The Explorers (49 page)

My brother and Windich being away we were short-handed. The natives seem determined to take our lives, and therefore I shall not hesitate to fire on them should they attack us again. I thus decide and write in all humility, considering it a necessity, as the only way of saving our lives. I write this at 4 p.m., just after the occurrence, so that, should anything happen to us, my brother will know how and when it occurred.

5 p.m. The natives appear to have made off. We intend sleeping in the thicket close to camp, and keeping a strict watch, so as to be ready for them should they return to the attack this evening. At 7.30 my brother and Windich returned, and were surprised to hear of our adventure. They had been over fifty miles from camp
ESE
, and had passed over some good feeding country, but had not found a drop of water. They and their horses had been over thirty hours without water.

14th (Sunday)—The natives did not return to the attack last night. In looking round camp we found the traces of blood where one of the natives had been lying down. This must have been the foremost man, who was in the act of throwing his spear, and who urged the others on. Two therefore, at least, are wounded, and will have cause to remember the time they made their murderous attack upon us.

We worked all day putting up a stone hut, ten by nine feet, and seven feet high, thatched with boughs. We finished it; it will make us safe at night. Being a very fair hut, it will be a great source of defence. Barometer 28.09; thermometer 68° at 5 p.m. Hope to have rain, as without it we cannot proceed.

† Sir Frederick Weld was governor of Western Australia between 1869 and 1875.

R
OBERT
L
OGAN
J
ACK

Each Caught Hold of Her Breasts, 1879

Robert Jack was one of Australia's most prolific field geologists. In 1879–80 he undertook geological exploration for the Queensland government in Cape York. On several occasions he encountered Aborigines who were unaccustomed to Europeans, and I'm afraid he showed them scant respect. One meeting was so remarkable, however, that I still puzzle over its significance. Aborigines showered many explorers with the milk of human kindness. Here Jack certainly gets the milk, but I don't know about the kindness.

August 26—The horses had gone back a good way in the night, owing to the poorness of the grass, and it was about nine o'clock before we made a start. In ten miles (
W
6°
N
) through desert country exactly like that of the previous day…We found some grass and water in a marshy bottom and camped for the night. There was a thunderstorm with heavy rain during the night.

August 27—Having dried our tents, we continued on the same course. In eight miles we came on two gins carrying a baby—mother, daughter and grandchild probably—the first natives we had seen near enough to speak to. The elder woman was hideous by nature and was rendered still more so by having her cheeks daubed with clay. The best that could be said of the younger was that she was less repulsive. She wore a fringe about four inches square, but her mother had no covering but mud. They were very much scared at first, but soon became very loquacious. Neither of our black boys understood a word of their language. We made known by signs our anxiety to find water, and the gins pointed to the west.

As the gins had more luggage than two could carry, they probably had companions who may have seen us and hidden themselves. We had the curiosity to overhaul their swags, but I was careful that the boys should take nothing. They had a well-made fishing net and line, about a score of long, thin bamboos for making fish-spears, and a net full of miscellanies, including two old jam-tins, some seashells (for drinking cups) and part of an old tent or fly. The European articles were probably spoils from the deserted Coen diggings. I was interested in seeing that the gins had distinctly the instinct of sexual modesty, as they kept getting behind trees and hiding behind one another during their parley with us. When we turned to leave, they followed us till we warned them that we did not desire their company. They seemed pleased at getting permission to retire, and I fancy they had in some way got it into their heads that they were bound to follow us as prisoners of war.

A low, table-topped hill of sandstone now appeared about a mile ahead of us, to
W
26°
N
, and I made for it in order to have a look out for landmarks. We had scarcely started when Macdonald informed me that two of the horses were getting weak, while a third had fallen a long way behind, and was in a lather of perspiration and could hardly be pulled and pushed along by Grainer and Willie on foot. They had taken off his very light pack and put it on another horse. I was under the impression that the horses must have eaten some poisonous grass or herb. The superiority of such of the horses as have youth and breeding on their side comes out conspicuously in such a strait as we were now in. Not much could be expected from the best of them, however.

The country we had travelled over for three days was nothing but a wooded Sahara. The blacks had just burned what grass it usually bears. Once in ten miles or so we crossed a wet bottom with a little grass which had escaped the fire. But for these grassy patches the horses must have died of starvation.

It will be readily understood that I gazed from the hill with feelings of considerable anxiety for some change in the nature of the country. Westward (our proposed course) as far as the eye could reach, nothing but low, flat land was to be seen, and there was nothing to indicate an improvement in the character of the vegetation. With a heavy heart I admitted that to carry out my programme had become impossible, and made up my mind that the first thing to be done was to find water and camp, to save the failing horses; and the second, to strike the Normanby River or the Coen track and go back to the nearest point of the Palmer Road, spell the horses, and perhaps buy a few more to replace those that were unfit to travel.

Turning to the south-west (magnetic), in which direction I hoped to find the Normanby at its nearest point, we came in one mile to a waterhole in a sandy gully, with a little green picking for the horses.

August 28—…Half a mile above our camp there had been a native fishing station last wet season. The mouth of a gully (still retaining a few waterholes) had been stopped by a fence of stakes and twisted branches. The blacks must have got a good many large barramundi, judging from the heaps of large scales lying about. Six dome-shaped gunyahs, four feet high and six in diameter, were still standing. They were strongly built of flakes of tea-tree bark, secured with vines and tea-tree bark ropes to a framework of boughs. Every cranny was carefully stopped up with straw. The access was by a door fourteen inches square, stopped up with a wisp of straw. A heap of ashes lay inside each gunyah, opposite the door. I thought the buildings were designed for smoking fish, but the boys assured me that they were only for protection in the season when ‘bigfellow rain come up'. It is an undeniable fact that Queensland natives can live where white men would be suffocated.

The next day (August 29), Brusher and Willie having been sent out with a shotgun and rifle to get game and report if they saw the Coen track, were attacked by natives while eating their lunch, about five miles down the river. One spear (barbed with kangaroo bone) lighted at Willie's feet, and a fishing-spear (a bamboo lance with four bloodwood prongs) broke in a tree above his head. The boys saw five natives in all, two of whom they shot dead—one of them while in the act of aiming a spear. The rest fled. Such, at least, was the boys' story, and I failed to shake it in any essential point by a long cross-examination. They brought home two spears in support of the story. I regret the circumstance, as I hoped to accomplish my peaceful mission without bloodshed; but I could not blame the boys for doing what I should have done myself had I been attacked.

In view of possible retaliation we kept a watch all night. It was clear moonlight, and it would have been easy for the natives to track the boys to the camp and treat us to a
camisade
. I did not doubt our joint ability to defend ourselves, but what was to prevent the natives wreaking their revenge (as is their custom) on the horses feeding out of our sight? Brusher insisted that the blacks would not start in pursuit till they had eaten the last of their two friends. We were not disturbed, which gives a colour to this theory; but my mind was not so easy as Brusher's. The boys, who do not usually watch with a good grace, were on the alert all night, even when ‘their watch was below'—a circumstance which, I think, corroborates their story to some extent…

September 1—…In two miles
NNW
, we passed a large lagoon on the left. Five gins were surprised here engaged in digging lily-roots on the edge of the lagoon. They ran away at first, one gin leaving her child behind, but they shortly approached and jabbered volubly. The women had straight hair. One of them had a child about three days old, and it was interesting to note that it was marked with the boiled-lobster tint common among white children of the same age. The women stood in line and pointed with their left hands along the track, reminding me of the witches in
Macbeth
. They were understood by the boys to mean that their men were in that direction, and that we should go another way to avoid a collision.

One gesture of the ‘weird sisters' surprised and puzzled us all. All at once each caught hold of her breasts and squirted milk towards us in copious streams. Perhaps they meant that they were entitled to our consideration as women and mothers. The party we met before had distinctly a sense of modesty, but this party had absolutely none.

E
MILY
C
AROLINE
C
REAGHE

The Little Explorer's Diary, 1883

‘E. Carrie Creaghe. The Little Explorer's Diary'. Thus did Emily Caroline Creaghe sign the title page of her extraordinary, unpublished diary of frontier adventure. Accompanying her husband Harry, Creaghe was the only female member of Ernest Favenc's exploring expedition, which pushed deep into the Gulf country in 1882–83. Her account is of especial interest because of her perspective on Australia's barbarous northern frontier—well illustrated when she enters a settler's hut to see forty pairs of Aboriginal ears nailed to the walls. We drop in on her just as an expedition member dies of sunstroke, and later at first contact with some Aborigines.

18 January 1883—Found today that Mrs Favenc is not strong enough to go out to the exploring expedition so, much to our disgust, we have to give up all idea of going. She is going back to Sydney with Mr Favenc and I am going to Mr Shadforth's station 220 miles inland with Harry. When Mr Favenc returns in March the two will go out with one man and get the work done in three months instead of four and a half as they would have done if we had gone…

20 January—Left Normanton at half past three p.m. for ‘Magowrah', Mr Trimble's station, a distance of sixteen miles. Arrived there at seven, about a dozen men camped all night and eight of us belonging to the party going inland. Mr Shadforth, Mr Murray, McNaught, Power, two men and ourselves. Being the only female except one in the kitchen I felt decidedly queer amongst such a number of men.

21 January—Left Magowrah, at nine a.m. passed the Bynoe River, Flinders River and had dinner at Armstrong Creek. The men left almost immediately after dinner for L Creek, a distance of thirty-two miles, called after Leichhardt the explorer whose initials are on a tree on the bank of the creek. I felt nearly done up when we got to Armstrong Creek, having come sixteen miles (and not yet being accustomed to long riding and poor food). Managed to get to the end of the second stage but was nearly knocked up. Got into camp at half past seven p.m. Rather hot, scarcely anything but bare plains all the way.

22 January—Made a start at half past six a.m. Arrived at camp a mile and a half this side of M Lagoon, twenty-two miles from L Creek, called after Morrel—Leichhardt's companion—at about noon. We, Harry and I, did intend remaining in camp at L Creek all today as I am nearly ‘finished' but there is every appearance of rain, so we must push on to cross the River Leichhardt before it is flooded. The hottest weather I have ever felt today; the flies are something dreadful. Mr McNaught and his man left the camp in the afternoon. Still the country is level and bare.