One
Terra Australis Incognita

‘Let any man 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.’

Charles Sturt, 1840

When Captain James Cook stood on the deck of the Endeavour in March 1770 and felt the hot dry winds filling her sails off Australia’s southern coast, he declared that the country’s interior would be nothing but desert. Nearly a century later, the same sultry breeze blew down from the heart of the continent, removing the morning chill from Melbourne’s Royal Park. As the sun rose, a small group of men emerged from the row of new canvas tents pitched under the gum trees. The warm air in their faces reminded them of the task that lay ahead.

It was Monday 20 August 1860—the day that Australia’s most elaborate and audacious expedition would set out to solve a geographical mystery that had confounded the European settlers since their arrival in Botany Bay in 1788. The Victorian Exploring Expedition was charged with crossing the driest inhabited continent on earth; an island the size of the United States of America, home to such extraordinary creatures as the kangaroo, the emu and the duck-billed platypus. What other strange beasts or lost civilisations might lie hidden in a land that had rebuffed European explorers for so long?

Despite the early hour, people were already making their way down Melbourne’s elegant boulevards, determined to catch a glimpse of the men, whom journalists had already dubbed ‘pioneers of civilisation and progress, some of who perchance might never return’. The crowds bustled towards the park expecting to see a highly organised operation. Instead, they found a scene of ‘picturesque confusion’.

Men rushed about, cursing under their breath as they tripped over the twenty tonnes of equipment that lay scattered on the grass. Artists jostled to find the best view and newspaper journalists elbowed their way through to examine the chaos. The Argus reported:

At one part, might be observed a couple of ‘associates’, already dressed in their expeditionary undress uniform (scarlet jumper, flannel trousers, and cabbage-tree hat), busily engaged in packing; at another, a sepoy might be seen occupied in tying together the legs of a sheep. Orders were being rapidly issued and rapidly executed, and there was, indeed, every indication of the approach of a movement of an extraordinary character.

Many spectators made straight for the specially constructed stables on one side of the park. They were intrigued by the strange bellowing noises and peculiar odour emanating from the building. Those who managed to thrust their way inside were rewarded with a glimpse of four ‘Indian’ sepoys, attired in white robes and red turbans, trying to calm a small herd of camels. Mochrani, Matvala, Gobin, Golah Singh, Linda, Tschibik and their companions had been imported to conquer the deserts of central Australia. The animals were the pride of the expedition and enjoyed a level of care normally reserved for visiting English opera singers. In preparation for the journey, they had each been fitted with a waterproof rug, complete with a hole for the hump, along with two sets of camel shoes, ‘each made of several folds of leather, and shod with iron’, designed for travelling over stony ground. Even river crossings had been catered for. ‘If it becomes necessary to swim the camels,’ boasted the Argus, ‘air bags are to be lashed under their jowls, so as to keep their heads clear when crossing deep streams.’

People milled about stroking, patting and getting in the way. Then, as the police tried to evict the inquisitive onlookers, pandemonium erupted outside. A passing horse had smelt the new beasts and, displaying the customary equine revulsion for the camel, it bolted through the crowd, throwing its rider and breaking her leg. Not to be outdone, a camel broke loose and chased a well-known police officer across the park:

The gentleman referred to is of large mould, and until we saw his tumbling feat yesterday, we had no idea that he was such a sprightly gymnast. His down-going and uprising were greeted with shouts of laughter, in which he good-naturedly joined. The erring camel went helter-skelter through the crowd, and was not secured until he showed to admiration how speedily can go ‘the ship of the desert’.

In the centre of the turmoil, standing on top of a wagon, was a tall flamboyant Irishman, with flashing blue eyes and a magnificent black beard. Shouting orders in a strong Galway accent, he was trying (and failing) to impose order on the mayhem below. Expedition leader Robert O’Hara Burke grew ever more impatient as he tried to squeeze too much equipment onto too few camels, horses and wagons.

The expedition was already running hopelessly behind schedule but, as fast as his men tried to organise the stores, more people descended in a frenzy of curiosity. They inspected the rifles and ammunition, sat down at the cedar-topped dinner tables and discussed the relative advantages of the bullock cart versus the American wagon. The expedition doctor, Hermann Beckler, recalled later, ‘no member of the expedition could see another, none could work with another, none could call another—such was the crush among the thousands who thronged to see our departure’.

The Victorian Exploring Expedition had been organised by a committee of Melbourne’s most important men. In July 1851 Victoria had proudly severed its ties with its parent colony of New South Wales and this grand enterprise was designed to show off the achievements of a new and ambitious colony. Every eventuality was catered for using the latest inventions. One ‘hospital camel’ was fitted with an enclosed stretcher, which would ‘afford capital accommodation for invalids, should sickness unfortunately visit the party’. In order to cope with dry conditions, each man carried a ‘pocket charcoal filter, by means of which he will be able to obtain drinkable water under the most unfavourable circumstances’, and should anyone get lost, the party carried ‘an abundance of signals, from the rocket and the blue light to the Union Jack and the Chinese gong’. As the Age remarked, ‘Never did an expedition set forth under, on the whole, brighter auspices. Everything that could possibly be furnished, as in any way useful or auxiliary to the expedition, has been given it.’ The problem was—where to put it all?

By lunchtime the crowd had swelled to around 15,000, a good turnout for a city of 120,000. An impromptu band was formed and a carnival atmosphere swept through the park, compounding the general disarray and giving the proceedings ‘a very gay and animated appearance’. Whispers began to circulate that certain ‘entertainments’ could be procured in the bushes around the edge of the park and a ‘sly grog shop’ opened up behind the camel stables.

By mid-afternoon an expedition member confirmed one of those rumours by appearing amongst the crowd ‘a little too hilarious through excess of beer’. Burke had already dismissed two of his party for disobedience and he now fired ex-policeman Owen Cowan on the spot. The expedition was three men down—and it had not even finished packing.

The only surviving photograph of the expedition leaving Royal Park shows Burke standing in the centre giving a speech to the city’s dignitaries.

One man avoided the revelry. Refusing to be interviewed or to have his photograph taken, a neatly dressed young Englishman stayed inside his tent, wrapping his scientific instruments and placing them inside purpose-built mahogany boxes. Surveyor, astronomer, meteorologist and third-in-command, William John Wills packed his nautical almanacs, sextant, compass, theodolite, chronometer, barometer, thermometer, anemometer, telescope, sketchbooks, notebooks, specimen jars and bottles of preserving fluid.

Wills was a born scientist. It was his mission to discover, record and explain the world around him, and now at the age of twenty-six he had the opportunity to cross an entire continent, from the Southern Ocean to the Gulf of Carpentaria. Wills had no doubt that scientific observation would soon dispel the mystique of the Australian interior as surely as it would explain away religion and other superstitions. He expected the journey to last more than two years.

The expedition had been due to depart at one o’clock in the afternoon but ‘hour after hour passed in preparation for starting’. After lunch the deputy leader, George Landells, who had special responsibility for the camels, delayed proceedings even further by losing his temper when it was suggested his animals should carry an extra 150 kilograms each. Burke was becoming flustered. With the city’s dignitaries waiting to offer the official farewell, he was facing the embarrassing prospect of having to leave with only half his party. Impulsively, and with little regard for the cost, he hired two extra American-style wagons and ordered that the rest of the supplies be loaded at once.

When the column of camels, horses and wagons finally assembled shortly before four o’clock, the mood became patriotic. It was as if the city of Melbourne was saluting its troops as they strode off into battle. Burke returned to his tent, changed into his explorer’s uniform and then addressed the crowd. For a man who often had plenty to say, his speech was awkward:

On behalf of myself and the Expedition I beg to return you my most sincere thanks. No expedition has ever started under such favourable circumstances as this. The people, the government, the committee—they all have done heartily what they could do. It is now our turn; and we shall never do well till we justify what you have done in showing what we can do!

In private Burke was more forthright. ‘I will cross Australia,’ he told his friends, ‘or perish in the attempt.’

As the band struck up ‘Cheer, Boys, Cheer’, the crowd applauded and the explorers began to march. It was an exotic cavalcade. Dressed in traditional ‘oriental’ attire, George Landells took the lead on an enormous bull camel, waving to the spectators and relishing the attention. Burke followed on Billy, his favourite grey horse, and behind him came the Indian sepoys, the scientists, the packhorses and the American-style wagons. The entire procession was half a kilometre long. ‘Never have we seen such a manifestation of heartfelt interest in any public undertaking as on this occasion,’ the Argus declared, ‘the oldest dwellers in Australia have experienced nothing equal to it.’

Among the vehicles swaying out of Royal Park was one extraordinary contraption. It was a wagon designed so that ‘at a very short notice it can be taken off the wheels, and put to all the uses of a river punt, carrying an immense load high and dry on the water’. This elaborate construction revealed the general uncertainty about what lay ahead for the explorers. Some believed the Australian interior would reveal nothing more than a vast desert, others fantasised about mountain ranges, fertile plains, lost civilisations and wild animals unknown to science. A few believed the semi-submersible wagon might be needed to sail across an inland sea. The truth was—nobody knew.

It was 4.30 when the expedition left the park. Ahead lay a journey of at least 5000 kilometres, the equivalent of marching from London to Moscow and back, or making the round trip from New York to Las Vegas. As the rousing speeches faded away and the crowd dispersed, the magnitude of the task became apparent. Several of the wagons became bogged in the soft ground at the edge of the park. One broke down completely just beyond the camels’ manure heap.

By the time Burke coaxed his recalcitrant convoy out of Melbourne in 1860, it was the age of overland exploration. Most of the world’s great maritime voyages were over and every continent bar Antarctica found itself being poked, prodded and plundered by scientists, missionaries, traders and tyrants. In the course of the nineteenth century Lewis and Clark blazed the Oregon Trail, William Wallace formulated evolutionary theory in south-east Asia, David Livingstone disappeared into the depths of the Zambezi and Friedrich von Humboldt traversed Venezuela, gingerly cataloguing the properties of the electric eel.

Australia revealed its secrets with reluctance. Unlike America, where the pioneers had spread out west as fast as their wagons could carry them, Australia’s first colonies were convict settlements. The last thing the British government had in mind was a mass exploration of the surrounding area. This policy of containment was assisted by the foundation of Sydney in 1788 beside the natural prison of the Great Dividing Range. The new immigrants spent the first few decades simply trying to survive, and when they felt secure enough to travel further afield they found they were pinned to the east coast by the towering sandstone cliffs of the Blue Mountains.

Some convicts were convinced that China lay on the other side of the range, others told stories of fearsome warriors, savage kingdoms and dangerous wild animals. These myths were propagated by overworked army officers, keen to emphasise the lurid consequences of escape from the prison farms. But as conditions in Sydney improved, and the fetters of convict society were loosened, pioneers spilled north and south searching for new pastures along the edges of the continent and helped set up the cities of Melbourne, Adelaide and Brisbane.

Despite the opportunity to explore a landmass of 7.5 million square kilometres (about two-thirds the size of Europe), the new settlers showed a marked hesitancy to leave the coast. It seems strange that a new society could cling to the hemline of its adopted continent for so long without knowing what lay in the centre—but with a small population and plenty of fertile soil, there was little incentive to travel inland. Even today, more than 80 per cent of the Australian population live within thirty kilometres of the coast.

As the towns grew into cities, people came to regard ‘the bush’ with a mixture of apathy and apprehension. They might never have seen a koala or a wombat in the wild; the nearest they came to a kangaroo was when they walked over the skin rugs in their English-style cottages. The subtle olive-greens and silver-greys of the eucalypt forests seemed pallid in comparison. Settlers like John Sherer in the 1850s regarded the Australian landscape as a source of tedium and discomfort:

There can be no walk, no journey of any kind, more monotonous than one through the bush…there is no association of the past connected with it…Imagination is at a standstill—fairly bogged, as your body may be in a mud swamp. There are no sacred graves…no birthplaces of great men. Nothing of this kind; all is deadly dull, uninspiring hard work.

The first attempts to penetrate further inland were often individual excursions by ambitious farmers. They took off into the unknown, armed with little more than a swag, a rifle and a healthy dose of enthusiasm. Little by little, these unsung heroes of Australian exploration extended their knowledge of the surrounding countryside. They might discover abundant grasslands and giant forests or stumble over nuggets of gold. But as they fumbled further afield, the fertile coastal safety net gave way and the landscape assumed a more menacing aspect.

In 1858, a farmer known as Coulthard set out alone to find new pastures to the north of Adelaide. His mummified body was later discovered by a government expedition. Before he died, he scratched a last message into his empty water bottle:

I never reached water…My Tung is stkig to my mouth and I see what I have wrote I know it is this is the last time I may have of expressing feeling alive & the feeling exu is lost for want of water My ey Dassels My tong burn. I can see no More God Help

It was only when the politicians realised that there was money to be made from the new grazing lands that a full-scale assault on the inland began. The countryside was attacked with military-style expeditions using columns of horses and bullock carts to carry enormous quantities of supplies into the bush. Drawings from the early nineteenth century show men wearing starched collars and impressive moustaches, clinging to their European traditions with admirable, if misguided, tenacity. After a hard day in the field, the officers would retire to their separate quarters and dress for dinner. In the middle of nowhere, they sat down at large oak tables, ate their three-course dinners with silver cutlery, sipped their wine and wiped their chins with spotless white napkins.

By the 1830s, the most imperious of all the government explorers, Surveyor-General Sir Thomas Livingstone Mitchell, was marching around New South Wales doing battle with the complexities of its river systems. Apart from being notoriously bad-tempered, Mitchell won recognition for opening up huge areas of grazing land in the far north-west of the colony, but when it came to unravelling the south-eastern rivers he faced a series of humiliating defeats.

Many of the waterways were boomerang-shaped, and just when Mitchell was convinced he knew where they were heading, they had a bizarre tendency to curve inland and flow in the ‘wrong’ direction. This led Mitchell’s great rival, Charles Sturt, to conclude that rivers like the Murray and the Murrumbidgee must eventually drain into an ocean in the middle of the continent. Why else, he reasoned, did seagulls mysteriously appear from the interior in certain years? Sturt was so confident that he pioneered the technique of building wagons that could be converted into small boats. With backing from the South Australian government, he set off from Adelaide in 1844, heading north on a ‘voyage’ towards the centre of the continent.

While Eyre and Leichhardt explored Australia’s coastal fringes, Sturt penetrated the interior in his quest for the inland sea.

For a man convinced he was about to ‘launch into an unknown sea and run away towards the tropics’, it was a heartbreaking journey. The grass turned to rock and the cool winds of the coast were replaced by searing blasts of air slicing across the treeless plains. As Sturt continued north, the waterholes dried up and the colour green seemed to vanish from the spectrum. At every turn he was confronted by vistas of sand, salt and clay. After 600 kilometres, his party became trapped between an expanse of gleaming white salt lakes and towering red dunes, ‘the most forbidding that our eyes had wandered over’, he concluded.

Tormented by mirages, Sturt continued north-west. With a commendable sense of irony he described himself ‘as lonely as a ship at sea’, stuck in a giant maze of sandhills, ‘which looked like the ocean swells rising before us’. Not only had he failed to find the inland sea, he and his men were now marooned in one of the most unforgiving landscapes Australia possesses. ‘The truth flashed across my mind,’ he wrote, ‘that we were locked up in the desolated and heated region that we had penetrated, as effectually as if we had wintered at the Pole.’

After an agonising summer, entombed in a small rocky gorge he named Depot Glen, Sturt mustered his last reserves for a final journey north. He emerged to find his way was barred by ‘gibber plains’—enormous expanses of bare earth covered in nothing but small purplish-red rocks.

The area became known as Sturt’s Stony Desert and it was to plague Australian explorers for decades to come. Geologists believe it is the relic of an ancient plateau that has been eroded over millions of years to leave belts of rocky plains intersected by sand dunes. The earth is rich in iron and it is the process of oxidation that gives the desert its distinctive colours. The average rainfall is less than 130 millimetres per year. During a drought, there is not a sign of life anywhere.

Sturt’s party stumbled onward. As the stones sizzled in the sunlight, it was like crossing a giant barbecue. Within hours their boots were in tatters. The expedition’s dog lost all the skin from its paws. Sturt didn’t realise it, but he was travelling at the height of one of the fiercest summers ever to be recorded.

The expedition was saved by the kind of geographical miracle that Australia sometimes reserves for those with sufficient perseverance. A chain of waterholes lined with coolibah trees seemed to appear from nowhere. The pools were linked by a series of channels to form a delicate ephemeral river system. This precious water was known to the Aborigines as Kini-papa. On 9 November 1845, Sturt named it ‘Cooper’s Creek’ after a South Australian judge.

It was only a temporary reprieve for the exhausted explorers. Every time Sturt tried to leave the creek, the countryside reverted to a waterless wasteland. A terrible drought gripped the country. Even the local Aboriginal tribes were struggling to survive. There is no water, they told Sturt—‘the sun has taken it’.

After months of torment, Charles Sturt’s disappointment turned to despair. Sick with scurvy and exhaustion, he conceded defeat and turned south on 11 November 1845. The surveyor abandoned his small wooden boat on the edge of the desert—and with it his dreams of an inland sea.

With so much of Australia’s landmass unexplored, the continent proved irresistible to European scientists and adventurers who had run out of discoveries closer to home. Ludwig Leichhardt turned out to be an exceptional explorer. Educated in Prussia, he arrived in Australia in 1841, determined to learn everything about his new environment. His training in zoology, botany, geography, geology and meteorology was so extensive that even Thomas Mitchell was impressed and hired him as a naturalist for several journeys around northern New South Wales.

The Major was less enamoured when, in 1846, he learned that his protégé had led a privately funded expedition from Brisbane to the British settlement of Port Essington, north of the site of Darwin. While Leichhardt blazed a trail through 4800 kilometres of largely uncharted territory, Mitchell was at home polishing his sextant and waiting for government funding for the same journey.

Leichhardt returned to Sydney a hero but his glory was short-lived. His second expedition ended prematurely when heavy rain set in, bogging his wagons and giving his men a ‘dose of fever’. Undeterred, he set off again from Roma (to the west of Brisbane) on 4 April 1848. It was a substantial party with seven men, fifty bullocks, 270 goats, seven horses, tents, rifles, ammunition and tonnes of supplies—yet it vanished into the wilderness and was never seen again. To this day, no verifiable trace of the expedition has ever been found.

Leichhardt’s disappearance provided another incentive to investigate the mystery of Australia’s centre. The New South Wales government asked surveyor Augustus Gregory to search for the lost scientist. Before he left, the methodical and cautious Gregory wrote to Thomas Mitchell asking for his advice. The Major refused ‘in a most discourteous manner’.

After Mitchell discovered the Barcoo River in 1846 and Leichhardt disappeared in 1848, Gregory forged a route through the deserts to Adelaide.

Gregory was one of the first explorers to dispense with the trappings of comfort, travelling instead on horseback with a minimum of supplies. Between 1855 and 1858, he made a series of ambitious expeditions around the fringes of the central Australian deserts, but his efforts were frustrated by the lack of water. As Gregory explored the north-west of the continent, even major rivers like the Victoria, which settlers hoped might turn out to be Australia’s Mississippi, splintered into thousands of rivulets and drained away into the arid land beyond. Gregory’s last hope of reaching the core of Australia was a watercourse he had named after Charles Sturt, but it too evaporated amongst the dunes:

Having followed Sturts Creek for nearly 300 miles, we have been disappointed in our hope that it would lead to some important outlet to the waters of the Australian interior. It has, however, enabled us to penetrate far into the level tract of country which may be termed the Great Australian Desert.

It was the final straw. Gregory gave up chasing the ghosts of lost scientists and invisible rivers—instead he decided to test a theory of his own.

In the 1840s, the explorer Edward Eyre had tried to penetrate the centre of Australia by travelling due north from Adelaide but he was repeatedly thwarted by an impassable ‘horseshoe’ of salt lakes. Eyre’s furthest point was a peak he named Mount Hopeless because the desolate view from the summit destroyed all his hopes of progressing any further. Gregory was convinced that if he attacked the problem from the opposite direction, he could travel south down Cooper Creek, via Mount Hopeless to Adelaide, thus establishing a route from the heart of the desert back down to the coast.

The journey was difficult even for an experienced party but, after crossing a large tract of barren terrain, Gregory emerged triumphant on the southern side of Mount Hopeless. It was the closest anyone had come so far to crossing the ‘Great Australian Desert’, but it had not quite solved the puzzle. There was still about 1300 kilometres of unexplored country between the Cooper and the north coast of Australia. Gregory’s assessment of its potential was hardly enthusiastic:

The universal character of the country along the boundary is level sandy desert or worthless scrub without any sign of change in advancing into the interior beyond that of increasing sterility, caused by the greater aridity of the climate, while not one single stream emanates from this inhospitable region, to indicate ranges of hills, better soil or climate.

Since Gregory’s expeditions were largely funded by the New South Wales government, his pessimistic conclusions might have been exaggerated in order to deter land speculators from deserting the Sydney market. Nevertheless, his reports fuelled the popular perception that the Australian interior was nothing more than ‘a scene of awful desolation, a sterile solitude, without a trace of verdure or a sign of life’.

Stories of Australia’s ‘dead heart’ grew until the hellish descriptions of an immense impenetrable void seduced prospective explorers, eager for the heroic challenge of taming such an implacable enemy. The catchcry ‘There’s nothing out there’ started in the mid-nineteenth century, and it is a myth that permeates urban Australian culture to this day.

It wasn’t just the Australian deserts that repelled the European settlers. The northern regions had been just as unpopular ever since the vagabond explorer William Dampier landed on the north-west coast in 1688 and reported that:

The land is of a dry sandy soil, destitute of water…the woods are not thick nor the trees very big…We saw no sort of animal, nor any track of beast, but once. Neither is the sea very plentifully stored unless you reckon the manatee and turtle as such.

After this derogatory assessment, no one bothered with the north or west coast for some time. It wasn’t until the British became suspicious of the French poking around in the area that they dispatched, first Matthew Flinders (the man who gave Australia its name) and later Phillip Parker King, John Wickham and John Stokes to survey the northern coastline.

Each naval expedition found itself beset by the same problems. Unable to penetrate the estuaries and swamps, the sailors found only ‘a continuous mass of mangroves, mosquitoes, mud and mosquitoes’. The natives seemed equally unhospitable. In 1839 Commander Wickham nearly lost two men who had gone ashore to fix the ship’s compass. As they made their repairs, a party of Aborigines appeared, wielding their spears in an unfriendly manner. With great presence of mind, the men folded their arms and began a vigorous demonstration of the sailor’s hornpipe. So bemused were the warriors that they threw down their weapons and roared with laughter while the sailors danced for their lives on the beach below. The area, east of Darwin, was later named Escape Cliff.

These miserable reports of hostile tribes, predatory crocodiles and over-enthusiastic insects were unlikely to inspire colonisation—but with an eye to the area’s strategic location on the edge of south-east Asia, the British made a couple of half-hearted attempts to establish settlements near the present-day city of Darwin. In the 1830s and 1840s, small groups of unfortunate soldiers and civilians were dumped on the north coast, told to uphold the honour of the empire—and then left to fend for themselves. Most traders sailed straight past them, preferring the established ports of Singapore and Indonesia to these pestilent naval garrisons. In the tropical heat, the new communities were soon strangled by fever. After visiting the settlement of Victoria on the Cobourg Peninsula in 1848, Thomas Huxley described it as, ‘the most useless, miserable, ill-managed hole in Her Majesty’s dominions’.

By 1860 nearly two-thirds of Australia remained unexplored. The oldest continent on earth seemed to have evolved an ability to repel the new immigrants for longer than almost anywhere else on earth bar the polar ice-caps. It was almost as if the unreachable centre was taunting the cities developing around its perimeter. The desert remained oblivious to nearly a century of European colonisation. Its indigenous inhabitants lived and died as they had always done and, on the banks of Cooper Creek, the old coolibah trees stood unmolested, their roots responding to the floods and droughts that had dictated the rhythms of the interior for thousands of years. But the tranquillity would not last forever.