Great Australian Stories

by Graham Seal

  Whipstick, near Bendigo in Victoria, is an area of mallee scrub first encountered by gold diggers. As some locals told folklorist Peter Ellis, the scrub was almost impenetrable, twisted about with creepers that whipped back into men’s faces as they struggled through it or tried to cut it down. Other people claimed that Whipstick was named after the whip handles made from the scrub by bullock drivers.

  Another story from the goldfields explained how Dunolly got its name. A couple were driving their horse-drawn cart along a track. The woman, whose name was Olive, asked her husband to stop and went to squat behind a bush. After a while, her husband became impatient and called out, ‘Are you done, Ollie?’

  Leatherass Gully is another goldfields name that cries out for a foundation legend. In this case, it’s based on an old fossicker who had a leather patch on the seat of his worn-out trousers. The original spelling was Leatherarse, but that was deemed vulgar, so it was replaced by Leatherass.

  Walkaway, near Geraldton, Western Australia, was established in the 1850s and now has a population of 612. Some say its name is derived from waggawah, an Aboriginal word meaning either camping place, a break in the hills, or the hill of the dogs. One tradition has it that some of the earliest settlers in the district left when their wheat crop failed. When the Aborigines were asked what happened to them, they replied: ‘Him walk away.’ Another version that alludes to these early farmers’ struggles is heartbreakingly succinct: ‘If you saw the place, you’d walk away too!’ Yet another version involves the railway line that for a time terminated near Walkaway: passengers who wanted to go further north were told they would have to walk a way.

  The dramatic legend of Govetts Leap, in the Blue Mountains of New South Wales, tells of an escaped convict turned bushranger named Govett who, pursued by troopers, found himself trapped on the edge of a 300-metre cliff. Preferring death to capture, he wheeled his horse around and rode it over the edge. In fact, the place was named after a colonial assistant surveyor, William Govett, who discovered the site in 1831. It is possible that the more romantic version originated from the observations of the English novelist Anthony Trollope, who travelled through Australia during the early 1870s. In his sometimes abrasive account of that trip, Australia and New Zealand, Trollope wrote:

  . . . there is a ravine called Govett’s Leap. Mr. Govett was, I believe, simply a government surveyor, who never made a leap into the place at all. Had he done so, it would certainly have been effectual for putting an end to his earthly sorrows. I had hoped, when I heard the name, to find that some interesting but murderous bushranger had on that spot baffled his pursuers and braved eternity—but I was informed that a government surveyor had visited the spot, had named it, and had gone home again. No one seeing it could fail to expect better things from such a spot and such a name.

  The Lone Pine seedlings

  The heroism and slaughter of the Gallipoli campaign in World War I gave rise to one of Australia’s most enduring national stories: the legend of Anzac. Closely bound up with it are tales related to Lone Pine. This was, on the day of the landings at Gallipoli, part of a ridge officially named 400 Plateau. Australian troops called it Lonesome (later Lone) Pine for a single, stunted tree that rose above the scrub. In August 1915, Lone Pine was seared into Australian memory when a terrible battle took place there. More than 2000 Australians were killed or wounded, and seven won the Victoria Cross. Each Anzac Day, Lone Pine cemetery is the site of the official Australian memorial service at Gallipoli.

  Today, Australia is dotted with trees said to be descended from the original lone pine. There are various stories about the origins of these symbolic trees. According to one of these, a Lance Corporal Benjamin Smith witnessed the death of his brother at Lone Pine and later pocketed a cone from the by-then felled pine tree that the Turks had used to cover their trenches. He sent it home to his mother who kept the cone for some years, eventually growing two seedlings from it. One of these was sent to Inverell, New South Wales, the place where her dead son had enlisted. Here it was planted and grew until it had to be cut down in 2007. In 1929, Smith’s mother sent another seedling to Canberra, where it was planted in the Yarralumla nursery. In 1934, the visiting Duke of Gloucester planted this tree in the grounds of the Australian War Memorial.

  Although the War Memorial’s Lone Pine is not often featured in official ceremonies, its existence is well known in the Australian community. When the tree was damaged by a storm in December 2008, the incident received nationwide media coverage. Memorial staff also report that ‘small wreaths, home-made posies and the occasional red poppy are sometimes seen resting at its base’.

  Another story has it that a Sergeant Keith McDowell of the 24th Battalion also souvenired a Lone Pine cone and kept it with him until the war’s end when he returned safely to Victoria, giving the cone to his aunt, Mrs Emma Gray, who lived near Warrnambool. Mrs Gray kept the cone for a decade or so until she too propagated four seedlings. These were planted variously throughout Victoria from 1933, in Wattle Park and the Shrine of Rememberance in Melbourne, and the Soldiers Memorial Hall, The Sisters, and at Warrnambool Botanic Gardens. However, researchers say they have found no such digger as Sergeant Keith McDowell and the battalion to which he supposedly belonged did not reach Gallipoli until a month after Lone Pine. Nor, it seems, were any Smiths involved in the Lone Pine battle. Nonetheless, the legend of the Lone Pine seedlings is now deeply rooted, and the trees so widely distributed (two seedlings were planted at Gallipoli for the 75th anniversary of the battle) that no amount of historical fact will weaken it.

  Like most such legends, the Lone Pine story arises from a powerful national desire for tangible connections to long-ago tragedies. If the connections are incomplete, explanatory tales are spun to bridge the gaps. While the Lone Pines are an unusually stark example of the process, similar needs underlie many national traditions, including the Anzac dawn service.

  The first dawn service

  Australia’s single most important national ritual is Anzac Day. Before sunrise each 25 April, people gather at memorials all over the country to begin the day with prayers for the fallen of all wars. This dawn service varies in form from place to place and has evolved over time to suit a variety of local needs and traditions. Its basic meaning, however, remains the same. In the years immediately after World War I, the services were relatively simple, spontaneous ceremonies. Over time they have become more elaborate as Anzac Day has developed into what is arguably a more consensual expression of national identity than Australia Day, the anniversary of the first settlement. Given its significance and its emotional resonance, it is not surprising that there are a number of different versions of the dawn service’s origins.

  The military version is that the ceremony is derived from the ‘stand-to’, in which soldiers were put on full alert to guard against a pre-dawn (or post-sunset) attack. Great War veterans are said to have remembered stand-to as a peaceful moment of the day in which the bonds of comradeship were keenly felt. Some began to hold informal stand-to ceremonies on Anzac Day, their significance increased by the dawn timing of the first Gallipoli landings. The order to stand-to would be given. Then there would be two minutes’ silence, after which a lone bugler would play the Last Post call and finally the Reveille. It is unlikely that these events were referred to as services, as there were no clergy present and no sermons or speeches. These elements of formality crept in from 1927, when the first official dawn service was held at the Cenotaph in central Sydney.

  This event has its own foundation legend. According to the story, five members of the Australian Legion of Ex-Service Clubs were on their unsteady way home in the early hours of Anzac Day after a celebratory evening. As they rolled past the Cenotaph they saw an elderly woman laying a wreath in memory of a lost soldier. The roisterers were so shamed and sobered by this dignified act of commemoration that they joined the woman in silent tribute and prayer. Inspired by this experience, t
he men decided to conduct a wreath-laying ceremony at the Cenotaph at dawn the following year, 1927. More and more people began to join them, including government dignitaries and representatives of the clergy and the military.

  In Albany, Western Australia, the first dawn service took a different form. At 4 a.m. on the day the first Anzac convoy left the town, the Anglican reverend Arthur Ernest White conducted a service for members of the 44th Battalion, AIF. After serving in the war, White returned to Albany. There, at dawn on 25 April 1923, he led a small group of parishioners up nearby Mount Clarence. As they watched the sun rise over King George Sound, a man in a boat threw a wreath onto the water. White recited the lines: ‘As the sun rises and goeth down, we will remember them’—a fusion of a Biblical verse and poet Laurence Binyon’s ‘At the going down of the sun and in the morning/We will remember them.’ News of this simple but moving observance—again with no strong religious overtones, despite a clergyman’s presence—is said to have spread rapidly, and the ritual was adapted and adopted in many other communities.

  Though well attested, this version does have a rival in Queensland. There, it is said that the first dawn service took place at 4 a.m. on Anzac Day, 1919. A small party led by a Captain Harrington placed flowers on the graves and memorials of World War I soldiers in Toowoomba, then drank to the memory of their fallen comrades. The observance was repeated, the Last Post and Reveille bugle calls were added, and other communities followed suit.

  These different accounts of the origins of the dawn service have many features in common, but each is adapted to its own locality. Like the dawn service itself, they have become part of the edifice of legend that has formed around the Anzac tradition.

  Lasseter’s Reef

  Many of Australia’s wilder places have a tale of lost treasure. It may be in a reef, a cave, a river or under the ground; sometimes it involves secret maps, indigenous custodians or even pirates. Despite varying details, these legends are suspiciously similar—suggesting that they are more likely to be rooted in folklore than fact. The best known of all is the legend of the ill-fated Lasseter.

  In Billy Marshall-Stoneking’s book Lasseter: the making of a legend, he quotes the observation of a Papunya man named Shorty Lungkarta that Australians’ obsession with Lasseter’s ‘lost’ gold reef is just ‘a whitefella dreaming’. It’s a perceptive judgement. Marshall-Stoneking said he was inspired to investigate Lasseter’s story by memories of the 1956 movie Green Fire—about a ‘lost’ South American emerald mine—in which Stewart Granger’s character mentions ‘Lasseter’s Reef’. Green Fire is only one of innumerable films and novels that deal with the El Dorado get-rich-quick theme of the quest for a fabulous treasure.

  The ‘mystery’, the history and the folklore of Lasseter’s Reef have been kicking around Australia for over a century. They—and the numerous books, articles and fruitless expeditions the legend has spawned—are a revealing insight into human acquisitiveness.

  In 1929 a man named Lewis Harold Bell Lasseter claimed that, years before, he had become lost in central Australia. During his wanderings, he said, he had discovered a reef of gold with nuggests ‘as thick as plums in a pudding’, but had been unable to mark or otherwise document its location. He said he had been saved from certain death by an Afghan cameleer. He claimed that three years later, in partnership with another man, he had managed to locate the reef. Because their watches were slow, however, the bearings they took were wrong and the reef was lost again.

  In 1930, with backing from a trade union leader and other investors, Lasseter formed the Central Australian Gold Company, which mounted a large expedition. It was plagued with mishaps almost from the first. Eventually, after considerable strife and bickering, the party split up. Lasseter was stranded in the desert, and died in the Petermann Ranges, southwest of Alice Springs, probably in January 1931. The famous bushman Bob Buck was commissioned by the company to find Lasseter. After considerable hardship and danger, he found and, allegedly, buried Lasseter’s remains, and retrieved the dead prospector’s diary and some letters.

  These papers, which included a map of the supposed location of the reef, triggered a futher series of expeditions. The fact that these ended in failure did nothing to quash the legend. At least eight books have been written about Lasseter and his treasure, the best known of which is Ion Idriess’s semi-fictional and often-reprinted Lasseter’s Last Ride (1931).

  In 1957, the American explorer Lowell Thomas made a television documentary on the story that included interviews with the ageing Bob Buck and the opening of Lasseter’s grave. This was intended to settle speculation that the remains Buck buried were not those of Lasseter and that the prospector had made his way to safety, only to disappear into either an obscure but wealthy life or anonymous shame. Whatever the truth, a number of people claimed to have seen or met Lasseter in Australia or overseas after the date of his death.

  And there is a curse. One of the expedition members took a churinga, a sacred Aboriginal artefact, back to England. Almost immediately, he was plagued by misfortune; there were deaths in the family and he fell into a depression. Finally, he destroyed the precious but cursed object.

  In some ways a uniquely Australian legend, the story of Lasseter’s Reef neatly fits the template common to ‘lost treasure’ folklore around the world: an intrepid male explorer stumbles on a fabulous trove but loses its location in his struggle to return to civilisation alive. Perhaps he has a sample of the find. Invariably he has a map or a diary, or some other clue, either too cryptic to be useful or itself mislaid. These scant signs and indications entice others to embark on vain—even fatal—searches. Disturbing the treasure or coming too close to it may arouse its native guardians or trigger some dreadful curse. The treasure remains lost.

  Yet the story lives on. We don’t want to let go of Lasseter and his reef. The story is a variant on El Dorado, a universal beacon for the greedy. But it also stirs specifically Australian feelings: the awe and fear that, even in the jet age, the ‘dead heart’ still provokes.

  The carpet of silver

  On 5 July 1834, the Perth Gazette carried an intriguing report of a shipwreck.

  Astrange report has just reached us, communicated to Parker, of Guildford, by some natives, that a vessel had been seen wrecked on the beach, a considerable distance to the northward. The story has been handed from tribe to tribe until it has reached our natives and runs as follows. We give it of course without implicitly relying on its accuracy, but the account is sufficiently authenticated to excite well-founded suspicions that some accident has happened. It appears the wreck has been lying on shore for 6 moons, or months, and the distance from this is said to be 30 day’s journey, or about 400 miles. When the water is low, the natives are said to go on board, and bring from the wreck ‘white money’; on money being shown to the native who brought the report, he picked out a dollar, as a similar piece to the money he had seen. Some steps should be immediately taken to establish or refute this statement: the native can soon be found. He is said to be importunate that soldier man, and white man, with horse, should go to the wreck, volunteering to escort them. We shall look with anxiety for further information upon this point.

  This news was met with some scepticism, but the following Saturday the paper published a fresh version of the story. In this rendition, the wreck, or ‘broke boat’, as the Aborigines called it, also had survivors.

  The report we gave publicity to last week respecting the supposed wreck of a vessel to the northward, has met with some farther confirmation, and has attracted the attention of the local Government. A Council was held on Wednesday last (we believe) expressly for the purpose of taking this subject into consideration, and, after a diligent inquiry, it was thought expedient to make arrangements for despatching an expedition to the northward, which will be immediately carried into effect. This, the winter season, rendering a land expedition both dangerous, and, in every probability, fu
tile, it has been determined to charter the Monkey (a small vessel, now lying in our harbour) to proceed immediately to Shark’s Bay, somewhere about the distance described at which the wreck may be expected to be fallen in with, where Mr. H. M. Ommanney, of the Survey Department, and a party under his directions, will be landed to traverse the coast north and south, the Monkey remaining as a depot from whence they will draw their supplies, to enable them to extend their search in either direction . . .

  . . . The following we believe to be the substance of the information conveyed to the Government: about a week or ten days since, Tonguin and Weenat came to Parker’s and gave him and his sons to understand, that they (Tonguin and Weenat) had recently learned from some of the northern tribes (who appear to be indiscriminately referred to under the name of Waylo men, or Weelmen) that a ship was wrecked (‘boat broke’) on the coast to the northward, about 30 (native) days walk from the Swan—that there was white money plenty lying on the beach for several yards, as thick as seed vessels under a red gum tree. On some article of brass being shewn, they said that was not like the colour of the money; but on a dollar being shewn, they recognized it immediately as the kind of money they meant: but laid the dollar on the ground and drawing a somewhat larger circle round it with the finger, said ‘the money was like that’. They represented that the wreck had been seen six moons ago, and that all the white men were dead: none, as it is supposed, having been then seen by their informants, the Weelmen. They added that, at low water, the natives could reach the wreck, which had blankets (sails) flying about it: from which it is presumed that the supposed vessel may not have entirely lost her masts on first striking, and they stuck up three sticks in a manner which led Parker’s sons to understand that the wreck they were attempting to describe had three masts, but Parker himself did not infer the same meaning.