Twenty-Two
A Bloodless Triumph

‘Lives of great men all remind us
We can make our lives sublime,
And, departing, leave behind us
Footprints on the sands of time.’

‘A Psalm of Life’, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow—
Wills’ favourite poem

The thrilling prospect of a state funeral established Burke and Wills as the nearest thing Victoria had to heroes such as Nelson and Wellington. Burke had been wise to choose Sir William Stawell as custodian of his personal papers. The chief justice declared all the documents ‘private’ and embarked on a strenuous campaign to ensure Burke’s image survived untarnished. The explorer’s intentions towards Julia Matthews and his outrageous will, leaving her everything, were all covered up. The bequest was largely irrelevant anyway. Burke had few possessions, his bank account contained just 7s 8d and the largest thing he left behind was his debt of £18 5s 3d to the Melbourne Club.

In order to protect his son’s reputation, Dr Wills senior suppressed the last words of his son’s final letter, which stated that his religious views ‘were not in the least bit changed’. Atheism was incompatible with the image of a heroic explorer. In some circles, it had already been suggested that Stuart survived his expeditions because he observed the Sabbath and that Burke died because he did not. (There might have been an element of truth in this, because Stuart rested his horses and men one day a week and Burke did not.)

The funeral also prompted renewed discussion about whether the expedition had been a success. It was a difficult question to answer. Burke had crossed the continent first, but at a cost of seven European lives and one Aboriginal life. The official interpretation was that the explorers had achieved everything they set out to do. Sir Henry Barkly informed the British Colonial Office that the outcome was of ‘the very highest importance, both to geographical science, and to the progress of civilisation in Australia’ and Georg Neumayer declared that the expedition was ‘the most brilliant achievement as yet on record in the annals of Australian exploration’.

But the question endured and was thrown into sharp perspective by the exploits of the four expeditions sent to rescue Burke and Wills. With embarrassing ease, ‘big John McKinlay’ and his party of ten continued from Lake Massacre to Cooper Creek, and up as far as the Gulf. Here, he had hoped to meet up with the Victoria, but he arrived at the mouth of the Albert River to find the ship had departed. McKinlay was forced to continue overland. He travelled south-east, crossing several crocodileinfested rivers to reach the Queensland coast, where he caught another ship back to Adelaide. The mammoth march through many stretches of difficult territory took him more than a year. McKinlay didn’t lose a man.

William Landsborough had an eventful start to his journey. On 24 August 1861, he left Brisbane with eight men on the brig Firefly, only to be shipwrecked on the east coast of Cape York eleven days later. Everyone including the horses had to be swum ashore while the Victoria pulled the vessel free. Once it had been refloated, the stricken ship was towed as far as the Albert River. Landsborough struck south-west and discovered the Gregory River near the present-day town of Camooweal, before backtracking and heading south across ‘a finely undulating, park-like plateau…richly clothed with the best grasses’. He named it the Barkly Tableland after the governor of Victoria. Landsborough didn’t lose a man.

Accompanied by eleven men, Frederick Walker set out on horseback from Rockhampton on 7 September 1861, and rode north-west to the Flinders River, where he found Burke’s dismal final camp. He followed the old camel tracks south for a while, before running short of food, and turning south-east back to Rockhampton. Walker didn’t lose a man.

The eight deaths on the Burke and Wills expedition now looked more unnecessary than ever. Including Howitt’s journeys, the five rescue missions collectively covered more than 11,000 kilometres through harsh terrain, without a single loss of life. They opened up millions of hectares for pastoralists and miners and lifted the final folds of the ‘shimmering veil’ that had hidden Australia’s central and north-eastern regions for so long.

It is ironic that the failure of Burke’s expedition led to far greater geographical discoveries than its success ever would have done. The achievements of the rescue parties were outstanding but they worked against Victoria’s interests. Throughout 1862, the colony petitioned the British government to annexe a new territory on the Gulf of Carpentaria. It was to be called Burke’s Land. To strengthen the claim, Melbourne’s Department of Lands ignored the evidence of Wills’ diaries and produced several duplicitous ‘official’ expedition maps. These showed the explorers’ return route well to the east of their outward journey. It was a deliberate attempt to make it seem as if they had covered more territory than they actually had. But the British had more important things to think about than the allocation of obscure corners of northern Australia, and in government circles the matter was ignored. Once again, it was private enterprise that dictated events in Australia’s north.

Queensland’s squatters soon realised that the country around the Gulf was not as hostile as they had feared. Hundreds took matters into their own hands and poured in from the east coast to colonise the area. Thousands of kilometres away, the Victorians could only sit helpless as ‘those wretched sheep farmers’ overran one of the most promising agricultural areas in Australia. All thoughts of telegraph lines, railways and northern ports vanished in the desert haze. ‘Like the monkey in the fable,’ commented the Argus, Queensland has ‘made off with the whole of the roasted chestnuts’ while taking ‘care not to burn her paws in the operation’.

Today the expedition stands in a very different light. The venture was a product of a wealthy and complacent colony. It belonged to a peculiarly British tradition—one that valued breeding, and the courage to have a go, above ability and experience. With its unshakeable faith in military training, the empire had been dispatching legions of improbable explorers to unsuitable destinations for decades. It was a practice that saw soldiers delivered to the Arctic without learning to ski and naval officers consigned to the Sahara in full dress uniform. Armed with only a commanding gaze and an inflated sense of their own importance, they blundered around and died miserable deaths from nothing more glamorous than a dose of scurvy, a bout of tropical fever or a well-placed spear. Given the history of British and early Australian exploration, it was not surprising that the Victorian Exploring Expedition was, at times, a fiasco. Once Burke had been chosen as leader, the die was cast. The enterprise was doomed before the first camel was ever saddled.

Burke was proof that, in exploration, bravery is rarely an alternative for experience. As Ernest Shackleton’s biographer H. R. Mill pointed out, there is no substitute for an innovative and capable leader in the field:

The best explorer is the man who can both ‘conceive and dare’, who carries his organizing committee with him on his own feet, and knows that there is no one to blame for his failings but himself. To such an explorer is due on his return the undivided praise for plan and execution.

Burdened with ill-chosen staff and cumbersome supplies, Burke did not have the knowledge or the skills to reorganise the expedition. An explorer such as Stuart would never have set out with such an unsuitable outfit in the first place. As Alfred Howitt noted:

It is evident to me that at no time was there the necessary means of conveying the 21 tonnes of equipment and stores from Menindie to Cooper’s Creek. This could only have been done if an organised train of packhorses or camels, or both, had been arranged, and the most important parts of the loading conveyed there first, leaving such as spare supplies, duplicates, &c. to the last. But such an organised service neither Burke nor anyone else in the party was, so far as I know, competent to arrange.

Once on the road, Burke’s inexperience was aggravated by his impulsiveness. With good organisation his divisions of the expedition may have proved successful, but his flimsy management skills only produced a morass of confusion from which his subordinates never managed to extricate themselves. To a great extent Burke’s mistakes were due to his inability to think through the consequences of his actions. He compounded his errors by leaving his safety in the hands of men who had neither the authority nor the resources to ensure his instructions (whatever they happened to be that day) were carried out.

Burke’s all-or-nothing attitude and his fascination with dying a heroic death made him a dangerous leader. His failure to establish any kind of foundation to his life gave him something in common with Stuart. Both men were lonely bachelors who had never found their place in society, and felt the need to escape in order to prove themselves. The critical difference was that, while Stuart risked all based on his extensive knowledge of the Australian landscape, Burke had no such experience to fall back on.

There is a perception in Australia that Burke and Wills were victims of a vast waterless desert. In reality it was too much water that contributed to their deaths, not too little. The constant rain on the way to Menindee delayed the expedition and the heavy monsoon weather up in the Gulf country took a heavy toll on the men and their animals. The explorers died next to one of the greatest permanent watercourses in central Australia. Thirst was never a serious problem.

As a feat of endurance, Burke and Wills’ trek to the north coast and back was an amazing achievement. When in 1977 Tom Bergin and Paddy McHugh re-created the journey from the Dig Tree to the Gulf using camels, their theory was that if Burke had undertaken the trip in the cool season, he could have completed the task with relative ease, perhaps even inside the ninety days he had originally predicted. But even though they travelled in the winter months, with the benefit of tracks, wells and advance knowledge of the terrain, their outward journey took about the same time as Burke’s had done. By the time they arrived at the Gulf, their camels were in poor condition and needed several weeks to recover. They abandoned their expedition because they did not have the time or the resources to get back to the Dig Tree.

The experiment proved that trying to complete the journey as fast as possible was a major factor in Burke’s downfall. He pushed his animals beyond their limits and reduced his party’s ability to supplement its rations with bush foods. Why did he set himself such impossible targets? The pressure on him to win the race with Stuart brought out the worst aspects of his character. In the end Burke became a victim of ‘an excess of bravery’. Once in the desert he seemed to lose touch with reality, until he was oblivious to the disasters that loomed before him. Blinkered by the conventions of his era, Burke found it impossible to embrace the expressions of generosity shown by the Aboriginal people he encountered. His innate sense of superiority made it difficult for him to understand his new environment and so he starved to death in an area where indigenous people had thrived for thousands of years.

Despite all his failings, there is still something romantic about Burke. He was a flamboyant, charismatic man who had never really lived up to his own self-image. He was a man motivated by emotion, and his passions had found their object in Julia Matthews. As William Howitt (Alfred’s father) commented later, Burke was ‘suffering under the irritation of disappointed love, which made him moody, fitful…restless at nights, hasty in the day and apparently undecided what course to pursue’.

Burke’s fatal flaw was his talent for mistiming events. He missed the height of the gold rush in Victoria, the war in the Crimea and the riots in Buckland. His arrival at the Dig Tree just a few hours after Brahe had left seemed almost predestined. The twentieth-century Arctic explorer Vilhjalmur Stefansson believed that any adventures that happen during an expedition prove only that something has gone wrong; that adventure is interesting enough in retrospect (especially to someone who wasn’t there), but that it constitutes a very disagreeable experience derived from poor planning. But what makes exploration of any sort so fascinating are the factors that cannot be controlled even by people like Stefansson. Good expeditions also fail.

Burke’s errors of judgment were exposed by a run of misfortune. Good planning would have overcome some of his mistakes, but equally, just a tiny piece of good luck could also have saved him. Once events began to spiral out of control, the Burke and Wills saga became the expeditionary equivalent of the Titanic. No one believed that such a magnificent enterprise could end in such tragedy. Complacency was the final mistake. Overwhelmed by mismanagement and ineptitude on all sides, perhaps the most striking thing of the Burke and Wills expedition is not that it failed, but how close it came to success.

On 21 January 1863, the day dawned bright and filled with sunshine. As the morning of the funeral wore on, the air grew warmer and the atmosphere heavy. Ladies ordered their maids to lay out their black dresses, their largest hats, their fans and their parasols. All over Melbourne people prepared for the largest public event the city had ever seen. Visitors poured in from around the colony. The trains were packed and the pubs were full.

From early in the morning, people jostled for the best position along the procession route. Some scrambled up trees, shinned up lampposts or climbed onto rooftops. The pavements ‘looked like a forest of umbrellas’ as onlookers sought to shade themselves from the sun. By midday, government offices, businesses and shops were closed. Estimates put the crowd somewhere between seventy and one hundred thousand. Several hotels draped their facades with swathes of black crepe, cherubs decorated balustrades and banners were festooned across the roadways. Stalls were set up selling Burke and Wills souvenirs, including commemorative pamphlets, medals, portraits, poems, even ‘Burke Exploring Hats’.

As with any event overseen by the Exploration Committee, the funeral had already created controversy. After some initial confusion about whether Burke was Catholic or Protestant (he was Protestant), it emerged that organisations with even the remotest connection to the explorer were desperate to bask in his reflected glory. More than 200 public bodies applied to take part in the procession. Only a few were chosen. Since Burke had served as a soldier and a policeman, a row broke out over whether the police force or the army should play the most prominent role in the ceremony. A sub-committee was appointed. Perhaps, it was suggested, the Castlemaine Volunteer Corps could supply a military band while the police could perform the gun salute over the coffin?

But who was to stand for Wills? The Ballarat Cavalry saw their opportunity and volunteered to take part, but when the government offered them single railway passes to Melbourne (the Castlemaine contingent was offered returns), they not only pulled out but threatened to disband permanently. The same generous offer of return railway passes was extended to the councillors of Beechworth but they declined, owing they said ‘to the absence of the railway itself’. Georg Neumayer boycotted the ceremony when it was announced that no one from the Melbourne Observatory was included in the official cortege.

Given the public hostility towards the Royal Society, it was feared that some members of the Exploration Committee would be too embarrassed to attend the funeral at all. A proposal was put forward that all members should walk together as a sign of solidarity. Dr Richard Eades responded enthusiastically. He was not ashamed, he said, of belonging to the ‘much maligned’ committee. In fact he was so proud that he decided to ‘carry a pole erect, indicating he was a member of it’.

At 1 p.m. on 21 January 1863, a hush fell over the crowd around the Royal Society Hall. People removed their hats, as the undertakers carried the explorers’ coffins outside to the funeral carriages and the police began to clear a way forward. Led by the Castlemaine Rifle Volunteer Regiment and the Castlemaine Light Dragoons, the procession would make its way towards Parliament House before turning down Bourke Street, then into Elizabeth Street and out towards the Melbourne Cemetery.

The centrepiece of the cavalcade was the funeral car, a magnificent vehicle modelled on the carriage used for the Duke of Wellington, who had started quite a fashion in elaborate state funerals. It was five metres long, seven metres high, and pulled by a team of six horses sporting elaborately decorated harnesses and black plumes. The Argus noted that:

The wheels, four in number, are bronzed, and in the space between them the panelling of the car descends in graceful curves and pillars nearly to the ground. The front panel bears the royal arms and on the back the inscription ‘Carpentaria’. On the top of this framework, about eight feet from the ground, rested the two coffins, surmounted by a canopy bearing plumes of feathers, and supported by four silver columns springing from the body.

Not everyone was so impressed. One observer branded the vehicle ‘that hideous affair’, and closer inspection revealed that the carriage was only a poor imitation of Wellington’s. His funeral car cost £11,000. Burke’s was knocked up for less than a thousand. As the coffins were slid into place, the police contingent came forward, raised their rifles to the sky and fired a volley of shots. The crowd fell silent once again. The funeral procession was about to start.

On the very same day in Adelaide, crowds were also gathering around the city. Since dawn, workmen had been hammering decorations in place until the streets ‘presented a truly gay appearance’. Pavements were cleared of rubbish and water carts were towed up and down the main avenues to dampen down the dust. Giant drapes of tartan adorned many buildings, flags flew from every lamppost and in front of the Treasury building was a ‘splendid arch of palms, laurels and evergreen shrubs’ leading to a specially constructed platform. Nearby, variegated lamps spelt out a message: ‘Welcome’. By noon, the streets were full and the balconies and rooftops ‘well sprinkled with ambitious spectators anxious to get a bird’s-eye view of the whole demonstration’.

The clattering of hooves silenced the crowd and a procession appeared. At its head, a horseman carried a flag embroidered with the initials JMDS. Behind him was a small, wizened, hairy figure mounted precariously on a packhorse. John McDouall Stuart was coming home.

Stuart’s successful journey across the continent was a triumph of determination and stamina. It had taken him more than a month to complete the last 300 kilometres through the Kakadu area to the north coast. Slowed by a maze of mangroves, mud and marshland, he had finally approached the ocean on 24 July 1862. Even then, he kept his suspicions of success to himself:

At eight and a half miles coming on a plain I could hear the wash of the waters and seeing a dense heavy bushy scrub on the other side of the plain, I knew it at once to be the bounding of the sea…Thring and I rode forward a yard or two and were on the beach delighted to see the broad expanse of salt water. I immediately dismounted, walked into the water, or rather dipped my feet into the Indian Ocean as I promised Sir Richard MacDonnell I would do if I got the chance, and not only did I do this but I washed my hands and face in it as well.

Thring got so excited at first sight of it that he could not restrain himself but called out, the sea, the sea, the sea, which so took the rest of the party by surprise that they seemed quite bewildered, and he had to repeat the words two or three times before they could understand him.

Stuart celebrated his crossing by raising a Union Jack lovingly embroidered with his name by James Chambers’ daughter Mary. Stuart named the area Chambers Bay.

At length, understanding what was meant they commenced cheering at a terrible rate which lasted some time.

Stuart had emerged on a headland now named Point Stuart. It flanks a small bay nestling behind glorious forests of palms and cycads. The ocean is turquoise, the sand fine and white and the beach is dotted with turtle nests.

Stuart’s men were elated and tumbled into the waves. After a ceremony to raise the Union Jack and toast the British empire, they approached their leader to ask for an extra cup of tea by means of celebration. Stuart refused.

One of his men said later that although their leader was ‘in their black books for a few days’, they realised that Stuart denied the request because he thought it unlikely he would survive the return journey. He wanted to be sure there would be enough rations for the rest of his party to get home. From now on speed was essential. For the first few days Stuart was strong enough to lead the march south but scurvy was beginning to take its toll once more and his eyesight was now so afflicted that he could not see at all after dark.

In early October 1862, as the party retraced their steps past Attack Creek, Stuart was finding it hard to sustain the necessary twelve-hour days in the saddle:

What a miserable life mine is now. I get no rest night or day from this terrible gnawing pain, the nights are too long and the days are too long, and I am so weak that I am hardly able to move about the camp…I am afraid soon I shall not be able to sit in the saddle and then what must I do?

Stuart now had to be lifted on and off his horse. He could barely walk and strips of rotting flesh inside his mouth made it difficult for him to eat. By 18 October, the situation became critical:

While taking a drink of water, I was seized with a violent fit of vomiting blood and mucus, which lasted about five minutes and has nearly killed me…I have kept King and Nash with me in case of my dying during the night, as it would be lonely for one young man to be there by himself. Wind south-east.

The next morning Stuart was unable to stand. His men constructed a stretcher, which they tied between the two quietest horses, and it was in this giant sling that the explorer was carried south. For the last few days of the journey home, Stuart’s men were convinced their leader was dying. He lay semiconscious in his stretcher and was only just lucid when the emaciated party arrived back at the outpost of Mount Margaret Station on 27 November 1862. It had taken three attempts but John McDouall Stuart had at last achieved his dream. He had crossed Australia from coast to coast.

News of Stuart’s success did not reach Adelaide until the end of December 1862. When he heard of the triumph, Sir Roderick Murchison, president of the Royal Geographical Society, hailed the explorer as a hero:

In no time or country has any geographical pioneer more directly advanced the material interests of a colony than Mr McDouall Stuart has done those of South Australia; whilst as a geographer we especially recognise the value of the numerous astronomical observations he made under the severest of privations, by which the true features of large portions both of the interior and the north coast have been for the first time determined.

The successful party recuperated for several weeks in the Flinders Ranges before setting off for their reception in Adelaide. The men were told to wear their ‘bush attire’, so they salvaged what was left of their moleskin pants, red shirts and cabbage-tree hats. One man counted thirty-nine patches on his trousers. ‘The explorers in this guise were like victorious soldiers,’ wrote the Register, ‘returning from a well fought field, carrying the tattered flags and dented weapons which bear witness to their valour.’

Stuart himself was still weak, prone to violent stomach pains and choking fits, but he managed to ride unaided through the streets of Adelaide. As he passed the crowd cheered and waved their flags. Their hero had returned. ‘The poor horses,’ wrote one observer, ‘they look so tired.’

In Melbourne, the Castlemaine band struck up ‘a most satisfactory’ rendition of ‘Dead March in Saul’ and the cortege moved forward. Around the funeral car marched the pallbearers: John King (still pale and prone to fits of sobbing), Sir William Stawell, Ambrose Kyte, Frederick Standish (Burke’s old boss), Alfred Howitt, Ferdinand Mueller and Dr Richard Eades (minus the promised ‘erect pole’).

Six mourning carriages followed, carrying, amongst others, Nurse Dogherty (still wailing) and Sir Henry Barkly (eyes lowered). Towards the rear, there was an assortment of marchers including consular officials from nine nations and representatives from organisations as diverse as the Municipal Council to the Society of Oddfellows. The entire cavalcade was so long it occupied several streets at once and it took more than two and a half hours to march the five kilometres to the cemetery. This was the most glorious spectacle Victoria had ever seen, even more glorious than the party which had marched out of Royal Park nearly two and a half years earlier.

A hush fell over the crowd as the funeral carriages passed by and people strained for a glimpse of all that was left of the most famous men in the colony. As the procession reached the cemetery, spectators thronged around the newly constructed vault ‘in a rather unseemly manner’, forcing the pallbearers to push their way towards the grave. When police had cleared the audience back to a respectable distance, the bodies of Robert O’Hara Burke and William John Wills were lowered into the grave and laid side by side. A police guard fired three volleys of shots as a mark of respect.

Shops and offices closed as around three-quarters of Melbourne’s population turned out to mourn their heroes.

In Adelaide, John McDouall Stuart dismounted and stepped awkwardly onto the stage. As he accepted the keys to the city of Adelaide, it seemed as if the whole of South Australia was cheering his name. A few streets away in the city surveyor’s office, his maps were already being scrutinised by engineers as they plotted the route for the new overland telegraph line.

In both cities, as the crowds dispersed, the ladies fanned themselves and the men loosened their ties. The sultry northerly breeze was blowing down from the desert once more.

Today, the same hot wind still rustles through the branches of the old coolibah at Depot Camp 65 on the banks of Cooper Creek. Floods have washed away the remains of the stockade but some engravings on the tree are still just visible locked away inside deep round scars on the trunk. The creek still murmurs as it sweeps past the cracked red earth, and the air is filled with the chattering of the parrots and the raucous shrieks of the cockatoos. The Cooper was never a silent place.