The new cavern was expected to contribute to the further development of Jenolan for recreational spelunking.
In those days, cave diving was a very new sport, especially in Australia. One of the greatest of the French pioneers of the activity was quoted as saying: ‘Of all the gambles, this is the most perilous and foolhardy, for one’s life hangs upon a thread in these narrow tubes of rocks filled or almost filled with water.’
The Indigenous peoples of the area know the caves as Binomea, or ‘dark places’, while Jenolan means ‘high mountain’. The present name was given to the caves in 1884. Before that they were known as the Fish River caves. Europeans first officially located the underground complex in 1838, although legend has it that the caves were in use by escaped convicts some time before this. Over the years many caverns and cavities have been discovered, explored and opened up to tourism. Today Jenolan Caves is a premier tourism and recreation site. Well over 200,000 people every year make the journey into the mountains to take in the magnificent natural display.
MANHUNT
Just why police tracker Billy Benn pumped fourteen bullets into Harry Neale on 5 August 1967 has never been clear. Most say it was related to the misappropriation of sacred Aboriginal stones, often known as tjuringa. Neale died before a full account of the incident could be taken from him but he lasted long enough to identify his killer.
Two constables from the Northern Territory police pursued Billy but the wily tracker ambushed them in a gully, wounding both badly. Fortunately they survived, but the hunt was redoubled, for an armed and very dangerous man who knew his way through the Outback better than any white man. The police understood this and formed a pursuit party that included a number of Aboriginal trackers, including a young man known as Teddy Egan.
The police in this hastily assembled group were poorly equipped and mostly without a lot of bush experience. They had no compass or maps. One of the officers recalled that the only way they were likely to find Billy was when he shot at them.
As they struggled through the rough country, seeking signs of Billy’s passing or that of his relatives who had followed him out into the bush, and waiting to be shot, the journey became a contest of mind and skill between Billy and Teddy Egan. The Aboriginal outlaws wrapped their feet in strips of blanket to hide their tracks and kept just ahead of their pursuers. But Teddy soon realised they had a dog and tracked the animal’s prints instead.
As the days wore on, the police and their trackers were plagued by mishaps and accidents. One horse broke a leg and had to be destroyed. They were short of food and clothing in the cold conditions. A police aircraft flew over them from time to time but was of little help in locating the fugitives.
Water was a problem for both the hunters and the hunted. The police found Billy’s old campfires with the remains of paddy-melons around them, indicating he and his family had cooked them for the water they contained. The fugitives were continually digging for water in the arid land.
It was six days of rough riding before they caught up with Billy and his mob. That evening the pursuit party camped in a deep gorge. Teddy was restive, saying Billy was nearby. Just as it was getting dark, the police tracker heard a noise and went out to investigate. What happened next differs in the telling. In Constable Terry O’Brien’s account, recalled many years later, they lost sight of Teddy behind a large rock, then a rifle shot echoed around the range. The police feared the outlaw had shot Teddy. Luckily not. Teddy had bravely walked straight up to one of Billy’s mob, who was carrying a rifle, and ripped it away from him, then fired a shot into the air to signal all-clear.
The police were relieved. Fearing for their lives but also for a race-relations disaster if the situation got further out of hand, the officers gladly took custody of the fugitives. Billy and his people were also pretty relieved, worn out from lack of food and water. ‘They were poor as crows,’ Constable Laurie Kennedy remembered.
They camped overnight, with Billy held in custody, and next morning the group set out for Harts Range, a day’s ride away. Billy led the way, guiding them to the waterholes for the horses. The police party appreciated how lucky they had been. As Laurie Kennedy said, ‘If it wasn’t for the trackers, I believe we could have still been out there.’
Billy was flown to Alice Springs and eventually stood trial for murder. He was acquitted on grounds of insanity but served fifteen years in gaol followed by two years in an Adelaide mental institution. Teddy’s bravery and skill were largely forgotten as the years went by, although at least one policeman did not forget Teddy’s courage: former Alice Springs station chief Graham MacMahon campaigned tirelessly for proper acknowledgment. Six Northern Territory police commissioners came and went. Each was petitioned. All refused to recognise Teddy’s service.
Through those same years Billy Benn served his time. While inside he took up painting as a form of therapy and a way of reconnecting with his faraway country. His landscapes eventually made him a successful and well known central Australian artist. When he died in 2012 he had even been the subject of a book on his life and art.
In 2015, a new Northern Territory Police Commissioner finally agreed that the heroic tracker Teddy Egan deserved an award. He was given the Northern Territory Police Valour Medal in October 2015, at the remote Yuendemu community. But the award was given to his family: Teddy Egan had died in 2011. It had taken nearly half a century for the potentially deadly journey that he and Billy Benn had taken together to deliver rightful recognition for one and redemption for the other.
4
MYSTERIOUS JOURNEYS
The Court cannot say what particular form was taken by the catastrophe.
Board of Trade Inquiry into the loss of the SS Waratah, 1909
LEICHHARDT’S RIFLE
The German-born explorer Ludwig Leichhardt was perhaps the greatest and most single-minded inland explorer of Australia. His last expedition produced one of our most persistent colonial mysteries.
Leichhardt landed at Sydney in 1842, following years of scientific and medical study in his native Germany (then Prussia) and in England. He wished to explore the inland, and in 1844 led a privately funded expedition overland from Sydney to Port Essington on the Cobourg Peninsula in the Northern Territory. The successful journey, of almost 5000 kilometres, made Leichhardt a hero. He was feted in his homeland, in Britain and in Australia and showered with geographical and scientific awards.
After a partially successful attempt to cross the country from east to west in 1846–47, he assembled another expedition with the same aim in 1848. With six others, including two Aboriginal men, he left the Darling Downs in April with the intention of travelling far enough north to skirt the central desert, hoping to find a river that would then take his party to the west coast. Going across the Top End would also provide a reasonably reliable water supply for the large herd of livestock that was an essential element of the expedition.
On April 4 he wrote from Mount Abundance, describing his progress and the country he had crossed. All had gone well. The weather had been kind, the ground mostly good and there had been no accidents. The leader also expressed himself pleased with his party: ‘I cannot speak in too high terms of my present party, who seem to me well qualified for the long and tedious journey which is before us.’
No more was ever heard from Leichhardt or his companions. We have been looking for him ever since and, like the journey of Burke and Wills, Leichhardt’s story has moved from history into myth.
The explorers expected to be away for two or three years so initially there was little concern for their fate. The first person to express concern seems to have been another German scientist and explorer, Ferdinand (later Sir) Von Mueller. As early as 1849, he was writing to officials suggesting it was time to look for Leichhardt. But search parties did not head out until 1852, then again in 1858 and 1865–66. Explorers pursuing other conquests were also tasked to look for Leichhardt. These investigations found an old campsite and a few trees marked with a
n L. But that was about all until more than fifty years after Leichhardt set out on his last expedition.
Some time around 1900 an Aboriginal man known only as Jackie came across a firearm in the branches of a boab tree marked with an L on the border of Western Australian and the Northern Territory, near Sturt Creek. The firearm was burned but there was a brass plate mounted on the stock or butt of the weapon. Engraved on the plate were the words LUDWIG LEICHHARDT 1848. Jackie gave the find to his employer, Charles Harding, who threw away the wooden remains but kept the plate. He apparently treasured it and would often show the artefact to the curious. He later gifted the plate to a friend. It was loaned to various institutions and individuals but in 2006 came to rest in the National Museum of Australia, where it remains today.
The plate’s authenticity has been confirmed but it is almost the only hard evidence of Leichhardt’s fate. The exact location of the original find has always been murky and often contested, leading to many theories about the total disappearance of the party. As well as speculation that they died of thirst, hunger or both, it has been suggested they drowned in a flash flood or were murdered by Aborigines, among other wilder thoughts. Did they abandon their plan of sticking to the relatively well-watered north and make a fatal trek into the desert? What about the many trees that have been found over the years all bearing marks that might—or might not—have been made by Leichhardt or his men? In the absence of almost any other verifiable evidence other than the enigmatic brass plate from Leichhardt’s own gun, myth takes over.
Almost as soon as Leichhardt’s disappearance became an acknowledged fact there were stories about a white man living with the Aborigines somewhere in the centre of what is now the Northern Territory. In 1889, a stockman reported that an aged European man with yellow hair was living with Aborigines at the head of the Macarthur River. He spoke in what the stockman thought was German but he appeared very weak and the people in whose care he was seen were unwilling to allow him to leave. About twenty years earlier, a ‘wild white man’ was reported seen with a group of Aborigines along the Roper River. It was speculated that this might have been a member of Leichhardt’s party, a German named Classen.
Another claim was made by a man named Hume: he maintained that he met Classen about 1870 in similar circumstances and even obtained his and Leichhardt’s journals. Hume said Classen told him the expedition had mutinied at the head of the Victoria River. Leichhardt died and the rest of the party were murdered at Eyre Creek on their way home. Classen survived but as a prisoner of the Aborigines. Unfortunately, Hume was unable to produce the documents and his criminal past meant that many were not inclined to accept his account. There was also a story that an Aboriginal named Jimmie, known to have been part of Leichhardt’s expedition, had also survived.
It is said there is an iron or steel chest from the expedition in the possession of Aborigines living far to the north of the Warburton Ranges or along the Plenty River. Skeletons and gold coins have been found with alleged links to the lost expedition. A lively oral tradition continues among bush people about Leichhardt’s fate, and there’s a mini history industry dedicated to feeding the ongoing speculation about how seven men, 70-odd cattle and horses, wagons, and masses of equipment could disappear with almost no trace. Patrick White’s famous novel Voss plumbed the psychological and cultural enigma that Leichhardt and his men had become.
There is even an odd link between the Leichhardt myth and that other great legend of the Outback, that of Lasseter’s reef. In the story of Lasseter’s original discovery of his fabulous lode, told in this chapter, the perishing young prospector was saved by an Afghan cameleer and a surveyor named Harding. Lasetter and Harding together returned to the find a few years later but a poorly set watch rendered their recorded bearings wildly inaccurate. The reef was ‘lost’ again. It seems that the Harding who rescued Lasseter was the slightly shady Joe Harding, brother to Charles Harding, who was so proud of the brass plate from Leichhardt’s gun in his possession. Coincidence, of course, but one that, along with the many other imponderables of Leichhardt’s fate, only serves to intensify its enduring mystery.
NAMING THE DESERT
This is the story of a journey within a journey; an epic trek that left one man dead and the other barely living.
Earnest Giles is one of many relatively unsung explorers of the inland. Born in 1835 in Bristol, England, he came to Australia in 1850 and gathered what was then called ‘colonial experience’ on goldfields, in the public service and with some exploring expeditions. He later led expeditions across South Australia and the Northern Territory, seeking a route to the coast of Western Australia. He left a precise but compelling account of his travels in Australia Twice Traversed: The romance of exploration. On one of these journeys he was accompanied by an enthusiastic but inexperienced young man named Alfred Gibson. When Gibson asked to ‘go out’ with him, Giles replied:
I said, ‘Well, can you shoe? Can you ride? Can you starve? Can you go without water? And how would you like to be speared by the blacks outside?’ He said he could do everything I had mentioned, and he wasn’t afraid of the blacks. He was not a man I would have picked out of a mob, but men were scarce, and as he seemed so anxious to come, and as I wanted somebody, I agreed to take him.
This man would be remembered as the namesake of one of Australia’s harshest environments, and in the account Giles gave of their harrowing journey.
With Gibson, William Tietkens and guide Jimmy Andrews, Giles set out for the west coast in August 1873. They struggled through mountain ranges, discovered Mount Olga (now Kata Tjute), and passed through the Tomkinson Range to Lake Amadeus. From their camp at Fort Mueller they explored the surrounding country. But after nine months they were still nowhere near the west coast. Giles decided on a last desperate reconnaissance, travelling light.
On 20 April 1874, Giles and Gibson loaded up a couple of packhorses with water and a week’s supply of smoked horse meat. Mounted on a cob and a bay, they rode west from their camp at the distinctive rock formation east of Lake Christopher that Giles called The Circus (also Circus Water), leaving the other two men, with the rest of the supplies, to await their hopefully triumphal return. Giles and Gibson chatted as they rode:
I remarked to Gibson that the day was the anniversary of Burke and Wills’s return to their depot at Cooper’s Creek, and then recited to him, as he did not appear to know anything whatever about it, the hardships they endured, their desperate struggles for existence, and death there . . . He seemed in a very jocular vein this morning, which was not often the case, for he was usually rather sulky, sometimes for days together, and he said, ‘How is it, that in all these exploring expeditions a lot of people go and die?’
I said, ‘I don’t know, Gibson, how it is, but there are many dangers in exploring, besides accidents and attacks from the natives, that may at any time cause the death of some of the people engaged in it; but I believe want of judgment, or knowledge, or courage in individuals, often brought about their deaths. Death, however, is a thing that must occur to every one sooner or later.’
To this he replied, ‘Well, I shouldn’t like to die in this part of the country, anyhow.’ In this sentiment I quite agreed with him, and the subject dropped.
Giles later discovered that Gibson had not packed enough smoked horse meat and there was hardly enough to last one man for a week, let alone two. Despite this they made reasonably good time through the landscape of casuarinas and bloodwood trees. Ants troubled Giles at night though Gibson seemed immune to their attentions.
But soon their mounts were ailing in the ‘heated breeze’ and the packhorses were turned loose to trek back to the last water, if they could. Giles and Gibson pressed on through what looked like ‘fine, open, dry, grassy downs’ with the odd patch of mulga or mallee scrub.
Around 160 kilometres from their starting point, Gibson and his mount could go no further. Giles was bitterly disappointed:
The hills to the west were twenty-five
to thirty miles away, and it was with extreme regret I was compelled to relinquish a farther attempt to reach them. Oh, how ardently I longed for a camel! How ardently I gazed upon this scene! At this moment I would even my jewel eternal, have sold for power to span the gulf that lay between!
A few kilometres along the return route, Gibson’s horse died. They kept going, Gibson riding Giles’s horse and the leader on foot. They drank the last of their water.
It was time to make some hard choices. Giles sent Gibson on with the horse and his treasured compass, even though he knew the young man was unable to operate it: ‘I sent one final shout after him to stick to the tracks, to which he replied, “All right,” and the mare carried him out of sight almost immediately.’
Giles struggled after them on foot, hoping to reach the next water hole. He made it and found that Gibson had been there and left him water in a keg. He drank it and then ate two dirty sticks of the smoked horseflesh also left for him. The only receptacle that would hold liquid was the keg Gibson had left behind, filled with water. His revolver, blanket and knife, together with his fourteen remaining matches, weighed around 22 kilograms.
Loaded like a packhorse, the explorer staggered on through the scrub, mostly by moonlight and often in a daze. He lost track of time as he tried to resist drinking his precious ‘elixir of death’ as long as possible. Frequently losing consciousness, Giles managed about five miles a day. Eventually he stumbled across Gibson’s tracks again. The man had followed the trail of the two packhorses but they were going in the wrong direction. Giles tottered after them for a mile or so but, finding no signs, turned back to what he knew was the correct course.
Great Australian Journeys Page 9
