‘We think of the unfortunate travellers whose bones, bared by dingoes and polished by sand, lie scattered on the central Australia wastes.’
J. W. Gregory
It was John McKinlay who made the grim discovery on 21 October 1861.
We started at once for the grave, taking a canteen of water with us and all the arms. On arrival removed the ground carefully, and close to the top of the earth found the body of a European enveloped in a flannel shirt with short sleeves—the flesh, I may say completely cleared from the bones, and very little hair but what must have been decomposed…Description of body: Skull marked with slight sabre cuts, apparently two in number—one immediately over the left eye, the other on the right temple, inclining over right ear, more deep than the left; decayed teeth existed in both sides of the lower jaw and right of upper…body lies head south, feet north, lying on face, head severed from body.
McKinlay had left Adelaide on 16 August to search for Burke and Wills. He was on his way to Cooper Creek when a group of local Aborigines guided him towards a waterhole they called Kadhibaerri, in the Coongie Lakes region.
The next day he found a crudely scratched-out grave on the shores of the lake about 110 kilometres north-west of the Dig Tree. Of course he knew nothing about the discovery of King a month earlier, and assumed that Aboriginal tribesmen had slaughtered Burke’s entire party. He christened the waterhole Lake Massacre.
As McKinlay investigated further, he was mystified to find a second grave, ‘evidently dug with a spade or shovel’. There was no body but closer examination revealed ‘a piece of light blue tweed and fragments of paper, and small pieces of a Nautical Almanac…and an exploded Eley’s cartridge’. Nearby lay a ‘pint pot’ and a ‘tin canteen similar to what is used for keeping naphtha in’.
When news of McKinlay’s discoveries reached Melbourne, it provoked a furious debate. Had he discovered the body of Charley Gray? If he had, why did the skeleton bear scars around the head? Had Burke’s thrashing been violent enough to cause Gray’s death? The controversy was fuelled by Burke’s detractors. William Lockhart-Morton suspected a cover-up:
To strike a weak sick man, in any way and under any circumstances must ever be regarded…as an unmanly action…there has been much concealment of the facts so that the whole truth cannot be known.
According to Lockhart-Morton, King told Howitt’s party that, after Gray was caught stealing, he had been ‘knocked down, kicked, and so ill-used, that he [King] would have shot the leader, if he had had a pistol’ and that ‘poor Gray was never again allowed to eat his meals with the others’. An anonymous letter to the Register claimed King had also stated that ‘Gray was thrashed unmercifully by Burke when near to death’s door’, and that he had died soon afterwards. King denied the reports. He maintained that Burke had never been cruel to his men:
The fact is that poor Gray died on the 17th of April 1861, which was twenty-two days after he was chastised by Mr. Burke for pilfering from the little store on which we all depended. There is a discrepancy I admit between the record in Mr. Wills and my statement before the Royal Commissioners, but I may say in explanation, that I was present and Mr. Wills was not…it is possible that Mr. Burke told him [Wills] that he had given Gray ‘a good thrashing’ to satisfy him that conduct so dishonourable and cruel had been duly noticed and corrected…During the period that intervened between the chastising that Mr. Burke gave Gray and his death, nothing could surpass the kind attentions of both Mr. Burke and Mr. Wills to him, after it was found that he really was ill; and on the last evening of his life Mr. Burke assisted Wills and I to make the poor fellow as comfortable as we could by covering him with our blankets, such as we had, to keep him warm, in the hope he might rally a little by morning. But he died in the night—died from sheer exhaustion. I wish that those who are now so cruelly attempting to blacken the name and the memory of Mr. Burke saw him on the morning of the next day weeping over the corpse, as only a brave and generous man could; declaring that if he had thought he should have lost even one of his party, he would never have entered on so perilous an exercise. [italics added]
King’s response went some way to exonerating Burke, but there was general suspicion that he was now just a mouthpiece for the Royal Society. Since the inquiry he had changed his views on many things. Previously King had declared that Burke’s journey north was too disorganised and too hurried for the men to supplement their provisions with bush foods. Now he asserted that Burke had planned the journey ‘with judgement’, constantly adding to their supplies by fishing and hunting. He also maintained that his leader trusted and respected the Aborigines at all times and made strenuous efforts to foster relations with them. No one was convinced.
In the years since the Burke and Wills expedition, there has been much speculation about whether McKinlay really did discover Gray or whether the corpse was a member of a different expedition (possibly even Leichhardt’s party) or even just an unfortunate settler lost in the desert. The most important opinion available was that of John King. Given the body’s scars, he had every reason to deny it was Gray’s, in order to protect Burke from accusations of murder. Yet King was convinced that the corpse was Charley Gray from McKinlay’s description. He described how he and Wills, ‘tied the body up in a flannel shirt, trousers and a large piece of oilcloth’ just as McKinlay found it and he even remembered the pint pot and the tin canteen discovered nearby.
Today, with the passage of time and the shifting of the landscape, the evidence is harder to assess. The matter is complicated by the fact that more than one area has been called Lake Massacre over the years. Descriptions given by King, and by Wills in his diary, show that it is geographically possible that Gray was buried on the shores of McKinlay’s Lake Massacre. Given King’s certainty, it is fair to conclude that the body was Charley Gray. But, if it was him, several intriguing questions remain.
Why were two graves discovered adjacent to one another? Why was Gray discovered in the shallow scratched-out hole and not in the other deeper grave, which had been dug with a shovel? Why was he laying face down, when the Christian burial position is face up? Why was his head severed and his flesh completely decomposed after only six months buried in a hot dry climate?
Five main factors influence the decomposition of a corpse: its depth underground; environmental temperatures; type of soil; accessibility by necrophagic organisms; and the extent of injuries allowing points of entry for bacteria and carrion insects. Although it is not possible to be exact about the rate of decomposition of Gray’s body, expert opinion points to the fact that, after six months buried in desert conditions, the body should still have had some flesh attached to it.
A body needs to be buried at least a metre deep to prevent animals from digging it up. This would have been a difficult task for John King to achieve in his exhausted state, so the most likely explanation for the lack of flesh and the severed head is that animal scavengers attacked the corpse, hastening the rate of decay. It is also possible that Burke, Wills and King removed flesh from the body before burial to supplement their failing rations—not something they would have admitted in their diaries.
So how did the body get back into the second grave? Did local Aboriginal people rebury the disturbed corpse out of respect for the dead man? There is another possibility. Gray was originally buried near an important waterhole. This would have been unpleasant for the local people, as it meant that an unknown spirit inhabited the area. It is important in Aboriginal culture that the proper burial practices are carried out in order to release the spirit. Since these would have been neglected in Gray’s case, his body may have been dug up by the Aboriginal people so that the appropriate rituals could be observed. It is also possible that during this process, flesh was removed from the bones and eaten for ceremonial purposes, before the body was reburied in a shallow grave.
As for the scars on Gray’s skull, Burke’s critics suggested these were evidence that he had been beaten far more severely than anyone admitted. In rejecting these accusations, King pointed out that the marks were described as ‘sabre cuts’ when the party had not so much as a knife left between them, let alone a sword. Yet we know that Burke had access to a shovel because King used it to dig Gray’s grave, and he could have used it as a weapon to beat his subordinate. The mystery is only increased by the fact that several pages of both Wills’ diary and Burke’s pocketbook were removed before the official diaries were printed. We will never know if those pages contained more information about Gray’s death.
As it is, there is not enough conclusive evidence to charge Burke with murder, but he had a history of losing his temper and, if he did strike Gray, who was already a sick man, then a blow or blows to the head may have hastened his death. Several expeditions have been mounted in recent years to find the remains of Charley Gray. While the location of the camp where he died has almost certainly been established, the body has never been found.
There is one final mystery. McKinlay noted that the Aboriginal man who led him to the corpse also had a recent wound on his knee:
He showed how he had been shot, by pointing to my gun, and carried from the spot on another native’s back. Besides the wound on his knee, there was another bullet-mark on his chest, reissuing between his shoulders, and four buckshot still protruding from the centre of his neck.
The man was wounded before McKinlay’s party arrived, but who shot him? Had a skirmish taken place at the lake to which Burke, Wills and King never admitted?
John McDouall Stuart was convalescing from his hand injury in Adelaide when he heard of Burke’s success in reaching the north coast and of his tragic death on the way home. The news did not dampen the Scotsman’s enthusiasm to cross the continent himself. If anything, it made him more determined—like most South Australians, he believed that Adelaide could still grab the overland telegraph. Besides, Burke’s route did not technically allow the Victorians to claim the £2000 prize for crossing the continent, since Burke’s track was too far east of ‘Stuart’s country’.
Without waiting for his hand to heal, Stuart rejoined his men at Chambers’ Moolooloo station. On 1 January 1862, flanked by his trusted lieutenants, Francis Thring and William Kekwick, he rode north once more, his right arm dangling by his side. Stuart cursed his disability but in secret joked that it wasn’t his greatest impediment—the politicians had insisted that he take a scientist with him on his latest journey.
Stuart crossed through the MacDonnell Ranges and headed into the dreaded scrub country further north. The heat took its toll on Stuart’s weakened constitution and on several occasions he was forced to send Thring and Kekwick ahead, because he was not well enough to leave camp himself. ‘No rain seems to have fallen here for a length of time,’ wrote Stuart as his hopes of success faded, ‘we have not seen a bird, nor heard a chirrup of any to disturb the gloomy silence of the dark and dismal forest.’ North of Newcastle Waters, the discovery of another chain of ponds, christened Daly Waters, lifted their spirits but the explorer admitted in his diary, ‘I feel this heavy work much more than I did the journey of last year, and feel my capability of endurance giving way.’
Yet Stuart refused to turn back. As his party entered the lush tropical forests of the Australian north, the mulga scrub gave way to stringybarks, woollybutts and pandanus. The men reached the Roper River on 25 June 1862. Calculating that he had reached Augustus Gregory’s east-west track, he knew the coast couldn’t be too far away. But his health was failing fast. ‘I have scarcely been able,’ he wrote, ‘to endure the motion of horseback for four hours at a time.’
Suddenly there was water everywhere, but Stuart’s party soon found the rivers and swamps brought new tortures. Pat Auld recalled:
I have not said a word about our minor troubles, the ants, the sandflies, the common flies, and the mosquitoes…From the time we struck the Roper until we left it, the mosquitoes and flies were terrible. Our hands, wrists, necks and feet were all blistered with their bites, and many earnest inquiries were made as to who could explain their use in this world. One of the party thought they were sent to teach a man how to swear fluently.
The Roper led Stuart and his men into what is now Kakadu National Park. The region, which takes its name from the Gagudju people, is rich in Aboriginal culture. Intersected by an extensive network of rivers, swamps and wetlands, it is packed with 1000 species of plants, fifty native mammals and more than 270 species of birds. Now designated a world heritage area, it is an ancient landscape with the power to entrance even the most hardened explorer. In 1910, the pioneer Stuart Love wrote:
Quite suddenly we came to a steep ravine, and riding down this found ourselves on the bank of a lovely river. All around stretched acres of long, green grass; the river banks, steep and sandy, were covered with iron-bark and many another shady tree and with great clumps of bamboo; the stream itself, blocked just below by granite boulders formed a magnificent pool. Beyond this bar the cool, sweet fresh water flowed away over the stones with a soothing murmur.
But this new paradise was more difficult to cross than Stuart had anticipated. There was so much water that the rivers and wetlands barred their way. Day after day, Stuart forced himself back into the saddle. He even ate on his horse for fear that he might not be able to remount after his meal. Could he reach the north coast before his health collapsed completely?
In Melbourne, the royal commission was over, but throughout the latter half of 1862, Burke and Wills fever still gripped Victorian society. After all there was still the funeral to look forward to.
Ignoring the summer heat, Alfred Howitt was already on his way north to retrieve the bodies of the fallen explorers. For him, the journey was almost routine and on the way he even found time to correspond with his British relatives. About halfway between Menindee and Cooper Creek he left a packet of letters buried in a pickle jar with a sign asking that they be posted by whoever next passed by. One of them duly arrived in England a few months later:
I am slowly progressing towards Cooper’s Creek which I hope to reach in 10 days…I am quite well only when I knock a piece of skin off, the millions of flies make a sore and keep it so—imagine me in a pair of buckskin gloves—an explorer in gloves!
Yet again, Howitt achieved his goals with breathtaking ease. During one reconnaissance mission towards Mount Hopeless he confided, ‘At Cooper’s Creek I have left the main party building a fort, catching the finest fish in this part of the world and gardening.’ His men nicknamed one campsite ‘the Fish Pond’ after they pulled out more than a hundredweight of fish in a single afternoon. Howitt returned a few weeks later to find pumpkins, melons and radishes thriving along the side of the creek. He settled down to a meal of horse steak and fresh vegetables—just a few kilometres away from where Burke and Wills had expired from exhaustion and malnutrition.
After several weeks exploring the Cooper area, Howitt decided it was time to commence the grisly task of exhuming the bodies. Burke and Wills were now little more than skeletons, and even these had been extensively mauled by dingoes. Wills’ skull was missing (except for his lower jaw) and Burke had lost his hands and feet. Howitt collected all the bones he could find, wrapped each set in a Union Jack, and put them in boxes to be taken back to the city. He decided to travel back to Melbourne via Mount Hopeless and Adelaide, as Burke had tried to do eighteen months earlier. Yet again Howitt showed how easy the journey could be with the right supplies and preparation.
When he arrived on 8 December 1862, the mood in the South Australian capital was sombre. Burke may have been a rival but the sight of the tiny black box containing his bones was enough to silence even the most critical commentators. John McDouall Stuart was still out in the desert somewhere far to the north. Nothing had been heard from him for nearly a year.
Thousands lined the streets to watch the remains being carried through the centre of the city. ‘For a time all business was suspended and the streets were silent,’ observed the Register, ‘making most audible the slow tread of the crowd who followed the hearse and the solemn sounds of the military band playing “Dead March in Saul”.’
During his stay in Adelaide, Howitt was forced to undergo a gruelling round of memorial dinners and formal receptions and it was with some relief that he set sail for Melbourne with his macabre cargo. On Sunday, 20 December 1862, with her flag trailing at half-mast, the Havilah sailed into Port Melbourne. She cut through the glassy waters of Port Phillip Bay, bathed in early morning sunshine, and pulled alongside Sandridge Pier. ‘It was,’ decided the Leader, ‘as if the elements were hushed into mournful stillness by the presence of the dead.’
Standing on the docks waiting for the ship’s arrival was a delegation from the Exploration Committee and a small elderly woman who addressed the men in a strong Galway accent. Ellen Dogherty had been Burke’s nurse, his nanny and life-long friend. Now in her seventies, she had decided to travel around the world to see ‘Master Robert’ one more time before she died. But instead of being reunited with her favourite son in the prime of his life, she found herself surrounded by strangers watching his bones being unloaded in a tin box. Four of Howitt’s men carried the remains ashore, placed them in a hearse and watched as they were conveyed to the Royal Society Hall. Once inside, Nurse Dogherty asked to be left alone. She stayed for several hours, leaving members of the Exploration Committee shuffling uncomfortably outside as they listened to the harrowing sound of an old woman weeping.
Eleven days later, on New Year’s Eve 1862, the Royal Society gathered for the formal ceremony of ‘coffining’ the bones of the two dead explorers. There was just one problem. The metal boxes were locked. John Macadam had the only key. It was late afternoon and he was nowhere to be found.
Embarrassment, impatience and anger rippled through the invited audience. Several other keys were tried without success. The members were about to embark upon the undignified process of forcing open the boxes with a small crowbar when Macadam made an unsteady entrance into the hall. The rather dishevelled secretary explained that he had been so upset, he was ‘overcome with a sudden indisposition’, which prevented him attending earlier. The newspaper reporters had a less delicate explanation. Macadam was drunk.
As the Age put it, ‘It was New Year’s Eve, and Scotchmen on that night of all others are apt to grow “sympathetic”.’ Others were outraged at the sight of ‘the weeping Doctor, overcome by emotions which he had imbibed, staggering over the bones of poor BURKE, and slobbering drunken kisses upon those sacred remains’.
Amongst much ostentatious sniffing and dabbing of eyes, the gruesome ceremony continued:
The remains of Burke were the first opened, and Dr Murray cut the bags and revealed the bones, wrapped in a piece of black alpaca. The nurse of Burke, who was present, now came forward, and it was remarkably affecting to see the care with which she had provided for the melancholy occasion. A clean sheet was spread by her over the iron shell, and a small frilled pillow was then placed for the accommodation of the skull.
The skull was now placed by Messrs Murray and Gillbee, and after it the collar bones, shoulder bones, vertebrae and the remainder of the skeleton was laid out in the shell in conformity with their proper positions. These bones were remarkably perfect, a few of the smaller ones only being missing. Having been properly laid out, poor Mrs Dogherty again pressed forward, and folding over the left side of the sheet, devoutly kissed the skull, sobbing bitterly all the while.
But not everyone was as upset as the nurse. Amongst much ‘crying and kissing’ of Burke’s skull, several members of the Royal Society slipped a couple of his teeth and a few locks of hair into their pockets as souvenirs. (It later became quite common in certain circles to pass around Burke and Wills body parts as a conversation piece at dinner parties.)
To everyone’s relief, Dr Wills senior felt unable to attend the ‘coffining’ of his son. But in the absence of any other relatives no one had thought to provide a winding sheet to wrap up poor Wills. An assistant was dispatched and the explorer was eventually swathed in a piece of old calico. As the Age recognised, it was a sad end for a young man who had died by himself in the desert:
The contrast between this and the preceding ceremony was remarkable and affecting. No pitying female hand waited to perform the last sad offices towards the remains of him to whom Australasia and the world alike are indebted for one of the most interesting and touching narratives ever penned, and all that remained of the head which dictated it was the lower jaw. The remains of Wills were somewhat imperfect; several of the other bones were gone. The vertebrae and skeleton were kept together by the remains of the shirt in which the poor fellow died, and in this condition, it was coffined. Among these bones was a small portion of sandy-coloured beard, sufficient in itself to prove the identity of the remains.
Once this ‘indescribably disgusting’ ceremony was over, the full force of Melbourne’s communal grief could be unleashed. For a period of fifteen days the public was invited to view the explorers’ remains through special glass-topped coffins laid against a spectacular backdrop. As the Melbourne Post recorded:
Long veils of black cloth relieved with white, are draped around the upper part of the walls and windows…the panels in the lower walls are draped with Maltese crosses and on the pillars between the panels are sixteen white shields, bearing the names of the principal explorers of the Australian continent…In the centre of the hall stands the catafalque upon which the coffins containing the bones rest…The catafalque is raised on a dais two feet from the ground, and is reached by four steps covered with black cloth and crimson bands. Above the catafalque is a canopy, surmounted with a heavy plume of white ostrich feathers…and on each side are three large silver candelabras, which will be lighted with gas…
Nurse Dogherty completed the lavish display. Inseparable from Master Robert, she sat next to the coffin entertaining the crowds with bouts of loud and persistent wailing.
Veiled and escorted through in a private viewing, Julia Matthews was one of the first to pay her respects. John King also visited the hall, but on seeing the remains of his dead companions he broke down and had to be removed. Such was the public obsession with Victoria’s dead heroes that up to 7000 mourners a day queued to see the remains. Those with enough influence were actually allowed to climb up beside the coffins and handle the bones. Pickpockets ran through the crowds and stalls sprang up outside the hall selling food, drink and commemorative handkerchiefs. More than 100,000 people filed past the bodies.
This ostentatious display confounded some commentators who found the death pageant vulgar in the extreme. ‘The spectacle which Victoria presents at this moment,’ complained the Examiner, ‘is anything but an edifying one. The bones of its heroic explorers have been brought with infinite trouble and expense from the silent spot where the rude natives vouchsafed the remains a truer sympathy than we, in our boasted civilisation, seem capable of expressing.’
There was a strong feeling that the public displays of sorrow from various members of the Royal Society were designed for ‘a maximum of show and a minimum of feeling’. In the same way that many people follow the exploits of royalty or the antics of movie stars, the residents of Victoria had become obsessed with the Burke and Wills saga. It had been talked about, gossiped about, argued about, criticised, complimented, glorified and speculated upon at every public bar, every private club and on every street corner around Victoria. The public and the press had followed the expedition as it degenerated into a petty but compelling human drama and then watched in amazement as it rose again to attain tragic status. Now the whole of the colony prepared itself for the magnificent final act: Burke and Wills would be buried on 21 January 1863. It would be Victoria’s first state funeral.