Ten
The Dead Heart

‘Desert: 1) A dry barren often sand-covered area of land.
2) An uninteresting or barren subject, period, etc. eg cultural desert.
Adjective: barren and uncultivated; uninhabited.’

Modern Australian Oxford Dictionary

The heart of Australia is not dead. Its pulse is just less regular. The seasons do not arrive in convenient quarterly bundles, but stretch through decades in erratic cycles of drought and flood. When conditions shift, they do so in spectacular style, rearranging the landscape with astounding ferocity. The result is a patchwork of boom and bust—an unpredictable environment that demands flexibility and patience.

About one third of Australia receives an average of less than 250 millimetres of rain a year. Geographically, it is classified as desert but, as Charles Sturt had discovered, it is not all wrinkled sandhills and tree-lined oases. The dunes are mixed with expanses of clay, dust, black soil, scrub, salt lakes and stones. This stark collage is broken up by mountains, creeks and even forests, features made all the more astonishing by the bleakness that surrounds them. On occasion the desert creates real surprises: the thermal wetlands of Dalhousie Springs, a huge quartz pillar near Alice Springs, a giant monolith such as Uluru or the most extensive cave system in the world under the Nullarbor Plain. An appreciation of these contrasts entails a shift in perception, an acceptance of emptiness, space and scale. For Burke, trapped in his European mindset and brought up on the green, compact, agricultural landscapes of England and Ireland, they were difficult concepts to grasp.

Today the desert captivates or repels. To some it will always be desolate and barren. For others it is a different form of beauty, simpler and more arresting than any other on earth. Either way, it is deeply affecting, even from within the air-conditioned security of a modern four-wheel-drive. People can still die here from drowning or dehydration. Burke and Wills passed through the landscape oblivious to these brutal possibilities. Their task was relentless, but they were lucky enough to be travelling in an unusually benign season and, contrary to most stereotypical desert treks, they were short of water for just one day on their entire journey.

The eight men toiled northwards towards the Cooper with their camels slapping across the claypans and crunching over the rock-strewn plains. After twenty-three days, on 11 November 1860, they entered an undulating area of stony rises, little realising that the desert was about to perform one of its most startling transformations. The clues were subtle—a faint green sheen on the horizon, the rustle of a lizard in the scrub, a flock of birds in the distance.

After an excess of space and light, the rich green environment that suddenly confronted the party was a revelation. Ahead was Cooper Creek, winding its way through the wilderness like a fat orange snake. The tired and dusty convoy of men, horses and camels plunged down its banks, and threw themselves into the water. The sludgy reddish liquid was cool, refreshing and too good to resist. The men were exultant; they were almost halfway across the continent and in terms of European exploration they were nearing the edge of the map.

Burke and Wills had reached one of the world’s most remote and elusive river systems. Modern topographical maps show the Cooper as an enticing maze of blue lines, which thread their way through the dunes to a series of lakes strung out across the desert. But the maps are deceptive. Most of the time the Cooper is a series of transient waterholes fed by a network of sluggish, muddy streams bleeding away in the relentless heat.

Defying convention, the water flows away from the coast. Fed by tropical downpours sweeping over the Great Dividing Range, it creeps inland through thousands of small arterial channels. Sometimes the creeks braid together to form a billabong, before splintering once more to drizzle away and vanish into the earth. All around, the terrain is scarred with channels gouged out by floods that have long since evaporated. Every year the baffling labyrinth changes according to the rainfall patterns, frustrating map-makers and confounding travellers.

Central Australia is dominated by anti-cyclones coming in from the west. These cells of high pressure provide clear skies, intense summer heat and low rainfall. But the region is also subject to the vagaries of the El Niño Southern Oscillation Effect, a complicated weather system that can produce violent bursts of rainfall and floods interspersed with long periods of drought. In an ‘average season’, the giant Cooper system might flow for just a few hours or a few days, but in an exceptional year torrents of water are disgorged down the myriad channels, cascading into one another, and spilling out into lakes up to 100 kilometres wide. Perhaps just once or twice in a century, the deluge rushes south with such momentum that it sweeps across more than a thousand kilometres of arid land to fill Lake Eyre—one of the world’s largest salt lakes. Briefly, the mythical inland sea that fascinated Charles Sturt becomes a reality.

The huge expanse of glaring white salt is overwhelmed by floodwater, and this giant ephemeral oasis becomes inundated with birds and animals. Frogs, fish and shrimps, dormant for years buried in the mud, emerge through the dissolving salt crust and catapult a temporary food chain into action. Mats of floating plants spread over thousands of square kilometres of water and photosynthesise so rapidly that they become too hot to touch. For several months everything from the pelican to the dingo embarks on a reproductive frenzy, but this outburst of fertility does not last. The blazing sun reasserts its stranglehold, the floodwaters recede and the desert returns.

The Cooper Creek basin is a land of extremes. One season may yield a beautiful chain of waterholes, bristling with life; the next will leave a series of glutinous mud-holes harbouring the skeletons of those unable to find sanctuary elsewhere. Once a drought takes hold it can last for many years. The weak will perish, and the strong must retreat and retreat, until they are clinging to the few remaining permanent billabongs. In summer the temperature is stupefying, soaring through 45°C and combining with furnace-like winds to paralyse all activity. In winter, the mercury can plunge to freezing point. Southerlies penetrate the desert, leaving the earth raw with frost.

The explorers arrived at Cooper Creek on 11 November 1860, at the beginning of the hot season. Wills noted temperatures ‘generally exceeded 100°’ with the highest being ‘109° in the shade’.

Everything here is on a scale the human mind finds either exhilarating or crushing. Writing during her travels through the cattle stations of the area in the 1930s, journalist Ernestine Hill gave this haunting insight into the cruelty of the landscape:

Three hundred cattle were grouped about the borehead, in horribly lifelike attitudes, except that the eye sockets were empty. They had been dead for three years. Many had died standing and sitting, and sunk down only a little deeper in the sand. Hides and horns were mummified in that dry air. They were denied the mercy of decay.

Yet the Cooper is also a place of great beauty, especially in the cool air and the soft light of the early mornings, or when the vivid sunsets of red, purple, orange and pink streak across the horizon and light up the evening sky. When Burke arrived here at the beginning of the summer in 1860, he found the Cooper resplendent in lush green foliage. Huge river red gums and coolibahs were flourishing along the banks of the creek and grass carpeted the red earth. Little realising how lucky they were, Wills decided the sudden outburst of fertility reminded him of England. ‘Imagine a creek or river somewhat similar to the Dart above the weir,’ he wrote to his family, ‘winding its way through those flats, having its banks densely clothed with gum trees and other evergreens.’

After the relative silence and emptiness of the desert plains, the Cooper was crowded, noisy and brimming with life. While pelicans and spoonbills patrolled the creek, turtles and water rats foraged along the banks. Echidnas snuffled through the grass looking for insects, while parrots, lorikeets and rosellas chattered in the branches above, and goannas and water dragons warmed themselves in the sun. Sliding through the undergrowth were some of the world’s deadliest snakes: the king brown, the death adder and, most dangerous of all, the fierce snake, whose fangs could inject enough venom to kill a hundred men.

In the early evening, dingoes, wallabies and kangaroos crept down to the water’s edge to drink, and the trees were filled with flocks of cockatoos, shrieking as they bickered over their favourite branch. Even the nights were noisy, as small marsupial mice, possums and bilbies scurried through the grass looking for insects, and the air became choked with the calls of cicadas, crickets and frogs.

Surrounded on all sides by an unforgiving terrain, the Cooper attracted creatures from hundreds of kilometres around to take advantage of the season. Burke and Wills were camped on the same thread of fertility that had for thousands of years kept the land and its people alive.

For the local Aboriginal tribes, the recent rains had produced a feast along the creek. Despite the unpredictability of their environment, indigenous people had lived and thrived around the Cooper or Kini-papa for more than 20,000 years. There were four main groups in the area, each comprised of about five hundred people: the Ngurawola, the Wangkamurra, the Yawarrawarrka and the Yandruwandha. The last two groups were closely related and it was their land that Burke and Wills were exploring as they moved up the creek.

The explorers found a tall, athletic people, who used nothing more than a simple string girdle or a smearing of goanna fat to protect themselves from the elements. Many decorated themselves with necklaces and bangles made from brightly coloured seeds, shells and even human teeth. The men dressed their hair with feathers and knotted their beards into a distinctive loop tied with fur string. On ceremonial occasions they painted their bodies with red ochre, charcoal and white clay.

Danbidleli was a member of the Yandruwandha tribe. As a young man he helped Burke and Wills during their last days on the Cooper.

Each tribe was headed by elders—men of power and influence, who had reached their position over the course of many years by undergoing various stages of initiation. They rose in status only when they were judged worthy of knowing the stories and myths that accompanied each level of wisdom. The signs of initiation included circumcision, the removal of two front teeth (the lateral incisors) and parallel scars on the torso. The elders enforced strict tribal laws, including complex rules governing marriage and procreation. This ensured that, despite the small size of each tribal group, there was no inbreeding and little incidence of genetic disease.

The strength and preservation of each tribe depended on a complex family structure. The Yandruwandha were divided into several distinct dialect groups. The first were the Murnpeowie Yandruwandha or Tingatinga blacks, who lived around Lake Blanche and up to Merty-Merty station. The second group were the Parlpanadramadra Yandruwandha who lived on the eastern extremity of the Cooper, around the Baryulah waterhole. The third group around the Cullymurra waterhole were the Nirrpi people. The fourth group were the Thayipilthirringuda people, from ‘the land of the stone chips’ near the present-day outpost of Innamincka.

Within these family groups, each person was assigned to a ‘skin group’ or kamiri, which determined certain aspects of identity and also governed who could marry. In addition, everyone belonged to a particular totem group, a practice common across nearly all Australia’s Aboriginal tribes. The Yandruwandha had between twenty-four and twenty-six totemic groups linked to various aspects of the environment such as the kangaroo or tjukurru group and the sand goanna or mangali group. It was considered taboo to eat the animal that had given you your totemic identity.

All the tribes were nomadic hunter-gatherers, moving around in small groups as their water and food supplies allowed. Possessions were limited, perhaps just a fire-making stick, a dish and a digging implement. Tools and weapons were also kept to a minimum, but the men made stone knives, chisels and adzes, and carved wooden spears, boomerangs, shields and clubs. Women collected local plants and fashioned the stems into string for fishing nets, cradles and bags.

They lived in temporary shelters made of branches and known by the Europeans as wurleys, gunyahs or mia-mias. Sometimes when the seasons were favourable, the people built substantial villages near waterholes, constructing solid beehive-shaped huts, which were thatched and then covered in earth.

As the Cooper provided permanent water, it was the hub of a busy trade route through Aboriginal Australia and long journeys were undertaken to procure goods from as far afield as the Flinders Ranges in South Australia and Boulia in Queensland. Gatherings of more than a thousand men were held to the south at a meeting place known as Kooperamana, where neighbouring tribes traded their prized red ochre for shields, axe heads, wooden bowls and the narcotic shrub, pituri.

Traders thought nothing of travelling across hundreds of kilometres of desert for ceremonial or commercial purposes. They were experts at finding water, digging in exactly the right spots in the dried-up creek beds or tracking animals and birds to rock pools and soaks. If all else failed, they could get water from certain roots and plant stems, even a particular type of frog, which was dug up and squeezed judiciously until its bloated body yielded a stream of precious liquid. If a man left his camp to hunt by himself, he would leave behind a small, decorated wooden object known as a toa. It depicted the natural features of the area and acted as a message-stick to friends and relatives.

Even if food was plentiful, it was rare for everyone to congregate in the same place unless there were ceremonies to be held. Then several hundred people would gather in special areas to carry out sacred rituals. At the same time there would be feasts, dancing, singing, rock painting and the opportunity for stories, legends and gossip to be related around the campfire.

Magic formed an intrinsic part of everyday life. Sorcerers could cure illness, change weather patterns and make men and women fall in love. Some could even cast spells powerful enough to cause death. One of the last of the Yawarrawarrka people, a man known as Wilpie, died in 1958 when he was ninety-three. He believed he had been sung to death by a sorcerer from Queensland with whom he had quarrelled the previous year.

For Aboriginal people life is inextricably bound to the land, its features, rhythms, animals and its spirits. Every man is the owner and custodian of his own territory, a birthright passed down to him through the male line. A person’s identity is forged by their land. The two are inseparable and removal from that place means spiritual as well as physical destruction.

The Aboriginal philosophy could not have been more different from that of their European visitors. After researching the tribes around the Cooper for many years, historian Helen Tolcher concluded that:

Time had no past, present or future, but was a single unit within which man moved, either as a spirit awaiting birth, as a human being, or as the spirit of one dead awaiting reincarnation. When they were tired they slept, and when they were hungry they ate; unless the need was urgent a task could be put aside and equally well taken up at dusk, in the morning, or when three floods had passed by. The division of time into regular units had no relevance to this way of life.

It was the land that shaped the needs of the Aboriginal tribes around the Cooper. The desert imposed a spartan semi-nomadic lifestyle, which was cruel when conditions were bad. It was nevertheless sustainable and enriched by sophisticated social structures and by a wide range of cultural activities. The Aboriginal people adapted, survived and prospered in conditions that defeated many who came later.

Unaware of the subtleties of this life, Burke’s party travelled through Yandruwandha and Yawarrawarrka territory searching for somewhere to rest and revitalise. The footsore party ambled alongside the creek until it reached a magnificent waterhole, more than a kilometre long, surrounded by grass and teeming with game.

The Cooper is home to more than two hundred species of birds. Its murky waters hide thirteen types of fish including plump yellowbelly (with flesh as sweet as any whiting), perch and bony bream. Down among the tangled tree roots are yabbies—freshwater crayfish, which taste like small lobsters and are now a delicacy around the world. The Aboriginal people made full use of these resources, trapping the fish and squelching their toes into the mud to feel for freshwater mussels or thukali. They were experts at mimicking the giant unsuspecting emus, which they lured into woven nets. And, as the writer George McIver noted, they were also skilled at catching the local waterbirds:

The preliminary to capturing whatever ducks he may require is cutting a thick bush. This he places over his head and wades into the water—always at a distance not likely to frighten the birds. If the water is shallow, as is often the case…he will wade towards the birds, and so slowly, with his body underwater and his head concealed by the bush, that the bush which appears to be stationary is all that can be seen by the birds. When near enough, he will grab a duck’s leg from beneath, pull the bird underwater, and while there quickly break its neck. The captured bird rarely utters a sound when it is being pulled underwater. In this way he may capture half a dozen or more, if he so desires without scaring the other birds.

Aboriginal people supplemented their protein intake with lizards, marsupials and snakes, but the core of their diet came from a wide range of plants and seeds. Local knowledge and persistence revealed mulga apples, succulent native figs, cucumbers, oranges, lemons and millet. There were coolibah seeds, pigweed and, most important of all, a small aquatic fern, resembling a four-leaf clover, known as nardoo, which grows in swampy country and provides seeds that can be ground into a paste and baked.

After 20,000 years living near the Cooper, the Aboriginal people knew every inch of their land; they understood how it worked and what it had to offer. In the good seasons they ate a nourishing diet, and even during times of drought they could survive on what nature provided. But harvesting the local bush tucker demanded knowledge, skill and patience—qualities conspicuously lacking in the man who now sought to lay claim to the land for European settlement. Burke had no interest in the intricacies and possibilities of his new environment. He had come to conquer, not to learn.

The arrival of the explorers must have been an astonishing experience for the Yandruwandha, as if aliens had appeared from over the horizon. Their land was suddenly being invaded by strange figures mounted on giant four-legged creatures that snorted and spat their way through the sandhills.

Today the descendants of the Yandruwandha have long been displaced from their traditional lands, but they still possess much of their tribal history and language. Stories of the explorers’ stay on the Cooper have been passed down through the generations to Arran Patterson and his family. Arran’s great-great-great grandfather Kimi was a young man when the expeditioners arrived at Cooper Creek in November 1860.

From the Yandruwandha point of view, the explorers behaved rudely. The waterholes along the Cooper were the equivalent of family homes and, as in most societies, Aboriginal people observed certain protocols when entering the territory of others. It was polite to stop a certain distance away and wait for a tribal representative to approach. He would find out where the stranger had come from, what his business was and, most important of all, what totem group he belonged to. Then, a member of that same totem group would come forward and escort the guest into the camp, where he would be fed and looked after. It was acceptable and even expected that ‘foreign’ tribes might visit an area for special events, and particular camping places were set aside for outsiders. Provided the proper courtesies were followed, there was no cause for conflict.

The Yandruwandha watched in amazement as these new strangers charged straight towards the water and began paddling around in it. They did not call the men ‘whitefellas’ but pirti-pirti, which means ‘red fella’. Presumably Burke and his men were sunburnt after their long march across the desert.

Wills was to notice that the Aborigines often gesticulated vigorously at them whenever they approached a waterhole. The explorers interpreted this as aggression but, a century and a half later, the Yandruwandha themselves believe their ancestors may have been trying to communicate in sign language, which was used across Aboriginal Australia to bridge the gap between the different tribal dialects. Rather than trying to frighten the men away, the Yandruwandha might have been asking, ‘What are you doing?’, ‘Why are you here?’ or, most pertinent of all, ‘How long are you going to stay?’

Groups like the Yandruwandha who lived in harsh environments were always anxious to conserve their food supplies, and they moved around so as not to exhaust a particular waterhole. Visitors who camped one or two nights could be tolerated, but what if they were to stay longer?

In fact the explorers were hardly a danger to the local food supplies. They did little more than take a few pot shots at ducks. Neither Burke nor Wills made any real effort to establish relations with the local people, despite the fact that the Yandruwandha showed no immediate aggression and often approached the explorers with offerings of fish or invitations to dances and ceremonies. All such advances were rejected. The rebuffs were sometimes delivered with a bullet in the air just to make sure the message was clear.

Burke may have had good reason to fear the Aboriginal people. Tales of their aggression and barbarism were common currency back in Melbourne and it was not unheard of for tribes to attack settlers and in some cases to kill them. He was also justified in worrying about the theft of his equipment, as much of it was highly desirable to the locals. The Aborigines were more inclined to share property than the Europeans, and they expected that their gifts of fish and nardoo would be reciprocated with objects such as knives and axes. These were particularly soughtafter, since the Yandruwandha (in common with all Aboriginal people) had no metal of their own. But, although Burke tossed them a few trinkets, he ignored them as far as he could. Wills was equally dismissive, even cruel in his assessment of the indigenous people:

A large tribe of blacks came pestering us to go to their camp and have a dance, which we declined. They were very troublesome and nothing but the threat to shoot will keep them away; they are, however, easily frightened, and although finelooking men, decidedly not of a war-like disposition…from the little we saw of them, they appear to be mean-spirited and contemptible in every respect.

Apart from the fact that Wills’ hostility was unfair, the explorers’ behaviour also robbed them of vital information and squandered any possibility of hiring a local guide. Whilst their actions may make sense when viewed in the context of their age, an age when it was common to regard Aboriginal people as ‘hostile savages’ or ‘ignorant blacks’, Burke and Wills did not have the wit to realise that, whatever their cultural differences, local people were the best judges of their land and its resources. Unlike explorers such as Gregory and Leichhardt, they lacked the vision to see beyond their prejudices. They were in too much of a hurry even to plunder the Cooper’s most precious resource—the wisdom of its indigenous people.

If Burke and Wills had shown even an ounce of friendliness, they might have begun to understand how to harvest the local food sources. If they had lingered long enough they could have realised how to communicate using smoke signals and messagesticks as the Aborigines did. Would they have learned lessons that changed the course of the expedition?