Two
Marvellous Melbourne

‘Nothing will ever be attempted if all possible objections must first be overcome.’

Samuel Johnson

Dr David Wilkie was an explorer of the armchair variety, a distinguished city physician who had never ventured further than the odd country picnic. So it was somewhat surprising when, in 1857, he suggested that Victoria mount a grand expedition to search for Ludwig Leichhardt and unlock the secrets of Australia’s enigmatic core.

When Wilkie announced his plan to the November meeting of Melbourne’s Philosophical Institute, it was met with bewilderment. The members debated the idea and then responded as they would many times over the next three years. They formed a committee and ordered a report on the matter.

The Philosophical Institute had been formed in 1855. It was the sort of semi-social, semi-scientific organisation that inevitably sprang up amongst the educated classes in cities throughout the British empire. A few of its members were professionals, a few were self-taught amateurs and the rest were either enthusiastic eccentrics or committed social climbers. They normally confined themselves to obscure papers on such subjects as ‘The Nature of Whirlwinds’ or ‘The Acclimatisation of the Llama’, but the idea of a transcontinental expedition appealed to their sense of importance. Perhaps it was time for the infant colony of Victoria to prove itself with a daring bid to open up the centre of the continent.

Despite a generous thirty-two members, the new Exploration Committee, headed by Melbourne’s mayor Dr Richard Eades, boasted just two men with practical experience in the art of geographical discovery: the naturalist William Blandowski, who had led some small scientific collecting parties, and the government botanist Baron Ferdinand von Mueller, who had been with Augustus Gregory in northern Australia.

When Wilkie’s plan was shown to Gregory, the explorer dismissed it as ‘almost hopeless’. Mueller then suggested that a light party should be sent out from Melbourne to the Darling River on a sort of apprenticeship journey for fledgling explorers. It could establish a depot just beyond the settled areas and the experience gained could be used to mount a more ambitious expedition at a later date. This new idea confused matters further. After much deliberation, the Exploration Committee only succeeded in producing another long and ultimately inconclusive report.

Representing many of Melbourne’s most powerful men, the Royal Society was often lampooned by satirists sceptical of its scientific credibility.

A month later, on 22 December, a group of men with top hats and mutton-chop whiskers could be found hanging around on Melbourne’s Collins Street, loosening their starched collars and cursing the Christmas heatwave. The members of the Philosophical Institute had gathered for their meeting—only to find the violinists from the Philharmonic Orchestra had beaten them to it. Tempers flared as the musicians ‘fiddled away happily’ inside and the institute’s secretary searched for alternative accommodation.

The anger over the lecture halls mix-up set the tone for the rest of the meeting. Mueller’s report provoked a series of furious arguments. ‘How could Victoria hope to cross the entire continent when it had no explorers and no one with any experience to lead the party?’ shouted the institute’s secretary John Macadam, a man of many professions including doctor, pathologist, chemist and university lecturer. ‘How many men would venture on a larger expedition until they had gained some experience on a smaller one?’ ‘Dozens! Dozens! Dozens!’ screamed Blandowski. ‘Two stockmen—yes, two stockmen, by Gott—would gallop across the whole distance and be back in five weeks!’

Ignoring the chairman Dr Richard Eades’ pleas for calm, the committee continued to fling amendments in every direction. Some wanted a return to Wilkie’s proposal, others wanted an expansion of Mueller’s plan, and Blandowski disagreed loudly with everyone.

It was the discovery of gold that gave Victoria the financial luxury to argue about exploration. In 1851, several large nuggets were found near Ballarat and then Bendigo, north-west of Melbourne. The strikes had a magnetic effect on the population.

The countryside was soon crawling with men pushing wheelbarrows down muddy tracks towards the goldfields. By 1853 a thousand ships a year were arriving in Melbourne. Lieutenant-Governor La Trobe despaired as everyone from bank clerks to police officers headed for the hills. ‘Cottages are deserted,’ he complained, ‘houses are to let, business is at a standstill, and even schools are closed. In some suburbs not a man is left.’ The Argus couldn’t resist poking fun, printing a mock dispatch from La Trobe to his colonial masters:

My Lord,

As nearly all my officers have ‘sloped’ for our extravagantly rich diggings, I am obliged to write my despatches with my own hand; besides having to clean my own boots, groom my horse, and do a little amateur wood chopping. I have no clerks and no constables. High and low are at Mt Alexander and, between ourselves, are doing more real work in a day than they used to spread comfortably enough over a month… Yours, in a hurry, as I fear the chops are burning.

Those who left the city to make their fortune soon discovered that life in the diggings was not what they had expected. Once the surface nuggets had been removed, mining was a back-breaking slog in the mud with a pick and shovel. Most people lived in filth under makeshift tarpaulins strung out between the few gum trees that remained standing. Food and supplies were sold at vastly inflated prices and many miners made only enough to drink themselves senseless at the sly-grog shops, which popped up like mushrooms around the shanty towns.

Those who did strike it lucky returned to the city to demonstrate that there was no one more generous than a successful miner with a few drinks under his belt. One digger bought the entire stock of champagne from a Melbourne hotel, emptied it into a horse trough and invited all and sundry to drink it; another donated a full set of solid gold horseshoes to be put on display in the city centre. Onlookers were astonished to find that they had been fitted and used.

Gold transformed life in Melbourne. Imposing sandstone buildings resplendent with columns and carvings began to appear around the city centre. A huge public garden was opened next to the River Yarra. It boasted a bandstand, a menagerie, a dance floor and a theatre. At weekends visitors could watch re-enactments of the burning of Moscow or the eruption of Vesuvius, and at night there were spectacular fireworks displays. Outings to the theatre became popular, particularly among miners looking for an excuse to pick up women. The venues and the shows were as lavish as they were vulgar. One of Melbourne’s favourite theatres was renowned for its saloon bar dubiously named ‘The Saddling Enclosure’.

By the end of the 1850s gold had catapulted Melbourne from a primitive muddy port to the most magnificent colonial city in the southern hemisphere. Victoria’s population jumped to half a million people, many of whom were engaged directly or indirectly in the production of one third of the world’s supply of bullion. Melbourne was, claimed the celebrated polymath Archibald Michie, ‘as comfortable, as elegant, as luxuriously lit, as any place out of London or Paris’.

As Victoria’s wealth spiralled, so did its scientific and cultural aspirations. The growing sense of sophistication brought with it a feeling of shame that large portions of the continent were unmapped, unnamed and—to European eyes—unclaimed. Melburnians might marvel at aeronauts ascending to the skies in giant balloons, or wonder at the African lions in their latest travelling zoo—but no one could say for sure what lay between the city and the north coast.

In this era of opulence the centre of Australia was an insult to the colonial mind; a rebellious outlaw that refused to be parcelled up and tied down by lines of latitude and longitude. The newspapers began to call for a resumption of the colony’s early enthusiasm for exploration, with one columnist lamenting, ‘That the interior of this continent should still remain shrouded in mystery, is a national reproach to the Australian communities in general but especially to Victoria.’

Victoria, however, was the least likely of all the Australian territories to solve the continent’s geographical conundrums. It was the smallest and southernmost mainland colony, hemmed in by New South Wales and South Australia. Since there was no room for territorial expansion, it had little experience in exploration. Yet the pride that Victoria felt in its self-proclaimed status as ‘the most advanced of the Australian sisterhood’ fuelled the idea of a grand scientific enterprise. The Argus wondered why such an ‘advanced’ colony was not striving to make her mark, by opening up an overland route to the north coast:

In all probability the time is not too far distant when we shall wonder at the timidity or the apathy and the ignorance displayed. A ghastly blank will no longer stare us in the face when we bend our eyes upon the map of this continent, and the track of the explorers, winding over that white plain, may become one of the highways of commerce dotted with centres of population, and vital with the ebb and flow of a periodic tide of travellers.

Despite the rowdy disorganisation of the Philosophical Institute, the idea of a transcontinental expedition had taken root amongst the rich and powerful in Melbourne society. When the shouting died down at the meeting on 22 December 1857, it was decided that the project should be tackled with new resolve. The institute formed another Exploration Committee, this time with a mere twenty-five members. Their job was to turn the rhetoric into reality.

The first requirement was money. Politicians were duly approached but most were uninspired by the idea of dispatching a group of scientists into the wilderness for the good of humanity. As far as official funding was concerned, the expedition was placed on the backburner. Here it seemed destined to remain, until a saviour stepped forward in the unlikely guise of Mr Ambrose Kyte.

William Stawell was an influential figure in Melbourne. He exploited Burke’s weaknesses to implement his own Machiavellian plans for the expedition.

Kyte was an Irish businessman of questionable but successful methods. He once had his arm set in plaster so he could later disown a signature on a contract he was unsure he wanted to honour. One of Kyte’s greatest ambitions was a good name and a knighthood, so he set about establishing himself as a philanthropist. In August 1858 he approached Sir William Foster Stawell with a generous offer for the Philosophical Institute.

Stawell was a lawyer with a commanding gaze and inexhaustible reserves of energy. After emigrating to Australia, he went on to hold nearly every public office in Victoria, from attorney-general to chancellor of Melbourne University and commander of the Royal Yacht Club. For now, he was Victoria’s chief justice, president of the Philosophical Institute and a member of the Exploration Committee.

Kyte offered £1000 towards an expedition, provided his fellow colonists subscribed at least another £2000. He wanted his donation kept anonymous, no doubt intending to reveal it when the expedition had succeeded and the impact would be all the greater. Stawell tipped off the Argus, which announced the scoop the following morning:

We are authorised to state that a gentleman of Melbourne has proposed to give the sum of one thousand pounds towards the promotion of a judicious scheme of Australian exploration… the mystery of our Interior is one of the most perplexing and at the same time one of the most interesting of the unsolved problems of physical geography. Hitherto every effort to penetrate it has failed, and Australia presents still the singular spectacle of a great land fringed with a belt of population and industry and yet we possess less positive knowledge than we have of the remotest interior of Africa.

Suddenly the idea of crossing the continent didn’t look so farfetched after all.

Australia was richer than it ever had been but it remained dependent, by necessity if not inclination, on Great Britain. It looked across the globe for government, manufactured goods, export markets and a constant supply of eligible young women. But there was a perpetual time lag since the clipper ships took two to three months to bring news from Europe. Farmers had to wait the best part of a year before they discovered the price for last season’s wool clip; mining companies produced tonnes of copper, only to find that, once it reached Europe, everyone was looking for nickel; settlers rushed home to visit a sick relative and found themselves in the nearest graveyard.

In other parts of the world these problems were being solved by a dramatic new invention—the overland telegraph line. In 1844, the first cables were laid between Washington and Baltimore. Suddenly messages could be relayed over hundreds of kilometres with the click of button. Investors and entrepreneurs were quick to embrace the new technology and soon the planet was festooned with an ever-expanding wire network. When engineers began to plan undersea cables, no corner of the globe seemed inaccessible. In these early days, enthusiasm often outstripped expertise—the line from Dover to Calais worked for a just few hours and then went dead, leaving its backers with huge losses.

It was the discovery of gutta-percha (a natural latex) to protect the cables that pushed the technology forward. By 1853, Britain could wield its influence through the copper wires as far afield as Germany, Austria, Russia and Turkey. Plans were under way to link America and Britain. The new communication system was particularly useful in times of conflict and when the Crimean War broke out in 1854, Australia realised how isolated from the rest of the world it was. Wild rumours circulated that the Russians were about to invade, and at the prospect of this rather unlikely offensive, calls mounted for a cable link to Europe.

The governor of South Australia, Sir Richard MacDonnell, petitioned the British government for assistance. Its response was to dispatch Charles Todd, a London astronomer with a passion for anything electrical. His task was to link the towns along the South Australian coast, giving Adelaide an early-warning system against an enemy attack. Todd arrived to find that private enterprise had outstripped government bureaucracy, and the cable was already in place. He turned his attention to building a line between Adelaide and Melbourne. A small dynamic man, Todd supervised every last detail of his projects. Fond of bad jokes, he would ride from camp to camp announcing to anyone who would listen, ‘Without the T, I would be Odd.’ Few disagreed with him.

By 1858, all three of Australia’s major cities were linked, and Todd began to indulge his ultimate telegraphic fantasy. He wanted to connect Australia to Europe. Like a giant web, the cable network was already being spun throughout Asia—but which route should it follow to reach the remote cities of Adelaide, Melbourne and Sydney? The cost of undersea cabling was about £1000 per kilometre, so it seemed sensible to bring the cable ashore on the northern coast of Australia at its closest point to south-east Asia, then take it directly south. That is—unless you worked for a cable manufacturing company.

Entrepreneur Francis Gisbourne had been involved with the plan to connect New York and London. Now he saw even larger profits in the southern hemisphere. Gisbourne arrived in Australia with an ambitious scheme to bring an undersea cable ashore on the east coast, thus maximising his revenue from the vast amounts of wire needed to go from south-east Asia all the way to Brisbane.

The idea horrified the South Australians. Adelaide was the first port of call for the European clipper ships. It was the gatekeeper of all the news from around the globe and the government made a handsome profit from disseminating the latest reports to the other states. Everyone from businessmen and politicians to homesick settlers had an insatiable appetite for information. Journalists would charter pilot boats to meet the incoming clippers, and then race each other back to the telegraph station with the latest stories. The competition for transmission slots was so intense that one enterprising reporter enraged his colleagues by ordering passages from his Bible to be telegraphed. Having tied up the line with Deuteronomy, he then composed his European news summary.

For Adelaide, an east-coast telegraph line via Brisbane to Sydney would mean isolation and financial disaster. Governor MacDonnell commissioned a report from Charles Todd who, unsurprisingly, stated that an overland route through the centre of the continent south to Adelaide was the most satisfactory option. MacDonnell communicated these sentiments vigorously, if not speedily, to the British government.

The undersea line via Brisbane never eventuated. It was not the British who wrecked the scheme, but the intransigence of the Australian colonies. Francis Gisbourne returned home a disappointed man. Not only had his American cable fallen to pieces after twenty-seven days, but he found that the Australian colonies had ‘opinions of their own, a most discouraging factor, even to themselves’.

Gisbourne left behind him a titanic struggle between the warring factions. Western Australia wanted the telegraph line to come ashore in Albany on the south-west coast. Brisbane and New South Wales were adamant that the eastern option was preferable and Victoria wondered how it could divide the pack and secure the prize for itself. While the overland route seemed the most logical solution, there was one problem. No one had actually travelled from one coast to the other—so who could say exactly where the telegraph should go?

At Melbourne’s Philosophical Institute the issue of the telegraph wires began to influence the more astute members of the Exploration Committee. Soon it was secretly splintering into opposing factions. Scientists like Ferdinand Mueller still envisaged a slow well-equipped party furnished with distinguished scientists and artists to record the natural riches of the Australian interior. Politicians and businessmen such as Sir William Stawell were more concerned with the strategic benefits of controlling the telegraph line, and with the possibility of an overland trade route linking Melbourne with south-east Asia. A swift gallop across the continent to establish a suitable site for a northern port would suffice. Pastoralists wanted to find out if there was fertile soil in the centre of the continent that could somehow be annexed to Victoria. They lobbied for a party led by an experienced bushman who knew a decent chunk of pasture when he saw one.

With money pouring into Victoria’s coffers from the goldfields, population pressures increasing and the overland telegraph on the way, the desire to solve the riddle of central Australia was stronger than ever. The reasons to cross the continent were numerous and compelling—but they were also contradictory and the history of exploration has shown that a successful expedition depends on clear objectives.