The Explorers (12 page)

Soon after they bade us adieu, in unabated friendship and good humour. Colbee and Boladeree parted from them with a slight nod of the head, the usual salutation of the country; and we shook them by the hand, which they returned lustily.

J
OHN
P
RICE

Whom-Batts and Cullawines, 1798

From the very beginning, the Irish convicts were the most troublesome, for many were freedom fighters who considered themselves political prisoners. They had no idea how Port Jackson stood in relation to the world, so constantly broke out, hoping to walk to China or to find some fanciful European settlement which was rumoured to exist in Australia.

Governor Hunter suffered constant thefts and irritation from such breakouts. In an effort to stem them and, as he said, ‘save worthless lives', Hunter sent a few of the more persistent questers on an expedition to illustrate the nature of the country beyond the bounds of settlement. They were led by John Wilson, known as the wild white man by the colonists, and called Bunboe by his Aboriginal friends. Wilson was a convict who, after serving his time, left European society and joined the Aborigines.

Records of the travels were kept by John Price, Hunter's servant. They are important because they contain the first recorded account of the lyre bird (shot on what was to become Australia Day), and mention of a mysterious animal, the cullawine, later identified as the koala. Here we join the party on its way to the Wollondilly River.

January 24th, 1798—Course,
SSW.
Left Mount Hunter for about twelve miles, till we fell in with the Nepean River, where the rocks run so steep it was with great difficulty we crossed them; the rest of the ground run very scrubby. We saw nothing strange except a few rock kangaroos with long black brush tails, and two pheasants which we could not get a shot at. Distance, eighteen miles.

January 25th—Course,
SSW.
The country runs very open; good black soil. We saw a great many kangaroos and emus, and we fell in with a party of natives which gave a very good account of the place we were in search of, that there was a great deal of corn and potatoes and that the people were very friendly.

We hearkened to their advice; we altered our course according to their directions. One of them promised that he would take us to a party of natives which had been there; but he not coming according to his promise, we proceeded on our journey as he had directed us. In the course of this day we found a great deal of salt. Distance, six miles.

January 26th—Course,
WSW.
The ground run very rocky and brushy, so that we could scarce pass. We crossed one small river, the banks of which were so rocky and steep that we could scarce pass it. We saw no signs of any natives about it, but we saw several sorts of dung of different animals, one of which Wilson called a whom-batt, which is an animal about twenty inches high, with short legs and a thick body forwards, with a large head, round ears and very small eyes; is very fat, and has much the appearance of a badger.

There is another animal which the natives call a cullawine, which much resembles the stoths in America. Here I shot a bird about the size of a pheasant, but the tail of it very much resembles a peacock, with two large long feathers, which are white, orange, and lead colour, and black at the ends; its body betwixt a brown and green; brown under his neck and black upon his head; black legs and very long claws. Distance, sixteen miles…

January 28th—Course,
WSW.
The land runs much the same, the timber thin, with a good many stringybark trees; and a little further we saw a number of meadows and 100 acres of land without a tree upon it. Here we saw a party of natives. Wilson run and caught one of them, a girl, thinking to learn something from them, but her language was so different from that one which we had with us that we could not understand her. We kept her all night, but she cried and fretted so much that the next morning we gave her a tomahawk and sent her to the rest of the natives, which were covered with large skins which reached down to their heels…

January 29th—Course,
WSW.
We steered our course for about four miles, but the country did not turn out to our expectation…We altered our course to the north for about twelve miles…We here saw in the creeks many pheasants and rock kangaroos, likewise dung of animals as large as horse-dung, but could not see any of them. We had nothing to eat for two days but one rat about the size of a small kitten. I myself was very sick, and wished myself at home again; the other man was sick like me, for he had hurt his leg and was not able to walk. Wilson was well and hearty. Distance, twenty-four miles.

January 30th—Course,
WSW.
The country still rocky and scrubby. We fell in with the head of a river very near as large as the Hawkesbury River, which seemed to run from
NW
to
SE.
The banks were so steep we could not get down them. The other side seemed open, but the banks very steep. Wilson proposed making a canoe; but the other man and myself were so faint and tired, having nothing to eat but two small birds each, we were afraid to venture on the other side of the river for fear we should not be able to procure anything to subsist on; likewise our shoes was gone and our feet were very much bruised with the rocks, so that we asked Wilson to return. Distance, sixteen miles…

February 2nd—Course,
ENE
…In the latter part of the day, after we had got over the first ridge of mountains, we fell in with a vast number of kangaroos. Here we were fortunate again, for Wilson killed one of them, which was a great refreshment to us.

The next morning, about sunrise, I myself heard two guns fire, which sounded to the
SE.
I was not certain that it was a gun until Wilson said, ‘Do you hear that gun fire?' I said I did. I then took up my gun and fired again, but we could get no answer, although we fired five different times.

We here come to a resolution of returning, for Wilson here came to a part of the country which he knew, and a very barren one, for we could not get anything to eat but a few roots and grubs, and they very scarce. Indeed I thought that we must all have perished with hunger, which certainly would have been the case had it not been for the indefatigable zeal of Wilson to supply us with as much as would support life; for we travelled six days successively over hills and valleys full of rocks, and no appearance of any animals or birds of any size, so that we had no hopes of ever reaching back again, being so weak that Roe and myself were scarce able to travel; but on the sixth day we got through the rocks, and made the forest land about ten miles from Prospect, which very much enlivened our spirits, for we were all but starved, and were obliged to cut up all our clothing to cover our feet, which was cut with the rocks.

Enlivened as were at getting good ground to travel on, and being cheered up by Wilson who said we should soon make Prospect, we then proceeded on our journey with all the spirit and strength we were master of, and to our great joy we reached the desired place a little before sundown. Distance, sixteen miles.

M
ATTHEW
F
LINDERS

The Great Circumnavigator, 1802-3

Few explorers were as admirable, and as ill-starred, as Matthew Flinders. A man of immense humanity and literary ability, he sailed to Westernport Bay with George Bass in 1797-98; the pair then circumnavigated Tasmania in 1798-99, proving the existence of Bass Strait. Between 1801 and 1803 he completed the first circumnavigation of Australia, making many discoveries, and beating the Frenchman Nicolas Baudin to mapping much of the coast. On his way back to England his leaking vessel was forced to sail to Mauritius for repairs. There Flinders was incarcerated by the French for six years, during which time the Baudin expedition results were published, falsely claiming for France many discoveries actually made by Flinders.

Physically broken by the hardships of his exploration and captivity, Flinders returned to England and his beloved wife in 1810, after an absence of thirteen years. He began preparing the book from which these passages are taken, and on 18 July 1814 the first copy was rushed to his tiny house in London. But it was too late. The volume was placed in the hands of the already unconscious explorer, who died the next day.

We join Flinders at the discovery of Kangaroo Island, a place which remained uninhabited after the Aborigines who once lived on the island died out 3,500 years ago. As Flinders observes, the kangaroos there are enormous, the largest recorded anywhere. We rejoin the expedition nearly a year later, in February 1803, off the north-eastern tip of Arnhem Land, where Flinders encounters explorers of a different ilk; the Macassans, who had come from distant Sulawesi. A week later Flinders describes how Bungaree, an Eora man and the first Aborigine to circumnavigate Australia, procured fish for the starving expeditioners.

21 March 1802—Neither smokes nor other marks of inhabitants had as yet been perceived upon the southern land, although we had passed along seventy miles of its coast. It was too late to go on shore this evening; but every glass in the ship was pointed there to see what could be discovered. Several black lumps, like rocks, were pretended to have been seen in motion by some of the young gentlemen, which caused the force of their imaginations to be much admired.

Next morning, however, on going toward the shore, a number of dark-brown kangaroos were seen feeding upon a grass plat by the side of the wood; and our landing gave them no disturbance. I had with me a double-barrelled gun, fitted with a bayonet, and the gentlemen my companions had muskets. It would be difficult to guess how many kangaroos were seen; but I killed ten, and the rest of the party made up the number to thirty-one taken on board in the course of the day; the least of them weighing sixty-nine, and the largest 125 pounds. These kangaroos had much resemblance to the large species found in the forest lands of New South Wales, except that their colour was darker, and they were not wholly destitute of fat.

After this butchery, for the poor animals suffered themselves to be shot in the eyes with small shot, and in some cases to be knocked on the head with sticks, I scrambled with difficulty through the brush wood and over fallen trees to reach the higher land with the surveying instruments; but the thickness and height of the wood prevented anything else from being distinguished. There was little doubt, however, that this extensive piece of land was separated from the continent; for the extraordinary tameness of the kangaroos and the presence of seals upon the shore concurred with the absence of all traces of men to show that it was not inhabited.

The whole ship's company was employed this afternoon in skinning and cleaning the kangaroos; and a delightful regale they afforded after four months privation from almost any fresh provisions. Half a hundredweight of heads, forequarters and tails were stewed down into soup for dinner on this and the succeeding days; and as much steaks given, moreover, to both officers and men as they could consume by day and by night. In gratitude for so seasonable a supply, I named this southern land Kangaroo Island…

17 February 1803—After clearing the narrow passage between Cape Wilberforce and Bromby's Isles, we followed the main coast to the
SW
; having on the starboard hand some high and large islands, which closed in towards the coast ahead so as to make it doubtful whether there were any passage between them. Under the nearest island was perceived a canoe full of men; and in a sort of roadstead, at the south end of the same island, there were six vessels covered over like hulks, as if laid up for the bad season.

Our conjectures were various as to who those people could be, and what their business here; but we had little doubt of their being the same whose traces had been found so abundantly in the Gulf. I had inclined to the opinion that these traces had been left by Chinese, and the report of the natives in Caledon Bay that they had firearms strengthened the supposition; and combining this with the appearance of the vessels I set them down for piratical ladrones who secreted themselves here from pursuit, and issued out as the season permitted, or prey invited them.
^†