Cooper's Creek Read online

  They found their way back through the red sand-ridges with white clay pans lying in between and the cloudless sky overhead—a country of red, white and blue. If they had not quite reached the centre, at least they had been almost half-way across the continent, and they had gone further than any other man. Both horses and men looked like skeletons when they reached Fort Grey at the end of seven weeks. They had ridden nearly 900 miles.

  It was now October 1845 and they had heard nothing from the outside world since they had left Adelaide fourteen months before, but still Sturt would not go back. Indeed, a kind of fixation seems to govern the actions of all these Australian explorers; they struggle on, not so much to get to a declared objective, but until they reach the extreme limit of their endurance, and then, and only then, will they turn for home.

  After the briefest of rests Sturt set out for the north once more, taking with him this time his draughtsman McDouall Stuart and two men named Mack and Morgan. They had four riding-horses and four pack-horses, and once again they expected to be out for several months. Harris-Browne was left in charge at Fort Grey, and before setting out Sturt gave him instructions that he was only to retire from the place if his supply of water failed or his men fell ill. In that event he was to leave a message saying where he had gone, and this message was to be placed in a bottle and buried under a tree which they chose together. Harris-Browne was devoted to Sturt and hated being left behind, but Sturt was adamant; and so on October 9, with a promise of rain in the air, the little party rode off into the scrub. They headed east of Sturt’s old track, making over thirty miles a day, and they soon crossed the Strzelecki Creek and came within sight of another creek which had been dry on Sturt’s previous journey. Climbing a sandhill early one morning they saw three miles away in an immense sandy plain a thick line of gum trees with hills in the distance, and they rode eagerly forward through park-like country until they came to the banks of ‘a magnificent channel covered with wildfowl’. They killed three ducks for breakfast. Riding on again to the north for half a mile they found still another creek, ‘broader and finer than the first … with splendid sheets of water.’ It was a full 200 yards from side to side and the banks rose up some eighteen feet among groves of flooded gum trees. The blacks had been recently burning off the grass, and now the ground was covered with bright young shoots. The water in the stream was vivid green. Sturt would have paused to investigate this important discovery, but a thunderstorm burst upon them and he decided to take advantage of the wet weather and go on again to the north.

  His hopes for an inland sea had revived, and it was a bitter disappointment when once again they struck the Stony Desert. ‘Coming suddenly on it,’ Sturt recorded, ‘I almost lost my breath. If anything it looked more forbidding than before. Herbless and treeless it filled more than half the horizon. Not an object was visible on which to steer, yet we held on to our course by compass like a ship at sea.’ But this was futile; the further they went the drearier the land became. Towards the end of October they were becoming dangerously short of water and there was no alternative but to retrace their steps.

  The desert now assumed its most menacing aspect. Most of the waterholes they had dug on the outward journey had dried up. ‘At the first waterless halt,’ Sturt wrote, ‘the horses would not eat, but collected round me, my favourite grey pulling the hat off my head to claim attention.’ It was only by catching sight of a pigeon darting down to a little muddy depression that they managed to replenish their supplies. When they were still 92 miles from the splendid creek they had discovered on their way north their water gave out entirely, and they continued on all night by lamplight. Half dead with thirst, they reached the creek and the shade of the trees on October 28.

  The flies and the mosquitoes here were so bad that the men wore veils on their faces, but this mattered nothing at all: they could drink, they could bathe and they could shoot ducks to eat. When they had recovered a little, Sturt led the way upstream, thinking that now perhaps at last they were on the true path to some really broad expanse of water. There were many encouraging signs. The blacks, for instance, were very numerous, their tracks and crude shelters were everywhere, and within five miles they met no fewer than eight different tribes.

  Sturt in his dealings with the blacks is something of a rarity among Australian explorers. He did not despise them or reject them. He treated them with kindness and tried to understand them, and in return he found them to be a gentle friendly people—embarrassingly friendly, in fact, since they invited the explorers to sleep with their grubby wives. They were, he said, an undernourished but merry people who sat up laughing and talking all night long. Being naked they suffered very much from the cold at night, and at this point he split his blanket so that he could give half to a shivering old man. He notes that they were adept at foretelling the weather from the position of the moon, and that in sight and smell they were keener than a dog.

  The tribes they had first encountered on their way up from Menindie were rather a scrawny lot, and very primitive; on seeing a horseman for the first time they had thought that man and beast were one creature like the mythical centaur, and they had run off in astonishment when the man had dismounted. But here, on this green watercourse, they were a much more vigorous breed, the men six foot tall, and although by tribal law their front teeth had been knocked out, many of them were handsome. They netted fish and dived for mussels in the waterholes, they brought down birds with their spears, and from the seed of a plant they called nardoo they made a rough kind of flour that was baked into cakes.

  Sturt questioned the tribesmen whenever he could, and now, by signs and by moving their arms in the manner of paddling a canoe, they indicated that there were indeed great stretches of water further to the east With renewed hope the party went on and found that the watercourse continued to divide itself into many different channels and waterholes. With its grass and heavy timber the country was much more promising than anything they had previously seen. On November 1 they arrived at a lake with seagulls flying above it, and still further east they came on other great pools, indigo-blue in colour and very salt. Here in this wilderness they interrupted a strange scene: a group of seven men crying bitterly. Nothing could make them explain the occasion of their grief, they cried and cried and would not stop, and in the end Sturt was obliged to go on his way, having left them a present of his greatcoat

  A few days later, when they were 120 miles upstream from their original starting-point, they came on a crowd of some 400 blacks, more than they had ever seen before. The men were very fine, no tribal scars on their bodies, no bulging stomachs among them, and no missing teeth. They were very friendly once they got over their fear of the horses. They came forward with gifts of ducks and flourcakes, and held up troughs of water for the horses to drink. But they also blasted Sturt’s hopes for the last time: from this point on they said the stream diminished, and nothing lay further to the east but the desert. Riding out in that direction Sturt came on a swamp, and beyond this he was confronted by an endless plain.

  Now finally he had had enough, and the party turned homeward. They retraced their steps down the creek to the point where they had first reached it, and then struck out for Fort Grey and the south. Sturt wrote: ‘Before we finally left the neighbourhood where our hopes had been so often raised and depressed, I gave the name of Cooper’s Creek to the fine watercourse we had so anxiously traced, as a proof of my respect for Mr. Cooper, the judge of South Australia.’ And he added, ‘I would gladly have laid this creek down as a river, but as it had no current I did not feel myself justified in doing so.’

  The march to Fort Grey was worse than anything they had endured before. A fearful hot wind sprang up; the thermometer rose to 127 degrees and burst, the horses stood with their noses to the ground, ‘the birds were mute; the leaves of the trees fell around like a snow-shower. I wondered the very grass did not take fire.’ When finally the weaker animals began to stagger and fall Sturt and Stuart decided to go on ahead of the other two men to Fort Grey so that they could get help. On their last stage into the camp they travelled for fifteen hours without dismounting.

  Sturt half thought as he rode along that Harris-Browne might have been forced through lack of water to retreat from Fort Grey, but he could not really bring himself to believe it. And so, when the two exhausted men at last reached the camp, a sickening feeling overcame them: all was silent. Stores, animals and men—everything had vanished. ‘With my bitter feelings of disappointment,’ Sturt says, ‘I could calmly have laid my head on that desert never to raise it again.’

  Getting off their horses they went to the tree which had been selected as a site for a cache, and there dug up a bottle with a message from Harris-Browne in it. He had been obliged to retreat to another waterhole sixty-seven miles away, he said, because the water at Fort Grey had become putrid and was causing his men dysentery. This was all too painfully evident; when Stuart went to the little pool he found that the slime there was green on top and red below.

  Without eating or drinking, the two men laid themselves down on the ground to sleep. Next day Mack and Morgan struggled into camp, having abandoned all their supplies on the way, but Mack after a short rest went back on the best horse to recover the provisions and a kettle. Now at last they were able to make a damper and boil a little of the slime. It was the first time they had eaten or drunk for two days.

  The sixty-seven-mile journey that still lay between them and the new depot was, as Sturt says, privation ‘of no ordinary character’, but somehow they managed it, riding for twenty hours without a stop, and on arrival Sturt collapsed. He fell to the ground as he dismounted, and next day his muscles contracted and his skin went black. It was nearly three weeks before they could move him, and then the whole party began their final retreat to the Darling, 270 miles away. It was now approaching midsummer—their second in the wilderness—and once again an incredible heat overwhelmed them: ‘The hot wind filled the air with an impalpable dust, through which the sun looked blood-red; and all vegetation seemed dead. So heated was the ground that our matches falling on it ignited … the silence of the grave reigned around.’ They travelled by night, Sturt lying helpless in one of the carts, and on December 21 they reached their depot near Menindie. The Darling had ceased to flow, but at least there were waterholes in the dry bed, and in the middle of January 1846 they struggled into Adelaide. When Sturt reached his home at midnight his wife collapsed fainting on the floor.

  Quite apart from the hardships they had endured—and one is forced to conclude that men in Victorian times were tougher than they are now—a good deal had been accomplished here. The expedition had failed in its main objects, but they had come within 150 miles of the centre and they had actually lived there for a year or more, isolated from the rest of the world like men on another planet, and they had valuable information to impart. From now on any future expedition knew that it must expect impossible conditions during the summer months, with the great dangers of thirst and hunger, and, in the absence of green vegetables, of scurvy. On the other hand, it was proved that the blacks were not dangerous if properly handled; in fact they could be very helpful.

  Sturt had brought back with him over a hundred species of plants and many geological specimens which were to lead on to the great mining discoveries in the centre. He had taken careful note of the strange wild animals he had found, and his description of the bird life around the waterholes has never been improved upon. He observes how the raptors, the hawks and the eagles, follow the migratory routes across the interior, terrorizing the smaller birds, dropping on them like arrows from the sky when they pause to drink and carrying them off in their talons. He speaks of species like the crested wedge-bill ‘which is heard in the heat of the day when all other birds are silent’; and of the galahs which were also known as rose cockatoos, of black swans which tended to be on the wing when the moon was shining bright, of the plover with ‘its peculiar and melancholy cry ringing through the silence of the desert’, of sulphur-crested cockatoos that posted a sentinel whilst feeding on the ground, and of seagulls on Cooper’s Creek, over 500 miles from the sea. There were half a dozen varieties of duck and a ventriloquist dove’ which, with the very slightest movement of its throat, made a sound that appeared to come from far out across the plain. Then there were the tawny-shouldered podargus, with mouths that reached from ear to ear and eyes half shut, that sat on the branches in a sort of conclave with their heads together; and the cracticus destructor, an ugly bird with dull feathers that could imitate any sound it heard—indeed, one of them used to come to Sturt’s camp every morning to learn a tune his men used to whistle to it. There were times when the birds were their salvation: of the amadina castanotus Sturt writes: ‘Never did its note fall on our ears but as the harbinger of good, for never did we hear this little bird but we were sure to find water close at hand, and many a time has it raised my drooping spirits and those of my companions … The hawks made sad havoc amongst these harmless little birds, generally carrying off two at a time.’

  And he says of the grey falcon: ‘A pair, male and female, were observed by Mr. Piesse one Sunday in May, whilst the men were at prayers, hovering very high in the air, soon after which he succeeded in killing both. They came down from a great height and pitched into the trees on the banks of the creek, and on Mr. Piesse firing at and killing one the other flew away; but returning to look for its lost companion, shared its fate. Nothing could exceed the delicate beauty of these birds when first procured. Their large, full eyes, the vivid yellow of the ceres and legs, together with their slate-coloured plumage, every feather lightly marked at the end, was quite dazzling, but all soon faded from the living brightness they had at first.’

  He writes equally well of the animals, of the dingoes, for instance, whose ‘emaciated bodies standing between us and the moon, were the most wretched objects in the brute creation’.

  For Sturt’s leadership there could be nothing but praise. None of the usual jealousies or dissensions had occurred among his party, and he had lost only one man and a few horses. The expedition had cost just under £4,000, which was very little more than he had originally estimated, and on the whole his system of base camps and small reconnaissance parties had been successful. There had been the interesting business of the message buried in the bottle, and in other ways—especially in the use of bullocks, horses and sheep—he had been able to provide a useful guide for future explorers. In a general way they would know what fauna and flora they could expect to meet, the routine of the seasons and the contours of the land. Places like Menindie, Cooper’s Creek and the Stony Desert were pinpointed on the map.

  Sturt never managed to return to the centre. His eyes began to trouble him again, and in 1853 he returned to England and died there sixteen years later. But his discoveries had opened a vast new field for exploration. From every side men began to push into the interior. Thomas Livingstone Mitchell, the New South Wales surveyorgeneral, struck inland from Sydney on a series of journeys and discovered the Victoria River. Later his assistant Kennedy traced the Victoria downstream and found that it linked up with Cooper’s Creek. Meanwhile Ludwig Leichhardt, a German botanist, travelled across the tropical north of the continent as far as Port Essington. In 1848 he set out once more from the east coast with the idea of crossing the continent to Perth, and was never heard of again.

  Leichhardt’s disappearance caused a great stir at the time —for years afterwards there were stories of a wild white man roaming in the interior—and Augustus Charles Gregory, the Queensland surveyor-general, made two separate expeditions to find him. In the course of these journeys Gregory also followed the Cooper, and he eventually succeeded in reaching Mount Hopeless in South Australia, thus linking up his own researches with those of Sturt and Eyre some twenty years earlier. Then in 1853 a resourceful character named Captain Francis Cadell got a small steamer over the bar at the mouth of the Murray and sailed upstream as far as Swan Hill and back. Later he started a ferry on the Darling with regular sailings to Menindie.

  Finally there was Sturt’s draughtsman, John McDouall Stuart, and he was proving himself to be the most persistent traveller of them all. After the 1844 expedition he made several journeys to the north of Adelaide, and in March 1860 he was preparing to set out again for the centre of the continent.

  Yet still the basic objects eluded them all. North of Sturt’s furthest, on latitude 25, it was still terra incognita. Was it possible for a party to cross the continent from south to north? It was not merely curiosity that was involved in this, the persistent urge for men to go where no one else had ever been before. In 1860 the settlements in the south were still divided from Britain and Europe by a two months’ sea voyage, and the introduction of steam had not materially speeded up communications. What if you could build a telegraph line from Adelaide to the northern coast and there link up with the cable that already extended through India to south-east Asia? That was a compelling idea. If realized it would mean that instead of waiting four months you could communicate with London in a few hours. There was also the possibility of opening up trade with south-east Asia through a port on the north coast. Then of course there was the hunger for land itself: all of it free, unused, waiting there for the first-comers to take possession. One would have thought that Sturt’s hardships were enough to disabuse anyone of such optimistic dreams as these, but here, as in the Sahara, mirages floated on the horizon and oases like Cooper’s Creek were a promise that they could be real.

  These, then, were the pressures and inducements that decided the colonists in Victoria to send out a new expedition in 1860.

  3

  THE EXPEDITION ASSEMBLES

  THE PHILOSOPHICAL INSTITUTE OF VICTORIA WAS ONE OF those small amorphous coteries of successful men that seem to spring up spontaneously in every community. It was a private institution devoted to scientific studies, it had no authority in public affairs, and yet it was a kind of club within the government; today we would call it a part of the Establishment. Sir Henry Barkly, the new governor, was a member, and so was Sir William Stawell, the chief justice. Then there were Dr. John Macadam, a university lecturer with political ambitions, Dr. Richard Eades, the Lord Mayor of Melbourne, Ferdinand von Mueller, a distinguished botanist and an explorer of some note,1 Dr. George Neumayer, the meterologist, and a number of others —wealthy squatters and merchants, a sprinkling of lawyers and politicians, a clergyman or two.