‘The explorations of Mr John McDouall Stuart may truly be said, without disparaging his brother explorers, to be amongst the most important in the history of Australian discovery.’
WILLIAM HARDMAN, EDITOR OF THE JOURNALS OF JOHN MCDOUALL STUART
IT’S A LONG way from Fife in Scotland to the Australian outback. And I’m not just talking about physical distance.
In summer, temperatures in the arid zone of the outback can top 45°C. In winter, they can drop below freezing. The desert lands are so vast you can travel for days without meeting anyone or anything. And while nowadays it’s possible to take tourist trips into the outback, or go on bushcraft tours, in the mid-nineteenth century very few people had dared to venture far into the Australian heartland. They preferred to keep to the exterior, where it was fertile. Where there was water. Where the temperatures were less extreme.
All of which makes it intriguing that the outback’s most persistent explorer was a Scot. His refusal to let the stark, grim, unrelentingly severe conditions of the Australian interior beat him, means that now many national monuments are named after him.
And with good reason.
The man in question was John McDouall Stuart, and he was one of the toughest – and some might say most eccentric – explorers in history.
*
Stuart left Scotland for Australia at the age of 23.
He was five foot six inches tall and weighed less than nine stone. On the voyage out, he was found on deck clutching a blood-soaked handkerchief to his mouth. Ordinarily that was a sign of tuberculosis. In this case it was a symptom of the stomach ulcers that would plague him all his life.
You wouldn’t think, to look at him, that he would turn out to be one of the toughest men in the fifty-year-old colony. But tough explorers aren’t ever made in a mould. They become tough by displaying spirit and determination against overwhelming odds. Stuart was made from that stock.
When he arrived in Australia, he started work as a surveyor, marking out blocks of land for new settlers in the semi-arid bush. There he learned to love the remote areas of the Australian inland.
Stuart also developed a reputation for excellent bushcraft skills. As a result, he was approached by the British explorer, Captain Charles Sturt, to join him on his 1844 expedition inland.
The plan was to explore north-western New South Wales and then head on further into Central Australia. They managed this with a small team, but the expedition had a brutal effect on their health. Captain Sturt suffered acute scurvy in the desert interior; as the expedition wore on he became almost blind. Good job he had Stuart with him, who was able to use his excellent surveying skills to map the areas they travelled.
But Stuart also grew very seriously ill with scurvy, not to mention persistent ulcers and beriberi – a horrific illness that can cause paralysis, vomiting and mental impairment. When Stuart returned he was so thin you could see his bones, his gums were bleeding profusely, his teeth were loose and his muscles wasted. He was bedridden for months, and his doctor didn’t think he’d survive.
You’d think an experience like that might put him off exploring this forbidding landscape for ever. It didn’t.
Stuart liked it in the bush. Where other people saw an empty wasteland, he saw much more. He saw how watching flocks of birds, or following cracks of rocks, could lead you to precious water. He learned to make shelters from stringybark. He could employ his surveying skills to navigate accurately, using compass bearings and landmarks. He became sensitive to subtle changes in the landscape.
It was as if he was at one, naturally, with this harsh environment.
As the months and years passed, Stuart spent more time in the bush than in the towns. And, in May 1858, when he was 42 years old, he set off on his first major expedition.
The plan was to explore the area beyond the Oratunga mine in the Flinders mountains of South Australia, where no white person had set foot. Ever.
Around the same time, an explorer named Benjamin Herschel Babbage was preparing for a similar, but much better-funded, expedition. Babbage and his men were to take with them such luxuries as 20 kilos of chocolate, 38 kilos of German sausage, 150 sheep and two 22-litre water condensers.
The tough, weather-beaten Stuart and his two companions took, in total, just six horses, a compass, and four weeks’ worth of the most basic rations.
Stuart and his men headed into the bush. They came to the vast salt lake – now known as Lake Torrens – 200 kilometres wide and 30 kilometres long. The temperatures were burning hot. The land gave them nothing to drink.
They found a member of Babbage’s team. That expedition had not been a great success, and one of their number had been left behind by the others.
He was dead. His skin had shrunk tight against his skeleton and browned ‘like the top of the drum’. Driven wild by thirst, he had cut the throats of three pack horses so he could drink their blood. The true horror of his final moments, though, was scratched in a few words on his metal water bottle as he lay there dying:
‘My eyes dazzle. My tongue burns. I can see no way. God help, I can’t get up …’
It was the kind of place that sucked the very life out of those not hardy enough to endure it.
Stuart spent four months in this harsh environment. He travelled 2,400 kilometres. No wonder that he returned to civilization with a growing reputation as the toughest explorer of the age.
But the truth was, he’d barely even started.
*
Stuart was as weather-beaten and rugged as his surroundings. He was certainly no gentleman, and had a taste for strong rum. He was, according to one report, ‘not only the beastliest drunkard but the dirtiest man I ever had to deal with’. Or to use the words of a 14-year-old boy who once met him: ‘He is such a funny little man, he is always drunk … on coming off one of his long journeys, he shut himself up in a room, and was drunk for three days.’
He must have come across as a pretty crazy guy – and getting crazier – but he obviously didn’t much care what other people thought of him. He avoided company. He avoided crowds. This was a man who lived to explore.
At the time, South Australia was completely cut off from the northern coast. There was no road cutting across the continent, and there was no telegraph wire.
If somebody could find a route from coast to coast – say, from Adelaide in the south to Darwin in the north – both roads and wire could be built. It would mean that South Australia would have a link with the north and, by extension, to the rest of the world.
Stuart made the discovery of such a route his driving goal in life.
Most explorers give themselves plenty of time to recuperate after expeditions such as Stuart’s punishing trek of 1858 into the outback. The body needs time to heal. So, sometimes, does the mind.
But Stuart didn’t have the time or the inclination for anything as comforting as rest and recuperation. He wanted to get back in the saddle.
And so, a few months later, in 1859, he launched another assault on the harsh interior of Australia. He found himself a second-in-command called William Kekwick.
Stuart had learned a great deal about how to be a leader when he had been part of Captain Sturt’s team – or, rather, how not to be a leader. Remarkably, by the end of that expedition, Sturt hadn’t even known Stuart’s Christian name.
When Stuart and Kekwick found undiscovered springs near Mount Eyre, on the other hand, Stuart named them after his second-in-command. He may have been the beastliest drunkard and the grubbiest man in town, but he knew how to look after his men. And it would be a source of personal pride to him that, in all the gruelling journeys he ever made to the Australian interior, no men ever died on any of his expeditions.
Although he very nearly lost his own life. Many times.
Stuart completed a total of three such expeditions in 1859, with barely time to catch his breath between them. Come 1860, he allowed himself only two months’ rest before hurling himself back at the arid wastelands. He instructed Kekwick to gather ten good men. His second-in-command came back with only one – an unfit and unimpressive young man called Ben Head.
Nobody else would dare to brave such a crazy endeavour.
Stuart wasn’t put off by the lack of a great team. His unconventional method of exploring was to travel light and fast. So, the three of them set out to discover the very centre of Australia.
It was a punishing expedition by anyone’s standards. Unexpected rain spoiled their supplies, meaning they had to carry on with half-rations. Ben Head – a big lad to start off with – lost half his body weight. Water became horribly scarce. Stuart went down with scurvy, and he started to go blind in his right eye. Despite all this, they found – roughly speaking – the centre of Australia, but they knew they couldn’t go any further north and survive. They had to head back.
This was easier said than done.
They were in a terrible state. Lack of water meant they had to go miles out of their way to track down springs. From sheer exhaustion, Stuart fell from his horse and badly injured his shoulder. The scurvy, which was affecting all of them, made their tanned skin turn yellow, then green, then black.
And if that wasn’t enough, they had to deal with some Aboriginals who didn’t take kindly to trespassing on what they saw as their land.
Ordinarily, Stuart got on well with the indigenous Australians he encountered on his travels. Not this time.
In their badly weakened state, they came across the Warumungu tribe. These Aboriginals set about them aggressively, raiding their camp and stealing their supplies. They hurled weapons at the explorers’ horses and set fire to the dry grass around their encampment.
The three men had no choice but to run – while they still could.
Starving, scurvy-ridden and with no supplies, they struggled on through the arid wasteland. But they never gave up, and refused to let the desert beat them. They eventually reached civilization, barely alive.
True to form, less than three months later, Stuart was off – again.
*
By now, the fame of this crazed, wild explorer was such that the South Australian government was willing to fund him in his attempt to find the vital route from the south coast to the north coast. Kekwick struggled to keep his drunken boss sober before their departure, but Stuart eventually led eleven men, plus horses and a dog called Toby, north. This was his largest expedition yet.
It was scorching hot. Unseasonably so. They soon lost some horses and the dog to the heat, and the uncompromising Stuart sent a couple of his men back south when it was clear they weren’t up to this extreme undertaking.
The rest of them pushed north, past the centre of the country and within 500 kilometres of the north coast. Over a period of nine weeks, Stuart personally led eleven attempts to break through the arid plains that would lead them north. Eleven times he was forced to retreat in order to stay alive.
Eventually, he had to concede defeat. He returned to the south coast full of anger and humiliation. The terrain had beaten him – badly.
But he wasn’t going to stay beaten for long.
The search for a route across Australia was dominating his life. Nothing was going to get in his way. Neither money, nor even his own dramatically deteriorating health.
He was a man on a mission. I know that feeling. Obstacles don’t matter. Nor does the prospect of pain and hardship. The goal is all-consuming.
He allowed himself just a month to recuperate, before having another go.
This time, in October 1861, he led ten men and seventy-one horses into the outback. Most of them were drunk as they set out, and onlookers had the enjoyment of watching them falling off their mounts. Were these really the individuals that would find a route all the way across Australia?
To do what no man had ever done before?
It didn’t seem likely at first, especially not when their leader also fell off his horse, only to have another horse stamp on his hand. The impact and weight of the horse mangled the tendons and dislocated the joint. Infection set in, and for a while it looked as if Stuart would need the hand amputated.
But it healed – enough, at least, for the team to press on. They crossed through the centre of Australia, but each time they tried to break through to the northern coast the brutal climate and a lack of water sent them back. This happened five times until, finally, on the sixth attempt, Stuart located a series of watering holes where his men could rehydrate.
Refreshed, the men pressed onwards. They soon reached a tributary of the Adelaide River. Stuart knew his journey was almost at an end. This was terrain that had been previously mapped by other explorers. If they could cross it, so could he.
And so, after six months of arduous trekking through the outback, they finally broke through to the northern sea. Stuart was the first to stagger across the beach and wash his hands and face in the Indian Ocean.
Victory, at last. But Stuart didn’t stick around to rest, or to lap up praise.
Twenty-four hours later he turned round and started the return journey. A mere 3,100 kilometres.
And it was now that his problems really started.
You can’t expose yourself to those sort of brutal extremes without it putting unimaginable stress on your body. And, despite his incredible resilience, Stuart’s battles with the outback were beginning to show.
It wasn’t just that the men were short of rations, or that, as they headed south, their horses started dying. It was Stuart’s right shoulder which succumbed first. A burning pain developed and spread across his body – so much so that he had trouble breathing.
His eyes, already damaged by the searing sunlight he’d exposed them to over the previous few years, became next to useless. The master navigator became reliant on others to find his way. (At least they had the detailed maps he had already prepared during his wanderings.)
Their water supplies dried up, and they frequently went for three days without a drink. Three days without food is bad enough; three days without water, in that kind of heat, and your body starts poisoning itself – never mind the all-consuming pain that a parched throat and swollen tongue brings on, you really have reached the limit of a human’s ability to survive.
In their desperation, the riders would pack lumps of clay into their handkerchiefs and squeeze them in an attempt to try to get some moisture out.
Stuart’s legs turned black. His shivering, sweating body was overcome with fever.
Scurvy had wormed its way into his gums, which were covered in festering sores and bleeding profusely. Everything he ate tasted of his own blood.
With their rations running perilously low, they found a nest full of wild puppies. Survival is rarely pretty. They boiled the puppies and ate them.
On the brink of death and unable to speak, Stuart finally indicated his permission to slaughter one of the horses – something he’d never normally do. His men made a nourishing soup out of the horse’s lips. It gave Stuart just enough strength to continue until, finally, after forty-four weeks of crippling exploration, he and his men made it back down to the south coast. A miracle in itself. A testament of courage, grit and endurance.
Stuart was so ill he was ordered to rest, or die. That didn’t stop the rest of Adelaide turning out to have a massive street party in his honour.
Stuart’s heroic persistence and skill had allowed him to succeed where almost anyone else would have failed. But his days of exploration were over. He’d given it his all, achieved his ultimate aim, and now his body couldn’t take any more.
Eighteen months later he left Australia for good.
Tragically, he died at the age of 50, lonely and penniless in London, where he lived with his sister. His body was totally worn out. Burnt out.
His funeral was attended by just seven people.
Now he lies buried in Kensal Green cemetery – half a world away from the continent where his greatest feats of exploration were conceived and executed. His epic accomplishments didn’t earn him great wealth, or even great fame in his own country. But those fickle masters never really mattered to him. He’d done what he set out to do. And he’d done it well.
Now his name remains immortalized, from the south coast of Australia to the north. The Stuart Highway, linking Adelaide to Darwin, bears his name, as does Mount Stuart, which he discovered in the interior. And there are many other statues and memorials in his name throughout Australia.
In short, his achievements have now, finally, and rightly, been recognized. Goals of that scale demand sacrifice, and they also demand that we ignore the suffering that so often accompanies ambitious callings.
And a little dose of eccentricity so often goes hand in hand with such endeavours.
I embrace that. And I salute Stuart’s quirks, his foibles, and his refusal to conform.
Huge goals require big character. And John McDouall Stuart was as big as they get.