A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P R S T U V W X Z

The History of Australian Exploration from 1788 to 1888

E >> Ernest Favenc >> The History of Australian Exploration from 1788 to 1888





During the time that Oxley, Sturt, and Hume had been tracing out and
painfully discovering the watershed of the Murray, a settlement had been
formed at King George's Sound, in Western Australia, and some slight
attempts at exploration made, but of inconsiderable extent. The
settlement was entrusted to Major Lockyer, who was succeeded by Captain
Barker, destined to meet a violent death at the mouth of the Murray. In
1828, Captain Stirling, in the SUCCESS, visited the coast, and made a
close examination of the Swan River. He was accompanied by Frazer the
botanist, who had now been present at the opening of a great deal of new
country. Stirling's report was a favourable one, and the Home Government
determined to form a free colony there. In 1831, we find a communication
to the Colonial Government, notifying that the ISABELLA be dispatched to
Hobart Town, to bring up a detachment of the 63rd regiment to relieve
those of the 39th, at King George's Sound. Also, directing the withdrawal
from the present settlement of both prisoners and troops.

Stirling was then appointed Lieutenant-Governor, and to induce
immigration and settlement, the colonists were promised land in
proportion to the capital they brought into the country, and for every
labourer they brought out they received two hundred acres of land
additional.

At first, the prospects of this new colony seemed most hopeful,
exploration was pushed out to the eastward for one hundred miles, as far
as Mount Stirling, and northward for some sixty miles or so, and the
country discovered gave every promise of being fitted for both pasture
and agriculture.

Captain Bannister made a trip in 1831 from Perth, the new settlement, to
the old one of King George's Sound; and, although he made no important
discoveries, he passed through fairly available country nearly the whole
of the way.

For some reason or other, however, a period of stagnation set in, and
little more was done in the way of exploring until Lieutenant Grey took
the field in 1837. In this new settlement, so entirely opposed to Port
Jackson in situation, no difficulties of any magnitude were experienced
in passing the coast range, as had been the great obstacle of the early
explorers in New South Wales. Unfortunately, however, the comparatively
lower altitude of the Darling Range led to there being no such flow of
water inland as even those disappointing rivers the Macquarie and Lachlan
had afforded. Consequently, exploration and the ensuing occupation were,
as in the parent colony, strictly confined to the immediate neighbourhood
of the township, to the Swan River, and its tributaries, the Avon and the
Canning.

Lieutenant Roe attempted several journeys to the eastward, and discovered
many salt lakes on the tableland of the interior. Messrs. Bunbury,
Wilson, and Moore made other explorations, more or less succeeding in the
purposes they had in view; but they all embraced so small an area, and so
little details have been preserved, that they cannot take any important
rank in the history of continental explorations.

During the twenties another settlement had been formed on the northern
coast of Australia; but one not destined to drag out a very long
existence.

Captain Gordon Bremer, in the TAMAR, accompanied by two transports,
sailed through Torres Straits and anchored in Port Essington, in 1824.
The port was, however, at that time condemned as a site for a settlement,
the supply of fresh water did not come up to expectations, and the dry
months of the year had set in. Bremer sailed for Melville Island, one of
twin islands lying off the coast. These islands, Melville and Bathurst,
are separated from each other by a narrow strait that Captain King, the
discoverer, mistook for a river. On Melville Island a favourable site
with abundance of fresh water was found, and the usual routine of taking
possession and forming an encampment gone through, and for a time things
seemed to prosper; the soil of the island is good, and tropical fruits
would flourish with little trouble; but hostilities commenced with the
blacks, sickness broke out, and in 1829 it was determined to abandon the
settlement, and since that date no attempt has been made to colonise this
island, although it is now stocked with the increase of the buffaloes
left behind by the TAMAR'S people.

Fort Wellington, in Raffles Bay, founded in 1826, fared no better,
although controlled during its last year by the gifted and unfortunate
Captain Barker. A blight of stagnation seemed in those days to hang over
all attempts at settlement in the tropical regions, and in three years'
time Fort Wellington was abandoned, and with it the northern coast.

Once more we must turn our attention to the southern watershed of the
Darling, and the additional links of discovery in the great network of
its tributaries.

Rumour, always busy with tales of the unknown interior, now spread a
story of a mysterious river called the Kindur, running to the north-west.
A runaway convict named Clarke, alias "the barber," brought the story up
first. He said that he had long heard of the river from the natives, and
at last determined to make his escape and follow it down to see if it
would lead him to any other country. He, therefore, took to the bush, and
started on this adventurous trip. The imaginative and highly-coloured
fabrication that he related on his return, was probably invented in order
to save his back, but at any rate it was plausible enough to induce the
Government to dispatch an expedition to investigate the matter. This was
his story. He started from Liverpool Plains, and followed a river called
by the natives the GNAMOI or NAMMOY, into which he said that Oxley's
river Peel flowed. Crossing this he struck another river, the KINDUR, and
down this stream he travelled no less than four hundred miles before it
was joined by the GNAMOI. Nothing daunted he stuck to the KINDUR, which
was broad and navigable, flowing through level country and spreading into
occasional lakes, until at last he reached the sea, but he acknowledged
that he had lost his reckoning, and whether it was five hundred or five
thousand miles he went he could not truthfully say, but he was as quite
sure upon one point, that he had never travelled south of west.

When at the mouth of the river he ascended a hill and looked out to sea
where he saw an island, inhabited, the natives told him, by
copper-coloured men who came in large canoes to the mainland for scented
wood. In addition he introduced various details of large plains, BALYRAN,
that he had crossed, and a burning mountain named COURADA. As he saw no
prospect of getting away from Australia, Clarke decided on returning.

This wild tale, and the expedition it led to, brings on the scene one of
the most noted figures of the past, Oxley's successor, Surveyor-General
Major Mitchell.

The Acting-Governor, Sir Patrick Lindesay, decided on sending out an
expedition to find out the truth of this story, thinking that, at any
rate, it would lead to the exploration of a great deal of new country.
Accordingly, Major Mitchell received instructions to take charge of the
party, and on the 21St of November, 1831, took his departure from
Liverpool Plains. On the 15th of December, he came to the Peel, and
crossing Oxley's Hardwicke Range, reached the Namoi River on the 16th.
After penetrating some distance into a range, which he called the
Nundawar Range, he made back for the Namoi, and proceeded to set up the
canvas boats he had with him, intending to try to follow the river in
them. His attempt was fruitless, one of the boats was soon snagged, and
it became evident that it would be much easier to follow the Namoi on
horseback. Leaving the river, after passing the range he had vainly tried
to cross, Mitchell, on the 9th of January, 1832, came to the river Gwydir
of Cunningham. Turning to the westward the party followed this river down
for eighty miles, when he again returned to his northern course, and came
to the largest river he had yet found. This was called, by the natives,
the KARAULA, and Mitchell descended it until convinced, by its southern
course and the junction of the Gwydir, that he was on the upper part of
Sturt's Darling.

As the junction of the Namoi could not be far distant, Mitchell had thus
laid down the course and direction of these two large rivers, although he
had as yet seen nothing of the object of his search, the Kindur.

He now prepared to move once more to the north, anxious to find a river
that did not belong to the Darling system. As, however, he was on the
point of starting, he was overtaken by his assistant-surveyor, Finch, who
was bringing on additional supplies, with the disastrous news that the
blacks had attacked his camp during a temporary absence, murdered the two
men, robbed the supplies, and dispersed the cattle. This misfortune put
a stop to the progress of the party. They returned, and having buried
the bodies of the victims, but failed to find the murderers, made their
way back to the settled districts.

This journey of Major Mitchell's helped greatly to work out the courses
of the rivers crossed by Oxley, and more especially those discovered by
Cunningham during his trip to the Darling Downs. Mitchell travelled, as
it were, a more inland but parallel track, crossing the rivers much lower
down. Thus the Field River of Oxley is the NAMOI of Mitchell,
Cunningham's Gwydir is recognised by the Surveyor-General, and is
probably the mythical KINDUR or KEINDER, whilst the last found river,
Mitchell's KARAULA, is formed by the junction of Cunningham's Dumaresque
and Condamine.

When we add to this the discovery of the Drummond Range, Mitchell's first
contribution to Australian geography was sufficiently important.

This year, 1832, was marked by the murder of Captain Barker, already
mentioned as in turn Commandant of Fort Wellington and King George's
Sound. He was returning from the latter place, after handing over charge
to Captain Stirling, and on his way home landed on the eastern shore of
St. Vincent's Gulf, to see if the waters of Lake Alexandrina, the
termination of the Murray, had an outlet in the Gulf. Being unsuccessful
he crossed the range and paid a visit to the lake. Anxious to obtain some
bearings, he swam across the channel connecting the lake with the sea in
order to ascend the sandhills on the opposite side. His companions
watched him take several bearings from the top of the hill, descend out
of view on the other side, and he was never seen again. One of the
sealers from Kangaroo Island interrogated the blacks by means of a native
woman of the island, who could speak broken English, and her account was
that Barker met three natives as he descended the sand dune, who attacked
and speared him, unarmed and naked as he was, and then cast his body in
the breakers. These natives were of the same tribes that showed such
determined hostility to Sturt when he first found the lake.

Although Sturt himself felt confident that the junction of the Murray and
Darling were satisfactorily proved by what he saw on his famous boat
excursion, he had not convinced all of the public. Major Mitchell, for
one, had an entirely different theory on the subject embracing the
existence of a. dividing range between the Macquarie and Lachlan rivers
which would entirely preclude the Darling and Murray from joining.
Time, however, proved that Sturt's instinct had not been at fault when
on reaching the junction of the two rivers in his whale-boat, he felt
convinced that he there saw the outflow of his old friend, the Darling.

It must be remembered that the explorations conducted by Major Mitchell
were also surveys, superintended by him as Surveyor-General, which will
partly explain the presence of the large body of men and equipage which
it was his custom to take with him. The roll call of the members of one
of his expeditions reads like that of an invading army. [See Appendix.]

In order to get some additional information concerning the elevated
country that Oxley had noticed to the westward between the Lachlan and
the Macquarie (on which slight foundation Major Mitchell had built his
theory of the two rivers running through distinctly different basins),
Mr. Dixon was sent out in 1833. This gentleman, however, for some reason
did not adhere to his instructions; he followed down the Macquarie for
some distance and crossed to the Bogan (Sturt's New Year's Creek), then
running strong, and having followed that river for sixty-seven miles,
returned to Bathurst; nothing new nor important came of this expedition.

In March, 1833, the party formed under the superintendence of the
Surveyor-General left Parramatta to travel by easy stages to Buree, where
they were to be overtaken by their leader. The list of the members is a
long one. We who live in the days of well-equipped small parties,
composed of reliable, experienced men only, would feel considerably
handicapped with such a retinue. In addition to Major Mitchell, Richard
Cunningham, botanist (brother to Allan Cunningham), and Mr. Larmer,
assistant surveyor, there were twenty-one men; carpenters, bullock
drivers, blacksmith, shoemaker, &c.

While still on the outskirts of settlement, an unhappy fate overtook
Cunningham, the botanist. Leaving the party, doubtless on some scientific
quest, during the morning of the 17th of April, whilst they were pushing
over a dry stage to the Bogan River, he lost his way, and was never seen
again.

A long and painful search was immediately instituted for the missing man,
but unfortunately, through some accident, his tracks were overlooked on
the third day, and it was not until the 23rd of the month that the
footsteps were found. Mr. Larmer and three men were sent with an ample
supply of provisions to follow the tracks until they found Cunningham,
alive or dead. Three days later they returned, having found the horse he
had ridden, dead, with the saddle and bridle still on. Mitchell returned
to the search once more; the lost man's trail was again picked up, and he
was tracked to the Bogan River. They there met with some blacks who had
seen the white man's track in the bed of the river, and made the
searchers understand that he had gone to the west with the "Myall" [Wild
blacks who had not visited the settlements.] blackfellows.

All hope of finding him alive was now almost abandoned, but the pursuit
was continued until May 5th, when the men brought back tidings that they
had followed his tracks to where it disappeared near some recent fires
where many natives had been encamped. Close to one of these fires they
found a portion of the skirt or selvage of Cunningham's coat, numerous
small fragments of his map of the colony, and, in the hollow of a tree,
some yellow printed paper in which he used to carry the map. His fate was
afterwards ascertained from the blacks. [ See Appendix.]

As is unfortunately so usual in these cases, Cunningham had, by wandering
in eccentric and contradictory courses, accelerated his fate, by
rendering the work of the tracking party so much more tedious and
difficult. Had he, on finding how absolutely he was astray, remained at
the first water he reached, he would have been found.

Having done all that man could do to find his lost friend, and even
jeopardised the final success of his own expedition by the long delay of
fourteen days, Mitchell resumed his journey by easy stages down the
Bogan, and on the 25th of May reached the Darling, which was at once
recognised by all the former members of the party as the "Karaula," from
the peculiar attributes that characterised it. On tasting the water, they
were agreeably surprised to find it fresh and sweet. The state of the
country now was very different from what it was when Sturt was forced to
retreat. With that explorer's graphic account of the barren solitude that
he met with, fresh in the reader's memory, let him contrast it with what
Mitchell writes, remembering that one was encamped beside a salt stream,
and the latter writer beside a fresh water river.


"We were extremely fortunate, however, in the place to which the bounteous
hand of Providence had led us. Abundance of pasture, indeed such
excellent grass as we had not seen in the whole journey, covered the fine
forest ground on the bank of the river. There were four kinds, but the
cattle appeared to relish most a strong species of AUTHISTIRIA, or
kangaroo grass."


Finding the place eligible in every respect for the formation of a depôt,
a stockade of logs was erected and the encampment christened Fort Bourke.

The boats were launched, but the navigation of the river was found to be
impeded by shallow rapids, so the party returned to Fort Bourke, and
Mitchell with four men made an excursion down the river to the point
where Sturt and Hume turned back. D'Urbans group was also 'Visited, and
bearings taken to whatever elevations were in sight. On returning to the
depôt the camp was broken up and the whole party started down the Darling
(the CALLA-WATTA of the natives) on the 8th June. During their progress
they found the tree marked H. H. by Hume, at Sturt's limit, and they now
noticed that in places the river water was salt or brackish. On the 11th
of July, after following the course of the river for three hundred miles,
and ascertaining beyond all doubt that it must be identical with the
junction in the Murray, noticed by Captain Sturt, Mitchell determined to
return; the unvarying sameness of the country they had travelled over
holding forth no hope of any important discovery being made, in the space
intervening between their lowest camp and Sturt's junction. The natives,
too, had been an incessant cause of annoyance to them; robbing the camp
at every opportunity, and keeping the leader in constant anxiety for the
safety of any of the members of his party, whom duty compelled to leave
the main body. On the very day, almost at the very hour, when Mitchell
made up his mind to return, the first hostile collision between the two
races occurred; a collision which had only been hitherto averted by the
admirable patience of the Major and his men. On the 29th June, he
wrote:--


"I never saw such unfavourable specimens of the aborigines as these
children of the smoke, [Referring to their constant habit of burning the
grass.] they were so barbarously and implacably hostile, and shamelessly
dishonest, and so little influenced by reason that the more they saw of
our superior weapons and means of defence, the more they showed their
hatred and tokens of defiance."


On the morning of this day, when he had settled in his own mind the
futility of further progress, two of the men were away at the river, and
five of the the bullock drivers were also at another bend, collecting
their cattle. One of the blacks whom they had nick-named King Peter tried
to snatch the kettle of water from the hand of the man who was carrying
it; and on being resisted he struck him senseless with his nulla-nulla.
The companion of the wounded man shot King Peter in the groin, and his
majesty tumbled into the river and swam across. The tribe now advanced
against them, and two shots were fired in self defence, one of which
accidentally wounded a gin. Three men from the camp hearing the firing came
up, and one more native was shot, who was preparing to spear one of the
men. The natives retreating, the men went in search of the
bullock-drivers, whom they found endeavouring to raise a bogged bullock:
their timely arrival probably saved these men's lives, as they were
unarmed and unprepared.

War being thus declared, a careful watch was kept up, but no attack was
made, and the explorers departed unmolested.

In speaking of this skirmish, Mitchell, seemingly worked up to a
sentimental pitch by hearing some gins crying out across the river in the
night time, says:--


"It was then that I regretted most bitterly the inconsiderate conduct of
some of the men. I was indeed liable to pay dear for geographical
discovery, when my honour and character were delivered over to convicts,
on whom, although I might confide as to courage, I could not always rely
for humanity."


By his own account, as given above, the affray was provoked by the
blacks, who compelled the men to use their weapons to save their own
lives; the reflections then, on their humanity, and the danger in which
his character stood in consequence, are slightly out of place.

The travellers now retraced their steps, and beyond the delays caused by
some of the bullocks knocking up, their return journey to Fort Bourke was
unmarked by anything of interest. From Fort Bourke they returned, partly
along their outward track, to the head of the Bogan, and reached a
newly-formed cattle station belonging to Mr. Lee, of Bathurst, on the 9th
of September.

The great fact added to the geographical knowledge of Australia by the
successful termination of this trip, was the identity of the Darling with
the KARAULA on the north, and with Sturt's Murray junction on the south.
It was now satisfactorily settled that this river was the channel that
received all the tributary streams flowing westward--so far north, at any
rate, as Cunningham's researches had extended, and that therefore their
final outlet was in Lake Alexandrina, and the idea of a river winding
through the interior to the north-west coast had to be finally
relinquished.

This journey of Mitchell's was also instrumental in somewhat palliating
the view held of the uninhabitable nature of the far interior; although
the true character of the country had yet to be learnt and appreciated.
His stay on the banks of the Darling at least lifted from those plains
the stigma of a grassless, naked waste, intersected by a river of brine.

Mitchell, too, was a keen observer of the habits and customs of the
blacks, he was remarkably quick at detecting tribal differences and
distinctions, and his record of his intercourse with them, which occupies
so large a portion of his journals, was interesting then, when so little
had been written on the subject, and is interesting now as the account of
the white man's first incursions into the hunting ground of a fast
vanishing race.

Mitchell's next expedition took place in 1836, in the month of March. As
before, it was to be more of a connecting survey, confirming and
verifying previous discoveries, than a fresh departure into an utterly
new region; but it turned out to be productive of the most important
results.

The Surveyor-General was informed that the survey of the Darling was to
be completed with the least possible delay, that having returned to the
point where his last journey terminated, he was to trace the Darling into
the Murray, and crossing his party over that river by means of his boats,
follow it up, and regain the colony somewhere at Yass Plains. This
programme was, however, departed from in many ways.

The new ground broken by Mitchell would thus be the Murray River above
the junction with the Morumbidgee or Murrumbidgee, as it was now called,
and it was supposed that he would be able to identify it with the Hume
River of the explorer of that name.

A long continued drought was in full force when Mitchell commenced his
preparations; horses and bullocks in good condition were in consequence
hard to obtain; but no expense was spared by the Government in providing
the animals required. On reaching Bathurst, he was informed that even the
Lachlan was dry.

In spite of the state of the weather and country, Major Mitchell departed
in high spirits. He writes:--


"I remembered that exactly that morning, twenty-four years before, I had
marched down the glacis of Elvas to the tune of 'St. Patrick's Day in the
Morning,' as the sun rose over the beleagured towers of Badajoz. Now,
without any of the 'pride, pomp, and circumstances of glorious war,' I
was proceeding on a service not very likely to be peaceful, for the
natives here assured me that the myalls were coming up 'murry coola'
[Very angry.] to meet us."


On March 17th, 1836, this start took place, but it was not until the end
of the month that he reached the limit of the cattle stations, and then
he was at the point where Oxley had left the river and turned south to
avoid the flooded marshes. Oxley wrote of a country that no living thing
would stop in if it could possibly get away; twenty years afterwards,
Mitchell writes of the same place:--


"In no district have I seen cattle so numerous as all along the Lachlan,
and, notwithstanding the very dry season, they are nearly all in good
condition."


As might have been expected, he followed down the Lachlan riding dry-shod
over the swamps and flats that had barred Oxley's progress, and finding
his lakes only green and grassy plains. Such had been the effect of the
exceptional season during which the late Surveyor-General had conducted
his explorations, that the country, save for the few land-marks afforded
by the hills here and there, could scarcely be recognised from his
description. Mitchell seems to have been strongly imbued with two leading
ideas, one being the existence of well-defined mountain chains in the
interior, forming systematic watersheds in a country where we now know
there is no system; the other that former explorers, however reliable
they might have been in their main facts, were quite at sea in any
deductions they had drawn from them, and that his theories would be
confirmed to their discomfiture.

Copyright (c) 2007. famouswriterz.com. All rights reserved.