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.
1 Mueller, an unmarried Luthern who came to Australia from Germany, was the founder of Victorian botany, and it was he who first introduced the eucalyptus to other countries. A scholarly and kindly man of extraordinary energy, he is reputed to have written 3,000 letters a year in his own hand.
By the late fifties the Institute had become an influential group; they had got a charter from the Queen which enabled them to change their name to the Royal Society, they had moved into comfortable rooms in Victoria Street, not far from Parliament House, and here in an easy and leisurely way they conducted their ‘proceedings’. With so many extraordinary Australian phenomena crowding in upon them there was no shortage of subjects for discussion; papers were read on such matters as the geology of the goldfields, the tribal customs of the aborigines, the acclimatization of imported animals and plants and the movements of the heavenly bodies in the southern sky. Dr. Mueller, who had been with Gregory in Northern Australia, brought forward the question of inland exploration, and in 1857 a committee was appointed ‘for the purpose of fitting out in Victoria an expedition for traversing the unknown interior of the Australian continent from east to west’. Early in the following year Sir William Stawell called a meeting to discuss the venture, and a prosperous dealer in provisions named Ambrose Kyte made an anonymous offer of £1,000 provided that another £2,000 could be raised by the public within a year.
For a while things hung fire—the colony was suffering from a business recession at the time—and only £900 was raised in eleven months. However, a new ‘lithographic letter’ was sent out to ‘squatters, merchants and country gentlemen’, and soon every mail brought in cheques, money orders and cash. A rural clergyman gave £100, Barkly subscribed £50, Captain Cadell offered the use of his steamers on the Murray and the Darling, and within the prescribed time £2,200 was raised to add to Kyte’s £1,000. The Victorian Government, which had been reluctant at first, now voted £6,000, and with a total of £9,000 in hand the Society could afford to make plans on a lavish scale. An Exploration Committee was appointed to handle the venture, with Stawell as its chairman, and Macadam as its secretary, and they set about the business of finding a leader for the expedition. Gregory was the obvious choice since he had already been in the centre, but he did not want to go. He suggested in his place Major Warburton, an experienced South Australian explorer, but the Committee felt that this ought to be an entirely Victorian adventure, and so the post was advertised in the Melbourne Press. Fourteen candidates applied, and six were finally considered. One of these was a police superintendent from the Castlemaine district named Robert O’Hara Burke, and he was chosen by ten votes to five.
Upon several counts the choice of Burke was a surprising decision. He knew nothing of exploration and he had no scientific qualifications of any kind. Moreover he was Irish, and it has to be admitted (at the risk of fierce contention) that there is something about the Irish temperament that is not ideal for exploration; it is too quick, too mercurial, too imaginative, too headstrong and, paradoxically, too brave. The Irish have produced the greatest of British generals and the best of soldiers in the ranks, but Irish names are not usually to be found among the first flight of explorers, whether in Australia, Africa, Asia, America or anywhere else. Exploration seems to require slow, unflurried tenacity and persistence, great patience and tact, a scientific rather than an emotional approach, a willingness to reject the flamboyant thing and to accept the middle of the road; all qualities which one tends to associate with the Scots and the English rather than the Irish (which is not to say that the Scots and the English cannot be mighty dull and wrongheaded at moments when the Irish have the vision and the courage to succeed).
Burke was very Irish. He came from a land-owning and military family of St. Clerans in County Galway, and action was in his blood. Having been educated at Woolwich Academy he joined a cavalry regiment in the Austrian service at a very early age. When this regiment was disbanded he went to the Irish Constabulary and then enlisted in the Victorian police force as an inspector. He arrived in Australia at the height of the disturbances caused by the gold rush and was a most successful officer; it was remembered that when the European miners set upon some 2,000 Chinese at the diggings on the Buckland River, Burke with a small detachment marched fifty miles non-stop to the scene, and restored order.
In 1854 he obtained leave of absence and went off to Europe to fight in the Crimean War, but he was too late, and he returned to Victoria, where he soon rose to the important post of superintendent of police in the populous gold-mining district of Castlemaine. At the time of his appointment as leader of the exploring expedition he was aged 39 and still unmarried.
That was the official side of the record. His private life was more bizarre. This is how a bank manager who knew him well describes him: ‘He was a careless dare-devil sort of Irishman of very ordinary physique. He wore a long beard, over which he dribbled his saliva. When he was off duty he often wore a slouching sombrero-like hat, and as he did not wear braces his breeches hung in rolls about his heels, and he looked altogether untidy … It was told of him as a good joke, but true nevertheless, that when he was returning from Yackandandah to Beechworth he lost his way, although the track was well-beaten and frequented, and did not arrive at his destination for many hours after he was due. He was in no sense a bushman …’
Another contemporary wrote ‘he is humane and tenderhearted as a woman, he seeks to hide it by a brusquerie wholly external …’And another: ‘He was kind and generous to a fault but let anything happen out of the common routine he was confused, then excited, till finally he would lose all control of his better judgment. Then again, when he had made up his mind to do a thing he never considered the consequences. He had thorough discipline and no one dared to presume to contradict him.’
‘Burke,’says another, ‘did not possess a dress suit, nor even a white shirt,’yet he was ‘soldier-like’, had ‘much vigorous commonsense’, and was a ‘well-bred gentleman and quite at home amongst people of the best class’. (This may have been a reference to Burke’s connections with a wealthy family in Cloncurry in Ireland.) Then there were his eccentricities. Once when he was getting fat he instructed his housekeeper not to spend more than sixpence a day on his food. He loved splashing about in a pool which he built in his backyard. There he sat naked in the open with his helmet on his head, reading a book.
Elsewhere we hear that Burke had great charm and was held in much affection by the police of the district. ‘He was a wild, eccentric dare-devil … Either he did not realise danger or his mind was so unhinged to that extent that he revelled in it.’ He galloped his horse madly through swamps and forests and was so reckless ‘some people thought him not quite sane’. He was an able linguist and had a habit of scrawling notes and quotations from French, German and Italian poets on the walls of the parlour at his police station. Visitors, glancing at these curiosities, were taken aback by an inscription: ‘Do not read anything on the walls.’ He was a man who would always lend money to a friend: ‘His salary coursed through his fingers as soon as he received it.’ Sometimes he would disappear from his station for days at a time, and it was his particular delight to irritate a certain magistrate who used to come near to frenzy if anyone swung on his front-gate. Burke would ride thirty miles to swing on that gate. He was a martinet, a Bohemian (though no one suggests that he was a heavy drinker), and, rather surprisingly, he was a Protestant. Then again we hear: ‘He was the worst bushman I ever met;’ he was all for taking short cuts. At one time he had been greatly affected by the death of his brother in the Crimea, and would be found at home alone silently staring at his picture.
Then there was all the gossip about his connection with Julia Matthews, who was a young actress who had come out to Australia to sing in light opera. Burke first met her when she was playing on the goldfields, and she is described as a ‘buxom and sprightly’ girl in the fashion of the times. He is said to have attended every performance she gave in the town of Beechworth, and then to have followed her from place to place in a passion of adoration. According to one of his colleagues in the police force Burke was in despair when she rejected his offer of marriage. He bought a piano and retired to his house, where, with the help of a German teacher, he played over and over again the songs she sang.
Whether all this be true or not, Burke obviously had an engaging presence. When he came down to Melbourne to take up his appointment as leader of the expedition, he tidied himself up, took up quarters at the police station in the suburb of Richmond, and joined the Melbourne Club, which was another branch of the Establishment. One of his hostesses writes of him: ‘When we first knew Mr. Burke we called him “Brian Boru"; and there was such a daring, reckless look about him, which was enhanced by a great scar across his face, caused by a sabre-cut in a duel when he was in the Austrian Service; he had, withal, a very attractive manner. Many a pleasant dance I had with him.’
These last impressions are not altogether borne out by the only good likeness of Burke to survive—a daguerreotype taken shortly after the expedition set out. It reveals a wellgroomed head with a receding hairline, a carefully brushed beard and no sign of the scar. The eyes are surprisingly mild, romantic and brooding; it is the face of a poet.
So then we have here an odd character in an odd position. It is impossible to deny that up to this point there is a certain triviality about Burke, or at all events his reputation, a lack of seriousness and distinction. The dashings about on horseback, the carelessness and the somewhat amateur bohemianism, the punctilious policeman on duty and the whimsical readings in the bath, the affair with the minor actress—it all has rather a naïve and provincial sound, not at all in tune with the lives and accomplishments of the gentlemen of the Royal Society. What we seem to have here is not another Sturt, not a steady or a commanding figure in any way, but a sort of neo-hero, a made-up explorer, a likeable man but still a man with greatness thrust upon him.
Why ever then did the Committee choose him? The charm, of course, must have helped, and no doubt he was modest. Clearly he was brave, he was willing, his police record was good, and he had just that dash of the adventurer about him that may well have had its appeal to these serious sedentary men who were sending him off into the unknown. His technical deficiencies could be made good by the appointment of scientists to the party, and here the Committee had some able men to choose from. Dr. Neumayer, the meterologist, promised to lend a hand, at any rate during the early stages of the expedition, and Dr. Herman Beckler, a German doctor who had been trained at Munich, was appointed botanist and medical officer. He seems to have been a methodical and competent man, though perhaps, as a companion, a little dull. The post of naturalist went to Ludwig Becker, another German who was also a member of the Society. Becker—and to avoid confusion with his colleague one must note that he had no ‘1’ in his name—was a delightful man, a genuine amateur in the correct sense of the word. He was born at Darmstadt of a well-connected family; one brother was Chief of Staff of the army of Hesse and another was private secretary to the Prince Consort in England and the tutor of Queen Victoria’s eldest sons. Ludwig, though a shy and sensitive man, was a rolling stone; his travels had already taken him through Brazil, and at the time of his appointment he had been nine years in Australia, a part of the time on the gold diggings. Governor Denison of Tasmania has left an interesting description of him: ‘He is one of those universal geniuses who can do anything; is a very good naturalist, geologist, etc. and draws and plays and sings … He is travelling this country and pays his way by taking likenesses—miniatures, which he does very nicely indeed. He is very odd-looking with a large red beard.’ The governor’s references to Becker’s accomplishments were not greatly exaggerated; he was one of the earliest authorities on the lyre bird, and his drawings, scientific notes and diaries (which have never been published) are in some ways the best records of the expedition to survive. Indeed, he had only one serious drawback; he was about 52 at this time, and that was too old to go marching off into the interior of Australia.
For the important post of surveyor—the man who would chart the expedition’s route—Dr. Neumayer produced a member of his own staff, a serious young Englishman named William John Wills. Now we know a great deal about Wills, mostly from his own correspondence, and from a book written about him by his father, and the thing that instantly emerges is that he was a most excellent and reliable young man. Had his circumstances been different he would most certainly have been the captain of his school, carrying off all the prizes, excelling at all the games. Here is one of Dickens’ young heroes, fair-minded, compassionate, studious, eager to get on; he absorbed the Victorian virtues as to the manner born. His father, however, was a country doctor living in modest circumstances in Devon, and was not quite able to launch the boy on the career he merited; he was articled as a surgeon, a career he did not particularly like, and was sent up to Guy’s and Bartholomew’s in London to study medicine and chemistry. Young Wills’ real passion was for astronomy and meterology, for precise calculations and deductions, and indeed his sense of direction was so good that he unravelled the mystery of the maze at Hampton Court in ten minutes. When he had money to spend he bought scientific instruments. He was also a great reader of such works as Chesterfield’s letters to his son, and among the poets (whom he often quoted in his letters to his parents) Pope was his favourite.
In the normal course of events this poor but very promising student would have remained in England, and no doubt in time would have been appointed to some useful scientific post, but in the early fifties his father, Dr. Wills, was seized with excitement about the Australian gold rush. William, aged 18, and a younger brother were dispatched in a sailing-ship to Melbourne to make their fortune, and within a year the father followed. At first the two boys got jobs as shepherds at £ 30 a year on a far-away sheepstation at Deniliquin in New South Wales, and we have a picture of them got up in straw wide-awake hats, blue shirts and duck trousers. Then, like so many other young men, they drifted down to the goldfields and joined their father at Ballarat.
At that time Ballarat looked as though it had suffered an aerial bombardment. On every side the land was scarred and torn up by the diggers, one man handling a windlass and a bucket while another worked with pick and shovel below. On the surface the earth was washed for gold in wooden trays known as cradles, and a continuous murmur of rumbling and splashing filled the air. The miners lived in tents and bark huts, but on the main street, billowing with dust in summer and deep in mud in winter, there was a line of weatherboard pubs and stores, even a makeshift theatre where the luckier miners gathered at night to drink and watch a variety show. Dr. Wills, assisted by William, put up a tent in the centre of the town and opened a medical practice.
Young William hated the turmoil of the goldfields, the drunkenness and the nightly brawling in the pubs, and escaped when he could to the bush, which he loved. In 1858 he wrote to his mother in England, ‘Now the rush to the diggings is over people are beginning to live like civilised human beings’; and soon afterwards he got himself a job at Dr. Neumayer’s ‘Magnetic Observatory’ in Melbourne. This he regarded as his great chance. He set himself up in a respectable boarding-house and thought of nothing but his work. Not for him the music-hall or the fireworks in the Cremorne Gardens. Just occasionally he would attend the opera or a ball, but most evenings he spent at home, either with his books and his instruments or engaging in improving conversations with the more literate of his fellow lodgers; there is no mention of any female attachment. He was a good-looking young man with a fair beard, and a quiet manner, and he was always neatly dressed; in short, he was respectable and he was on his way to the top.
If one detects here a slight touch of priggishness, and if there is little trace of humour in his letters, one must also remember that young Wills eagerly wanted to join the expedition, and that he was full of joy when he was offered the position of surveyor. So now at the age of 26 he found himself serving a leader who was in every possible way his opposite. To Burke’s untidiness, his physical energy and his romantic flair, Wills opposed a bookish and examining mind, a love of figures rather than of visions. From the first the two men got on extremely well together, and Wills was to serve his leader, who was thirteen years older than he was, with devotion.
Burke himself interviewed some seven hundred applicants for the minor posts on the expedition, and eventually ten were chosen. Some were working men, others had qualifications of one sort or another, but it is impossible now to know on just what basis they were chosen. Charles D. Ferguson, the foreman, was an American who had come over from the Californian gold diggings, William Brahe was another German, and the others were Henry Creber, Owen Cowen, John Drakeford, Robert Fletcher, Patrick Langan, Thomas McDonough, William Patton, and John King. King and Brahe, as we shall see, were the most interesting of these ‘assistants’.
The salaries were fixed at £500 per annum for Burke, £300 each for Beckler, Becker and Wills, £200 for Ferguson, and £120 for the assistants. All the members of the party were examined by a doctor and declared medically fit.
There remained now the question of who was to be the second in command. Wills was too young, and Beckler and Becker, the only other officers, were not deemed suitable; both were Germans and Becker did not speak English very well. In the end it was decided to appoint a new man to the post—George James Landells. Landells is something of an enigma in the story of the expedition. Apart from the fact that he was an Englishman who was supposed to be an expert on camels, that his family had been settled in Australia since the forties, that he had a wife, that he possessed the only dog taken on the journey, and that he was extremely greedy for money, we know very little about him. It was only through the camels that he happened to join the expedition at all. Someone had suggested to the Exploration Committee that camels were vital to the venture; they had proved most successful in the Saharra and in other arid regions so why not in the centre of Australia? Six camels that had been brought out to Melbourne as part of a vaudeville show were purchased, but another twenty-four were needed, and Landells was sent off to India to get them. The Indian Mutiny had barely subsided, and it was difficult to move about the country, but Landells handled the business very ably. He managed to find his way up to the camelmarkets in Peshawar and Afghanistan, where he enlisted three sepoys, and twenty-five animals were driven down to the coast at the excellent rate of fifty miles a day. Before they embarked at Karachi Landells fell in with John King, who could speak the sepoys’ language, and he offered him a job.
There is something very touching about King; he always seems to be the victim of circumstances, life pushes him from one place to the other, and he is not at all like the Irish soldiers in the Kipling stories, whom outwardly he so much resembles; he is much too mild. He was only 14 when he became a soldier—what else was there for the son of a poor Irish private to do?—and he was soon dispatched to India where he showed some promise at his books, and was made an assistant teacher at the school attached to the 70th Regiment. This did not save him from the violence of the mutiny, and at Peshawar he saw forty mutineers shot away from guns. After this he was ill with fever for eighteen months, and when Landells met him he was convalescing at Karachi on the west coast. By then he had served his seven years in the army and had purchased his discharge, and so he accepted the job.
There was much excitement in Melbourne when the party landed in June 1860. Both camels and sepoys were a great rarity, Landells himself was in oriental costume, and crowds followed the strange procession up to Parliament House, where quarters had been prepared in the stables. Most of the animals appeared to have withstood the voyage without harm, but no one could be sure about their reaction to Australian conditions; a wild pea growing on the Darling River was said to be fatal to them. Landells, however, was convinced that all would be well if a certain amount of rum was added to their rations, and indeed it was important that the camels should survive, for his bill was an extremely large one: £5,497 in all for the purchase of the animals and their transport. Nor was this all: on being offered the position of second in command of the expedition Landells instantly protested that the salary proposed was not enough; he must have £600 a year, which was £100 more than Burke, the leader, was getting. Burke had been gambling and had run up bills at the Melbourne Club he could not pay. Yet he generously rejected an additional £100 offered him by the Committee, and said that he did not mind in the least if Landells was paid more money than he was. Landells was given his £600.
By now the assembling of the equipment was well advanced. The prisoners at Pentridge Gaol were put to work making such things as boots and harness, and a new kind of cart that would float on rivers was constructed. The armoury comprised 19 Colt’s revolvers, 10 double-barrelled guns, 8 rifles and 50 rockets, and among the general equipment were 95 sets of camel shoes, 4 dozen fishing lines, a huge amount of saddlery, 10 dozen looking glasses and 2 lb. of beads (for the natives), 12 tents, 20 camp beds, 80 pairs of boots, 30 cabbage-tree hats (hats with a high crown and large shady brim), 2 pairs of field glasses, several cases of surgical instruments, parcels of seeds provided by Dr. Mueller, a library of books by Sturt, Gregory, Mitchell and other explorers, 8 demi-johns of limejuice (to prevent scurvy), 4 gallons of brandy and 60 gallons of rum for the camels.
It was expected that the expedition would be away from a year to eighteen months, and large quantities of food were purchased: pemmican and meat biscuit, preserved vegetables, flour, ginger and dried apples. Nothing was skimped, nothing was forgotten. Prices of up to £50 were paid for horses, and there were twenty-three of them in all. In the end the total baggage amounted to twenty-one tons. It was the most elaborate and best equipped expedition ever to be set up in Australia.
The Committee meanwhile was giving much thought to the question of what route Burke was to follow. His great object was to cross the continent and discover what lay in the centre, but there was no point in going over ground where others had been before. Sturt had got up as far as latitude 25 and McDouall Stuart had already traversed the country further to the west. Leichhardt, the German explorer, had been across the far north, following an east-west route just south of the Gulf of Carpentaria. In Western Australia Gregory had made a journey southwards from the north coast as far as Mount Wilson, while his younger brother had explored the coastal region in the vicinity of Shark Bay. Sturt, Mitchell, Kennedy and Gregory had all been on Cooper’s Creek. The thing to do now was to try and link up some or all of these discoveries and resolve the mystery of the centre.
Gregory, in a very sensible letter to the Committee, advised them to strike inland from Brisbane to Cooper’s Creek and set up a depot there. He did not believe that the expedition should try and move in summer, and if it failed to cross the continent in the first winter it should retire to Cooper’s Creek and wait for the next. Others suggested that the expedition should be taken round by sea to Port Augusta on Spencer Gulf, in South Australia, and that thence it should march northwards. Others again thought that a landing should be made on the Gulf of Carpentaria, and that Burke should then come south through the centre.
The Committee decided to reject all these proposals, mainly it seems because of the difficulty and expense of shipping the camels once more, and perhaps too because they felt that the expedition should emphasize its Victorian character by setting out overland from Melbourne itself. They were agreed, however, in a general way on a southnorth crossing, and it was decided that Burke should first march directly to Cooper’s Creek via Menindie, on the Darling.
The following instructions were drawn up and officially presented to him by Dr. Macadam on August 18, 1860:
‘Sir,
I am directed by the Committee to convey to you instructions and views which have been adopted in connection with the duties which have developed upon you as leader of the party now organised to explore the interior of Australia.
‘The Committee having decided upon “Cooper’s Creek", of Sturt, as the basis of your operations, request that you will proceed thither, form a depot of provisions and stores, and make arrangements for keeping open a communication in your rear to the Darling, if in your opinion advisable, and thence to Melbourne, so that you may be enabled to keep the Committee informed of your movements, and receive in return the assistance in stores and advice in which you may stand in need. Should you find that a readier communication can be made by way of the South Australian police station near Mount Searle (about 90 miles to the south-west of Mount Hopeless) you will avail yourself of that means of writing to the Committee …
‘The object of the Committee in directing you to Cooper’s Creek is, that you should explore the country intervening between it and Leichhardt’s track, south of the Gulf of Carpentaria, avoiding, as far as practicable, Sturt’s route on the west, and Gregory’s, down the Victoria (or Cooper) on the east. To this object the Committee wishes you to devote your energies in the first instance; but should you determine the impracticability of this route, you are desired to turn westward into the country recently discovered by Stuart, and connect his furthest point northward with Gregory’s furthest southern exploration in 1856 (Mount Wilson).
‘In proceeding from Cooper’s Creek to Stuart’s country, you may find the salt marshes an obstacle to the progress of the camels; if so, it is supposed you will be able to avoid these marshes by turning to the northward as far as Eyre’s Creek, where there is permanent water, and then by going westward to Stuart’s furthest.
‘Should you fail, however, in connecting the two points of Stuart’s and Gregory’s furthest, or should you ascertain that this space has already been traversed, you are requested, if possible, to connect your explorations with those of the younger Gregory in the vicinity of Mount Gould, and thence you might proceed to Shark’s Bay, or down the River Murchison to the settlements in Western Australia.
‘This country would afford the means of recruiting the strength of your party; and you might, after a delay of five or six months, be enabled, with the knowledge of the country you shall have previously acquired, to return by a more direct route through South Australia to Melbourne …
‘The Committee is fully aware of the difficulty of the country you are called on to traverse, and in giving you these instructions has placed these routes before you more as an indication of what is deemed desirable to have accomplished than as indicating any exact course for you to pursue. The Committee considers that you will find a better and safer guide in the natural features of the country through which you will have to pass.
‘For all useful and practicable purposes, it will be better for you, and for the object of future settlements, that you should follow the watercourses and the country yielding herbage than to pursue any route which the Committee might be able to sketch out from an imperfect map of Australia.
‘The Committee entrusts you with the largest discretion as regards the forming of depots and your movements generally, but request that you will mark your routes as permanently as possible, by leaving records, sowing seeds, building cairns, and marking trees at as many points as possible consistent with your various other duties …
‘You will cause full reports to be furnished by your officers on any subject of interest, and forward them to Melbourne as often as may be practicable, without retarding the progress of the expedition. The Committee has caused the enclosed set of instructions to be drawn up, having relation to each department of science, and you are requested to hand each of the gentlemen a copy of that part more particularly relating to his department.’
(There follow instructions to Beckler, Becker and Wills on the geographic, geologic, meteorological, zoological and botanical aspects of the journey.)
It is an odd document. Even if one makes allowance for the fact that no one knew what was in the centre and that no maps existed its wording is extremely loose. Having reached Cooper’s Creek, Burke if he chose could go here, there or anywhere—north to the Gulf, west to the coast of Western Australia, or anywhere in between. This was juggling with thousands of miles of unexplored land as though it presented no more obstacle than the empty sea, and it placed an immense responsibility on the leader.
Burke, however, appears to have been content, and in fact he had a hand in drawing up his instructions, for he attended the Committee meetings every day. By now he was held by the Committee in high esteem, and they were eager to give him a free hand. But this was very far from being the case with everyone in the colony. The Age was now publishing letters protesting that the appointment of a leader without proper qualifications was absurd, and that neither the Committee nor any of the members of the expedition had had any real experience of the bush. Burke himself received a number of anonymous letters of a similar kind and was much upset. Others again were opposed to the whole enterprise on the grounds that if rich territory were discovered in the interior it would be damaging to Victoria’s commercial and pastoral interests.
Then there were the usual cranks; one man wrote to the Committee suggesting that the expedition should pay out a hose as it went along so as to ensure its water supply. Another recommended the use of a ‘fire-balloon’from which the country could be surveyed. A squatter warned the Committee that he would sue them if Burke’s camel’s scared his cattle on their way north.
But by now they were all much too involved and too excited to turn back or even consider major re-adjustments. Barkly informed the government in England that the party was about to set out, and asked that ‘instructions may be given to officers in Her Majesty’s navy, or others, likely to approach the northern coast, within the next year or two, to look out for and assist such of the number as may succeed in crossing’. Some weeks previously an assembly camp had been set up for the expedition in Royal Park, an open stretch of bushland outside the city, and every day there was a great come and go along the dusty track leading out there from the centre. A tented camp was put up for the men and wooden huts for the camels. The last farewells had begun. Dean Macartney held a special service for the Expedition, and at a public dinner given in Burke’s honour at Castlemaine the Reverend J. Storie declared, ‘If there really exists within our great continent a Sahara—a desert of sands, parent of hot winds, we should like to know the fact. If great lakes on whose verdant banks thousands of cattle might feed, tempt men to build new cities, let us know the character and the promise of the land by the true report of a true man.’ Modestly, Burke replied that he would do his best.
There also appears to be some evidence that Burke made a last proposal of marriage to Julia Matthews, who was then playing at the Princess Theatre in Melbourne, and that she said she would decide on his return.
So now they were all gathered at Royal Park, the Irish police officer, the acquisitive camel-dealer, the two German scientists, the studious young surveyor, the American goldminer, the assistants and the sepoys, the camels, the horses and the twenty-one tons of baggage. If there was an amateurish atmosphere about the scene, if indeed it bore some resemblance to a provincial circus taking the road, this was not at all apparent at the time. The fated feeling of a great adventure was in the air, and everyone connected with it was extremely agitated, hopeful and busy. The memory of the lost explorer Leichhardt was still very strong: was it possible that these men too would vanish into that mysterious space in the centre and never be heard from again? Probably no one believed that such a thing could happen: still the possibility was there, and Burke and his men were regarded with that special leave-taking emotion which surrounds young soldiers marching off to war.
On August 19, 1860, it was announced that everything was ready, and on the following day business in Melbourne was practically suspended while a huge crowd came out to Royal Park to see them off.