Cooper's Creek Read online

  This new man was a materialist, a speculator, a mocker of authority and very often a sentimentalist. He had a certain volonté, an instinct to ‘give it a go’, to take a risk, but despite—or perhaps because of—his professed contempt for tradition he was deeply conscious of being a provincial, and he tried to conceal this inner feeling of cultural inferiority by an outward show of aggression. The harshness of existence in a new country, with its sudden drastic setbacks and failures, convinced him that life was an implacable struggle: he felt himself very much in competition both with the land and with his contemporaries. It was every man for himself. Consequently, when he did find a mate, ‘a cobber’, a man he could trust, he romanticized the attachment and trusted him absolutely. Victoria had never been a penal colony like New South Wales and Tasmania; nevertheless, some of these attitudes may have been a survival from the convict days when the prisoner, the under-dog, the outcast, naturally sought allies from among the other outcasts in his war against the warders and against the society that had shut him in. One of the fascinating things about Australia is this sense of claustrophobia in the midst of such an infinity of space.

  There was, too, the question of what this new man was doing to the country he had seized and adopted. For the blacks he had a mixture of fear and contempt. He was not interested in their way of life or their tribal customs, he did not particularly care what became of them, he did not grant them any rights in their own country, he treated them almost as animals. By 1860 the blacks had all but been driven away from the vicinity of Melbourne and the larger towns, and not more than a few thousand of them were left in the whole state. They had little resistance against smallpox and other imported diseases.

  In the same way Australian wild life was being banished and exterminated. Already in a day’s outing from Melbourne it was becoming a rare thing to see a kangaroo, and of the many thousands of koala bears living along the banks of the Murray River soon not a single specimen would be left alive. Charles Darwin, returning home from the voyage of the Beagle, wrote of Australia: ‘A few years since this country abounded in wild animals; now the Emu is banished to a long distance and the Kangaroo is become scarce; to both the English Greyhound is utterly destructive; it may be long before these animals are altogether exterminated, but their doom is fixed.’

  In short, the land was wanted for agriculture and that ominous inflationary thing, development; this was the era of sheep, the imported rabbit and the mason and the miner. After countless millions of years of utter isolation the sudden fate of Australia and its aborigines was now to be used, to be exploited, to be forced to conform to an alien civilization.

  There was nothing particularly new in all this: it had already happened or was about to happen in America, in Africa and in every other primitive country into which white men were penetrating all over the globe. But what was new in Australia in 1860 was that the settlers had as yet failed to take possession of or even explore the land they were so confidently governing. They perched on the extreme southern and eastern edge of it. The settlements of Sydney, Melbourne, Adelaide and Brisbane with their satellite townships were no more than tiny specks on a continent the size of the United States, two-thirds the size of Europe. For all the broughams bowling down Collins Street, the ladies in crinolines and the champagne being drunk at the balls in the Exhibition Hall, they were living in a little capsule, encompassed by a huge unknown wilderness, they were suspended, as it were, in space. If they stepped outside the capsule they were lost.

  The coastline of the continent had been charted from the sea, but as yet very few adventurers had penetrated far into the interior. All that was known was that the further one advanced into that vast empty space the hotter and drier it became, and it was perhaps because of this aridity that the colonists dreamed that one day they would discover an inland sea, a ‘new Mediterranean’ in the centre of the continent. It was like the legendary Atlantis or the land of Prester John; the more serious geographers scouted the idea, yet it had the persistence of a mystery. After all, no one had actually been in the centre, no one could say with finality exactly what there was to be found there, and the fact that half a dozen expeditions had already set out to resolve the matter and had returned defeated seemed, irrationally, to suggest that some great prize was awaiting the first explorer who succeeded in breaking through.

  There is a good deal about these early journeys that reminds one of the re-discovery of the Sahara in the nineteenth century. Here in Australia, as in Africa, the travellers speak of the dry antiseptic air, the cold nights, the incredibly high temperatures by day, the dreadful thirst, the mirages, the impression of empty land stretching away silently into infinity. Human beings are reduced to tiny atoms in these desolate wastes, cyclonic thunderstorms burst upon them out of a clear sky, and there is no shade or shelter anywhere.

  And yet the explorers profess to love the desert, they find a kind of exhilaration there, a sense of freedom, of physical cleanliness, perhaps even a spiritual regeneration, and no matter how they are reduced by their hardships they return again and again. Every traveller likes to relate his misfortunes, but these men elevate their trials almost into a mystique, a cult of barrenness and asceticism. Warburton, the Australian explorer who penetrated into the flat depression around Lake Eyre to the north of Adelaide, might easily have been describing the Sahara when he wrote:

  Lake Eyre was dry—terrible in its death-like stillness and sterility. The weary wanderer who, when in want of water, should unexpectedly reach its shores, might turn away with a shudder from the scene which shut out all hope —he could hide his head in the sandhills, and meet his fate with calmness and resignation, but to set his foot on Lake Eyre would be like cutting himself off from the common lot of human beings. I had a cheerful companion, a good horse, and some tea and damper;1 but I felt a dismal satisfaction in looking on this lake, hardly knowing whether I saw before me earth, water or sky; and I could not help thinking what might have been my feelings had my circumstances been less happy than they were.’

  Bread made of flour, salt and water and baked in the ashes of a fire.

  Griffith Taylor, the Australian geographer who quotes this passage, was struck by the similarity of the Sahara to the interior of Australia. He makes the point that just as the Sahara blocked emigration from Europe into Central Africa, so this wilderness protected Australia from penetration by the peoples of southeast Asia. He goes on to speak of the resemblance between the Murray, Australia’s largest river, and the Nile, pointing out that the Murray rises in a well-watered region with many tributaries on its upper course and then gradually enters a barren area where it receives only one tributary—the Darling—in 800 miles.

  The notion of an inland sea arose from the fact that the mountains so far discovered lay on the eastern seaboard and all the principal rivers, the Murray, the Darling, and the Murrumbidgee, flowed inland from these mountains towards the west; and in the west lay the tremendous unexplored tract, an area some 1,600 miles long by 800 miles wide, bounded by the 20th and 32nd degrees of latitude and the 115 and 140 degrees of longitude: an area more than half the size of Europe. This was ‘the ghastly blank’.

  2

  STURT

  A GOOD DEAL WAS ALREADY KNOWN ABOUT THE INTERIOR, OF course, through the travels of the early explorers, and one man in particular had shown the way ahead. Charles Sturt is something of a giant in Australian exploration, and indeed of exploration anywhere, and it is strange that his name is not better known, since he was the most literate of travellers, the most persistent and the most adventurous. Like so many other remarkable Englishmen of the nineteenth century, Sturt was born in India and at an early age sent back to England to be educated, at first at Harrow and then in the army. By 1814, when he was nineteen, he had already served with Wellington against the French in the Peninsular War, and with the British in Canada against the Americans. After Waterloo he returned to garrison duty in France, and when his regiment was transferred to Ireland he was involved in the famine riots of 1821-22. In 1823 he was gazetted a lieutenant and two years later a captain. He was then sent out to New South Wales in charge of a convict guard.

  These brief details conjure up a recognizable military figure of the early nineteenth century, a bully-boy young officer, ignorant of politics, eager only to advance his own career and ready to deal with any defier of authority, whether he might be an American rebel, an Irish peasant or an English criminal; more of a policeman you might say than a soldier. In point of fact he was nothing of the kind. At the age of thirty, when he sailed for Australia, Sturt was a spare, tall man, with a sensitive and distinguished face; he had a talent for both sketching and writing, he was an enthusiastic botanist, and far from being a typical garrison officer in a penal colony, he loathed the whole idea. But a penniless professional soldier in the eighteen twenties had very little control over his comings and goings, and so, after a six months’ voyage, he arrived at Sydney, where his destiny was awaiting him. Governor Darling met the quiet, intelligent young man and made him his private secretary.

  Already in 1827 Sydney was an established settlement with cornfields and orchards running down to the sea, and it was not unusual to see forty or fifty sailing-ships in the harbour. But in 1828 a drought set in, and with the failure of the crops the settlers began to look towards the regions behind the costal mountains, where they hoped they would find more fertile land. Sturt got in with a group of young men whose names were soon to become famous as explorers—Mitchell, Hume and others—all eager to find the ‘new Australian Caspian Sea’, and in 1828 he led his own party inland. With six convicts to carry the baggage he followed the Macquarie River to the point where, among swamps, it entered a large westward-flowing stream, which he named after his patron the Darling. A year later he set out again, turning southwards this time to the Murrumbidgee, and with a boat he had carried overland he sailed downstream until he reached a still more important river, the Murray, and this he followed to its junction with the Darling and then to its outlet at Lake Alexandrina, on the southern ocean.

  This prodigious journey of over 2,000 miles illuminated the whole river system of the south, and earned for Sturt much praise in Sydney, and a grant of land. It also undermined his health, and for the time being ruined his eyesight. For the next ten years he was obliged to stick to his farm and administrative duties in Norfolk Island and New South Wales, and in 1839 he was appointed surveyor-general in Adelaide. But he did not like a sedentary life, and repeatedly offered himself for new expeditions. He was still dreaming of an inland sea. ‘I have a strange idea’, he wrote, ‘that there may be a central sea not far from the Darling in latitude 29° and I should go prepared for a voyage.’ He had also observed the parrots and the cockatoos flying north, and he hoped that beyond the arid land to the north of Adelaide there would be ‘rich valleys and hills’.

  In 1840 his friend, Edward John Eyre, left Adelaide in an attempt to reach the centre, and Sturt, still troubled by his eyes and unable to leave his desk, regretfully watched him go. Eyre soon came back with a report that he could get no further than Mount Hopeless and the salt lake country around Lake Torrens, some 400 miles to the north of Adelaide. Mount Hopeless was nothing more than a low flattopped hill among many others, but it was typical of that dreadful country. ‘We ascended Mount Hopeless,’ Eyre wrote, ‘and cheerless and hopeless was the prospect before us;’ nothing but an endless waste of barren rock and sand. He gave the place its despondent name to mark his decision ‘to waste no more time on so desolate and forbidding a region’, and turned back to civilization. Sturt was not discouraged. ‘Let any man,’ he declared in an address to the colonists, ‘lay the map of Australia before him, and regard the blank upon its surface, and then let me ask him if it would not be an honourable achievement to be the first to place foot in its centre.’

  In 1844 at last the authorities let him go. He was now 49, but his eyesight had improved and he was still physically robust. The party that assembled in Adelaide that winter was exceptionally strong: 16 men, 11 horses, 30 bullocks, 200 sheep (to be eaten on the way), a boat, a couple of heavy carts and a year’s provisions. The expedition’s draughtsman was a wiry little Scots officer, five foot six inches high and under nine stone in weight, named John McDouall Stuart, and among those who came to see them off was a particular friend of Sturt’s, Charles Cooper, a lawyer who was subsequently to become the first chief justice of South Australia. A farewell breakfast was given for the expedition by the colonists, and then Sturt, with a straw hat on his head and mounted on Duncan, his old grey horse, led the way out of town.

  They marched first to the Murray River, and followed it upstream to the confluence with the Darling. About 180 miles up the Darling they reached Lake Cawndilla near the little outpost of Menindie, and here, having built a stockade, they turned north-westwards into the unknown. It was mid-October, and although the summer was approaching there was still water about and all the party were healthy. To cheer his friends, and perhaps himself as well, Sturt wrote back to Adelaide: ‘We seem on the high road to success with mountains and seas before us … We have strange birds of beautiful plumage and new plants … It will be a joyous day for us to launch on an unknown sea and run away towards the tropics.’

  For the moment, however, the land was uncompromisingly dry and flat, and it was an event when presently they came on a line of low hills that stretched across the plain. The most prominent of these they named Piesse’s Nob, since it so much resembled the conical hat worn by Louis Piesse, the storekeeper of the expedition. Highly magnetic iron ore was found lying about and in the years ahead mining engineers were going to examine that hill with interest.

  The centre of Australia is a place of violent extremes. ‘It is either a desert or a deluge,’ one of the early geographers wrote; ‘the rainfall can vary from 30 inches in one year to three inches the next. Watercourses that have lain dry for a decade can suddenly turn into a flood, and land that is as hard and dry as concrete will overnight become carpeted with wildflowers and fresh young grass.’

  Had they known it, Sturt and his men were marching into one of the most appalling summers ever recorded. The end of 1844 found them still toiling slowly northward—a Biblical-looking group with their ox-carts and their flock of sheep—and early in 1845 they reached the 29th latitude. Here they stuck on a waterhole for six months while the land dried up around them, unable either to go forward or to go back until rain fell.

  The extreme temperatures of the centre are very bearable because of the dryness of the air, but even so the heat this year was unbelievable. It rose to 132 degrees in the shade and 157 degrees in the sun. It penetrated to a depth of three or four feet into the ground, it forced the screws out of wooden boxes and horn combs split into fine laminae. The men’s hair ceased to grow and their finger nails became as brittle as glass. Sturt found it almost impossible to write his diary; the lead dropped out of his pencils when he picked them up, and when he used a pen the ink dried as it touched the paper. Scurvy broke out in the camp and one man died, but there was nothing to be done; they were alone in the wilderness, even the birds had deserted this inferno, and nothing moved on the cracked earth except the lizards and the ants. The blacks whom they had encountered on the way up had long since made off, saying that there was no water anywhere—‘the sun had taken it.’

  ‘The sky generally speaking,’ Sturt wrote, ‘was without a speck, and the dazzling brightness of the moon was one of the most distressing things we had to endure. It was impossible indeed to shut out its light whichever way one turned, and its irritating effects were remarkable.’

  By April it was a little cooler, and thunder clouds began to bank up on the horizon. At last on July 12 a gentle but persistent rain started to fall, and after a few days it developed into a downpour. Now they had floods to contend with, cold nights and even frost, but at least they could move, and as a guarantee that life was returning to the parched earth, swans and ducks and other migrating birds began to reappear. Sturt sent some of his men back to Adelaide and with the remainder pushed on to the northwest. At a place which he named Fort Grey, close to the extreme north-western corner of New South Wales, he formed another base where he dropped off more of his men, while he himself and a young companion named John Harris-Browne pushed on again, taking fifteen weeks’ provisions with them. They reached and named the Strzelecki Creek,1 and then followed it northward until they entered a region where the horses’ hooves were cut by flint-like stones and left no track. Here on every side there were ‘stupendous and almost insurmountable sand-ringes of a fiery red’. These ridges, Sturt went on, ‘like headlands projecting into the sea, abutted upon an immense plain where, but for a line of low trees far to the north-east, and one bright red sandhill shining in the sunlight, not a feature broke the dead level, the gloomy purple hue …’ He named this region the Stony Desert. Beyond it there were glimpses of the ‘better country’ for which he was searching, but presently he was again among sand dunes, and at the end of August, on latitude 25 and longitude 139, he gave up all hope of finding his inland sea in that direction. The ground was drying up again, great chasms had appeared, and they heard explosions as of a distant gun. These they put down to ‘gaseous influences’, but no doubt they were caused by masses of rock being split off the sides of distant hills by the extremes of temperature during the day and the night. On September 8 they turned back. ‘Depend upon it,’ Sturt wrote, ‘I would not have retreated from such a position for a trifle. But you can form no idea of that region.’

  1 Alter the Polish explorer who discovered and climbed Mount Kosciusko, Australia’s highest mountain just north of the New South Wales-Victorian border.