouall Stuart (1815–66) arrived in South Australia as a surveyor, when the colony began. He went with Sturt on his expeditions in the 1840s, but was to be far more successful when he was the leader of expeditions in the 1850s to look for gold, grasslands and stock routes.
Stuart had to turn back on his first attempt to cross Australia. His party got scurvy from poor food and ran out of water. Finally an attack by Indigenous people forced him back.
Later descendants of the Indigenous people said that their relatives had tried to tell Stuart there was no water, but the explorer didn’t take any notice. So finally they had to pretend to attack just to stop them heading into country where the party would have died of thirst. By then Stuart’s horse had travelled 112 miles without any water.
Just two months after he got back, Stuart set out again on 30 November 1860, with 12 men and 49 horses, on an expedition paid for by donations from people in Adelaide.
He crossed the salt lakes that had isolated South Australia, and in 1861–62 became the first white man to cross Australia south to north—and come back to talk about it! But for a time, even he became almost blind from scurvy and glare in the desert, and had to be carried on a stretcher slung between two horses.
Stuart’s explorations meant that people now knew how to get into Central Australia—and what is was really like. A road and a telegraph line followed his route, then railway lines.
The government gave Stuart the promised £2000 reward for being the first man to make the crossing. The nine other men in his party got £1500 divided among them.
But Stuart left Australia in 1864, bitter that the South Australian government hadn’t given him a more generous reward for his discoveries.
THE DEVELOPING NORTH
By the mid-1860s the far north was really taking off—even if settlers could only reach it by sea. In 1864 the Northern Territory was proclaimed, under the control of the South Australian government. South Australia’s first Premier, Boyle Travers Finniss, who was also a surveyor, took on the job of establishing a new settlement in the new territory.
The first three settlements in the far north had failed—just too far away, too hot, too many mosquitoes (and mosquito-spread disease)—and not enough food.
Would this settlement be different?
Finniss arrived at Escape Cliffs on Adam Bay in the Hillary Ellis on 30 December 1864, to set up a new settlement that was to be called Palmerston.
But it was still hot, horribly swampy—and once again there were too many mosquitoes and crocodiles. The settlers huddled in tents, while Finniss strode about the camp, giving orders and refusing to admit that he might have chosen a bad spot.
The next ship brought 40 settlers. But they didn’t think much of Palmerston either—and once again tropical diseases attacked the settlement.
By 1865, Finniss had spent £40 000 of the South Australian government’s money, but all he had to show for it were the complaints of his officials and the 80 or so settlers, who claimed he just wouldn’t listen to anyone else’s ideas.
In May, 30 settlers left for Adelaide, and another six set sail for Geraldton. They’d had enough! But their complaints convinced the South Australian government to recall Finniss, and send John McKinlay, one of the explorers who’d looked for Burke and Wills, to see what was happening up there.
McKinlay arrived on 30 November 1865 and decided that the settlers were right. A new site was needed!
But Palmerston ended up being the new territory’s capital, after it had been surveyed by South Australia’s Surveyor-General, George Goyder, in 1869. He decided that a million acres were suitable for growing tropical crops.
The locals called him ‘Little Energy’ because he surveyed so much land so fast.
THE CAMEL CARRYING COMPANIES
By now camels had proved their worth to the explorers. They were going to be even more valuable bringing stores to isolated farms in hot, dry areas that horses couldn’t reach, and bringing back wool, wheat and meat, as well as ore from the mines.
Most Afghans came to Australia on a three-year contract to work for the carrying companies. Many went home again after their three years were up. Others stayed and either signed up with other companies, or started their own.
The first camel carrying company was set up by Thomas Elder and Samuel Stuckey.
Elder and Stuckey were pastoralists, farming sheep in the dry country. Elder had gone with McKinlay’s party to search for Burke and Wills, and he’d met Stuckey on his run. They’d been so impressed by McKinlay’s four camels that they decided to buy lots more in India and hire a ship to bring them out.
But by the time Stuckey had bought the camels in 1862 it was too expensive to lease a ship because of the American Civil War.
So he came back home.
As it turned out, 1862 was a bad drought year in northern South Australia, and it was hard to get any stores up to the dry lands. So they tried again and in 1866 Stuckey came back from Karachi with 124 camels. He also had 31 donkeys, some partridges, two deer, 80 sheep, one cow and two bullocks.
Three camels died on the way out. But the others survived. Thirty-one Afghan camel handlers came out too.
To begin with, the camels carried supplies from Port Augusta to the copper mines at Blinman and Yudnamutana, 140 miles away. The camels then carried the ore back again.
But soon farmers up in the dry north were getting the camel trains to bring up their stores too, and take back their wheat and wool.
At last there was a way of getting goods through the harsh inland! And that meant that a really crazy scheme looked like it might just work.
THE OVERLAND TELEGRAPH LINE
Camels—and the cameleers—made it possible now to think of not just the largest engineering project Australia had ever seen, but one of the engineering wonders of the century anywhere in the world: a telegraph line linking the south and north.
There were already long electric telegraph lines in Australia. The first one had linked Melbourne to Williamstown in 1854. Within two years, a telegraph line was laid between Melbourne and Adelaide. And on 30 October 1858 the vast distances between Sydney, Melbourne and Adelaide were all linked.
Suddenly, the old colonies didn’t seem quite as far away from each other. But most of this proposed new south-to-north line had never been surveyed and the only Europeans who had seen anything of the route were the explorers. And they hadn’t seen it all. What if even the few waterholes they’d seen had dried up?
It was a massive project—poles would have to be put up right across the country, with electric wires strung between, through mostly unknown desert, far from any settlement that could supply food or water or help.
It was insane. Impossible!
Or was it?
In 1870, the South Australian government raised a loan of £120 000 to build the telegraph line from Adelaide to Palmerston’s port of Darwin, right at the northern end of the country.
From Darwin an underwater cable would connect Australia to the British colony at Singapore, and Australia would be connected to the world, or at least to news from what most white Australians thought of as ‘home’—even those who had been born in Australia.
Charles Todd, the South Australian Postmaster General, was given another job now—Superintendent of Telegraphs. He decided that one party would start work in Darwin and another would work their way up from Port Augusta. They’d meet in the middle of Australia on 1 January 1872.
At least, that was the plan.
But where exactly should it go?
Survey teams were set up to check out the country. Scotsman John Ross was in charge of the team from the south.
Elder’s camels and their Afghan cameleers carried most of the equipment as well as the food and water for the builders, though some horses were used too.
One big bull camel even managed to stand up with a ton on its back! (P.S. Do not try this at home! It isn’t fair on the camel.)
It was certainly an amazing project—and one of the great engineering undertakings of the 19th century. The telegraph needed 36 000 wooden poles, 3000 steel posts, 36 000 insulators and pins, and many tons of telegraph wire, insulators, batteries and other equipment brought from England. Two thousand sheep were needed to feed the workers—there were no fridges, so they had to be killed as they were needed. Lime juice had to be brought to stop scurvy—there was no fresh fruit and there were no fresh vegetables. And all the work had to be done in blazing, dry heat, across the red sand dunes and rocky deserts, with little water, but lots of flies.
Gold graves and glory Page 9
