The Explorers (3 page)

There is no clearer illustration of this than the experiences of Charles Sturt on his exploration of the Murray in 1830. The exploring expedition had been passed from group to group by Aboriginal emissaries who smoothed the way for them, but at one point Sturt's boat moved faster than the emissaries could make their way along the banks. Arriving unannounced, they were on the point of being massacred until, at the very last possible second, their belated emissary arrived.

Of course, the European forays across the frontier into Aboriginal lands are only half of the story, for Aborigines were constantly crossing the frontier in the opposite direction. The greatest of all eighteenth-century Aboriginal expeditions were Bennelong's visit to Norfolk Island and his journey with Yemmerrawanie to England. Yemmerrawanie was to die during his peregrinations in the English wilderness, and was buried near Eltham in Kent. Bennelong, however, survived two years in England, and returned to his native home.

Almost nothing is known of his visit, except that he met King George III at St James, and that he was ill and was nursed by a Mrs Phillips, Lord Sydney's steward, who resided at Frognal near Eltham.

One slender thread of first-hand evidence of Bennelong's travels survives. It is a letter headed ‘Sidney Cove, N.S. Wales, Aug'st 29, 1796'. Bennelong doubtless used an amanuensis. Apparently directed to Mr Phillips the letter reads in part:

Sir,

I am very well. I hope you are very well. I live at the governor's. I have every day dinner there. I have not my wife; another black man took her away. We have had murry doings; he speared me in the back, but I better now; his name is Carroway.† All my friends alive and well. Not me go to England no more. I am at home now.

I hope Mrs Phillips is very well. You nurse me madam when I sick. You very good madam; thank you madam, and hope you remember me madam, not forget. I know you very well madam. Madam I want stockings, thank you madam. Sir, you give my duty to Ld Sydney. Thank you very good my Lord; hope you well all family very well. Sir. Bannelong.

If only we could include here some of Bennelong's tales about England, told round a campfire on Sydney Cove to entranced listeners. Alas, none survive.

Other unexpected explorers have emerged during the compilation of this anthology. One recounted that for him and his companion ‘life was so uncomfortable, that they wished to die'. No, this is not a quote from a dying Burke or a lost Leichhardt, but the words of quite another kind of explorer who was quietly doing a perish in the vicinity of George Street, Sydney, in 1805. Paloo Mata Moigna and his wife Fatafehi had left the comfort of a royal existence in Tonga, and had set off to explore the new society which they heard had been established on the shores of Port Jackson. They were possibly Australia's first royal visitors, but barriers of language and prejudice meant that they were accepted by Governor King only as lowly black freeloaders. Starving, exhausted and disoriented in an apparently barren and hostile land, their wanderings round Circular Quay in 1805–6 almost cost them their lives. But unlike Burke and Wills, who actually did perish amidst plenty, the Tongans adapted, and lived to return home and tell their tale to King Finau.

I make no apology for including Paloo's rather unconventional tale of exploration in this anthology, for in its own way it is a story as noble, courageous, even heroic, as those of Mitchell or Sturt. But the story of the Tongans is important for another reason. It makes plain that explorers cannot exist without a frontier, and the frontier of Australian exploration has almost always been between two cultures. True it is that Australian exploration in the Antarctic, or even on Lord Howe Island, has involved the penetration of a truly virgin, uninhabited land, and that the exploration of Kangaroo, Flinders, and a few other Australian islands has involved the investigation of a place which has lain uninhabited for a few thousand years. But pure geographic exploration in this sense is a relative rarity in Australasia.

Behind the European-Aboriginal-Pacific frontier developed a series of other, lesser frontiers; for throughout the nineteenth century Australia was developing its own distinctive culture. For this reason, I consider the visit of François Péron to Sydney in 1802 as a form of exploration. Exploration, indeed, continues even today, but now it is largely the natural frontier—between humanity and nature—which provides the challenge. The principal frontier—between Aboriginal and European Australia—closed in 1977 when William Peasley went in search of the last of the nomads, removing them from their desert home and bringing them to Wiluna. His account is the last entry in this anthology.

Earlier generations of Australians viewed the continent's exploration very differently. They knew what an explorer was—and he certainly wasn't an Aborigine or a Tongan. To them, the famous figures of the classic phase of exploration—from about 1817 to 1874, that is from Oxley to Giles—were celebrated as the makers of modern Australia. They were seen as being in the very vanguard of the inexorable European advance and, by traversing the land, they were transferring tenure to the Europeans.

Even these classic explorers, however, tend to fall in and out of fashion. Sir Thomas Mitchell seems to be the latest to suffer a fall from grace. During my primary school days, he was held up as a paragon, an explorer of the first water. Yet in the last few years he has been severely criticised. Some suggest that his meticulous measuring of distances and directions indicate that he did not instinctively ‘know' where he was, and he has been castigated as a Luddite for travelling with bullock drays rather than horses. Most recently he has been pilloried as a monster for shooting at an Aboriginal war party. So what was this man—a fool, a savage?

Mitchell was, like many explorers, a complex personality. He was surveyor-general of New South Wales, fluent in Portuguese, a lover of poetry and inventor of curious devices. He was also virtually alone in his time in recognising and wishing to perpetuate a sense of prior Aboriginal ownership of Australia. It was he, after all, who admonished his survey staff that they should be ‘particular in noting the native names of as many places as you can in your map…The natives can furnish you with names for every flat and almost every hill…the names of new parishes will also be taken in most cases from the local names of the natives'. Mitchell was a key player in retaining Aboriginal names for 70 per cent of Australia's four million place names. Were it not for his efforts, unfashionable at the time, our cultural geography would be much the poorer.

If in Mitchell, and before him Banks and Tench, we meet men of the enlightenment, by the middle of the nineteenth century we are encountering men of the frontier. All too often they were rough men, ill-educated and prejudiced. Some were bragging, self-confessed murderers. Abominations, such as the Jardine brothers' account of the ‘Battle of the Mitchell' form some of the blackest pages in our history, but they must be included here. The goldfields of north Queensland seem to be a particularly rich ground for such dismal pickings, while David Carnegie's habit of capturing Aborigines (even aged women) and depriving them of water until they led the party to a soak, passed, with variations, as normal practice for many Western Australian explorers.

The third of November, 1874, arguably marks the apogee of this classic phase of exploration. Beginning about midday, a remarkable parade made its way through the streets of Adelaide. The good citizens of the city had decked the route with flags, flowers and streamers to honour the arrival of John Forrest's expedition. The four Europeans and two Aborigines had left the Murchison district of Western Australia eight months earlier, and had pushed west towards the Adelaide-Darwin telegraph line, in the process traversing some of the most inhospitable country on the face of the earth. They were accompanied at the head of the procession by the glitterati of the town, while behind came a remarkable miscellany of exploration participants. Members of Stuart's exploring expeditions bore standards marked with the dates January 1862 and 25 July 1862. Next rode R. E. Warburton (the son of the famous colonel who was absent overseas) and Charley, the Aborigine who performed such remarkable service on Peter Warburton's expedition. Next came William Gosse, European discoverer and namer of Ayers Rock, and the irascible yet poetic Ernest Giles. Even the equine explorers were well represented, for Mr Waterhouse rode astride the horse which had carried ‘poor Burke on his ill-fated expedition', and Mr Thring on ‘a horse which had crossed the continent with Stuart'.

When the Hon. Arthur Blyth rose to speak at the celebratory dinner that night, he compared the occasion to an ‘old Roman Triumph…how the conquerors, when they went forth, and were successful, were granted a triumph, and in this triumph were accompanied by the most beautiful of their captives'. It seems that explorers like John Forrest were Australia's conquistadors. Most often they returned without riches, but they brought a sense of real ownership of the entire continent to those Europeans that clustered around the edge, and for that they were feted.

Whatever the intent of the explorers of the classic period, the consequences of their work were clear. They were the vanguard of an army of invaders who, with disease, the rifle and poisoned flour, would utterly sweep away the unique world of which the explorers give us the briefest glimpse. We can see in their writing how little of this complex world the explorers knew, and how few were their opportunities to learn about it before the full-scale European invasion began.

It is one of the great ironies of the classic age of exploration that, by its end, the sum of human knowledge about Australia had been diminished. In 1817 it was still possible to find somebody, somewhere, who could tell you in detail about their society, the animals, plants and history of their particular part of Australia. The driest desert was as comprehensible to its inhabitants as your street is to you. Then, almost all of the country was lived in and used. But by 1874 vast new wildernesses had been created: areas which had become depopulated, or where people only very occasionally ventured. Moreover, these new ‘nomadic', mostly European inhabitants knew little about the land they occasionally crossed. Today, there is no-one who can interpret that land for us. It's true that what knowledge has survived, in writings such as those presented here, is more widely known; but that is the advantage which every literate society has over pre-literate ones.

As you peruse these accounts, I hope that you discover or rediscover something of Australia yourself. Its history is varied beyond belief. Eora warriors, Polish patriots, French aristocrats, currency lads and lasses, fools and wise men, black and white, have all played their part in shaping what the dying William Wills called ‘this extraordinary continent'. It's a continent we are just beginning to explore.

Although the explorers often refer to Aborigines in terms which today we find unacceptable—‘gins', ‘blacks', ‘savages', ‘niggers', not to mention the strange but surprisingly popular ‘children of nature'—the use of such expressions is not always intended to diminish. I have left the judgment of these instances to the reader. Where necessary, I have modernised punctuation and spelling, silently corrected a handful of obvious errors, inserted the occasional explanatory date, and sometimes added a word or two of clarification in a footnote, marked by a dagger (†). The explorers' own footnotes are indicted by an asterisk (*). Otherwise, their writings are presented as they were first printed, with any omissions of text indicated by an ellipsis (…).

W
ILLEM
J
ANSZ

Uncultivated, Savage, Cruel, 1606

Sometime during the first half of 1606, the Dutch ship
Duyffken
, under the command of Willem Jansz, made landfall on the western side of Cape York, then known as Nova Guinea. Jansz had entered a great and hitherto unknown gulf—the Gulf of Carpentaria. No eyewitness account of the voyage survives, which is a great pity, for Jansz seems to have been an interesting man. Born a foundling, he became an admiral who, from a pecularity of his speech, was known to his friends as ‘I say, I say'.

This, the first authenticated visit to Australia by a European, foreshadowed later visits in being marred by bloodshed. The brief account given here is drawn from expedition instructions given to Abel Tasman by the Dutch East India Company in January 1644.

Both by word of mouth and through the perusal of journals, charts and other writings, it is in the main well known to you how the successive governors of India…have, in order to the aggrandisement, enlargement and improvement of the Dutch East India Company's standing and trade in the east, divers times diligently endeavoured to make timely discovery of the vast country of Nova Guinea and of other unknown eastern and southern regions; to wit, that four several voyages have up to now with scant success been made for this desired discovery…