SENIOR INSPECTOR BURKE
When the Royal Society of Victoria had decided that the golden pre-eminence of Melbourne warranted that it put together the first exploring party to cross the continent, they chose as its leader Senior Inspector Richard O’Hara Burke, a man born of a genteel Galway Protestant family in 1821 who had never been beyond the settled regions. Burke combined in his character the stereotypical stage-Irish virtues and flaws—a yearning for the beyond, a Celtic romanticism about death, a volatile temperament balanced by charm and humanity. His posting was to Beechworth but in the pre-Ned Kelly era, when new land laws initiated by the Irish patriot Charles Gavan Duffy in the Victorian legislature were just beginning to trouble the squatters. Amongst other things, Burke was meant to prevent squatters using fake agents—dummies to select lands—but he was forgetful enough in his duties that he is said to have papered the walls of his Beechworth residence with reminders and documents to be dealt with.
When young he had served in the Austrian army as a hussar, but in 1848, the year of European revolutions, when the Austrians were fighting the Italian nationalists for possession of Milan and Rome, some shadow had fallen over his career, perhaps gambling debts. He was allowed to resign—a form of shame. He served in the Irish constabulary before emigrating to Victoria in 1853 with a promise of patronage and good hopes of promotion. Waiting for a posting, he ran up gambling debts at the Melbourne Club. He wanted to transcend that sort of social meanness by some transcendant deed. His young brother James had entered the pantheon by being the first British officer killed, in his case in hand-to-hand combat, in the Crimea in 1854. Burke too was looking for a place in the pantheon.
The name of William Wills, the expeditionary surveyor and astronomer, is a paler though perhaps more admirable presence in the expedition. He was in fact third-in-command. Second-in-command was George James Landells, who had both aquired and was responsible for the camels. But since it was Wills who struggled with Burke through the mangroves of the Flinders River to within reach of the Gulf of Carpentaria, tasted the water there and found it salty and suitable to validate their claim of a first crossing, and because they then died at Cooper’s Creek, their names are cemented together. Burke’nwills is an Australian term for bad luck, admirable but futile effort, and—despite the fact that they died by a flowing creek amidst Aborigines who were celebrating a good season—death in the desert.
The Royal Society of Victoria, consumed by civic ambition, wished to forestall the proposed third expedition of John McDouall Stuart, which sought to cross the continent (but which did not manage to). In making that journey, great natural resources might be found. Burke and his lieutenant Wills managed the south-north crossing in February 1861, while McDouall Stuart did not make the transit till July 1862. It would be a painful triumph though, since Stuart’s would be the route used forever more and serve as the route for the Overland Telegraph Line, and Burke and Wills gave their lives for their success.
From the beginning of the expedition Burke quarrelled with the English camel expert, Landells, and shed men and equipment as he went. He used his generous but aging meteorologist-naturalist-geologist, Ludwig Becker, for menial jobs such as loading the camels. While Burke was plunging northwards with Wills, the Irishman and former soldier John King, survivor of the Indian Mutiny some four years before, and a sailor named Gray, Becker would die near Cooper’s Creek (near the junction of present day New South Wales, Queensland, the Northern Territory and South Australia) in the spring of 1861.
Burke and Wills struggled over the Selwyn Ranges, past the present site of Cloncurry, and on into a Carpentarian wasteland of mud and mangrove and bewildering watercourses. In the better parts of this country they had sighted Aboriginal huts. But at the height of this triumph of European transit, all they could do was to taste the brackish water whose salt showed that they had reached the fringes of a shore they lacked the strength to struggle through and find. The place where they tasted the water of the Gulf is obscure to this day—no notable road is laid down to terminate there, or to follow their course across the continent.
At the same time, Burke and his three began their return journey wasted emotionally and physically not only by the conditions of travel but by scurvy. Gray died—foreshadowing Scott’s scurvy-ridden Antarctic expedition. They reached Cooper’s Creek depot, and the tree marked DIG, to find that the party that had waited there for them for over three months had ridden out just hours before and left a cache of supplies buried in the soil beneath it! Then came Burke’s decision, after rest, not to follow the track of the departed depot party but to strike out south-westwards towards a station in South Australia. And then, that proving hopeless, they went back to Cooper’s Creek for the last time.
King would prove to be the survivor, fed in particular by a woman named Carrawaw with fish and the edible grass seed named nardoo, prepared in the native fashion. Burke and Wills too had both eaten nardoo, which before they died they prepared with King by grinding it and mixing it with water. It is fashionable to believe they ignored native food sources. They obviously did not. Wills said they ate three to four pounds of it a day. Only when King was a near-helpless survivor did Carrawaw begin to feed him with nardoo prepared in the native way, from roasted seed. Without the roasting the nardoo did not provide thiamine. Burke and Wills, having unwittingly omitted one step in preparation, were somewhat amazed they were failing despite the use of the great Aboriginal staple. Wills found, unlike the experience of famine victims, that nardoo appeased his appetite. ‘Starvation on nardoo is by no means very unpleasant.’
While John McDouall Stuart was still crossing the continent on his last journey, the bones of Burke and Wills and the living survivor, King, were retrieved from Cooper’s Creek by a party led by William Hallett. Hallett, the survivor and the remains all reached Melbourne just before Christmas to be greeted by the Exploration Committee and Ellen Dougherty, Burke’s former nurse, now elevated to new status as nurturer of the immolated Burke. As one historian, Michael Cathcart, justly says, the exposing of the remains of Burke and Wills was a Victorian-age necrophiliac orgy.
When the remains arrived in Melbourne in a tin box, they were taken to the Royal Society Hall and examined (fragments of bone and tooth were stolen as civic relics). They were then displayed for fifteen days in a raised catafalque on which stood glass-topped coffins.
In black, Julia Mathews, the adolescent actress Burke had fallen in love with and to whom he had left all his goods, visited the bones. Those with influence were actually permitted to handle them. Treating bones as if they contained some relevant magic was something the good Protestant gentlemen of the Royal Society generally associated with Papism, but now it was practised in full and barely inhibited mode. Volunteer regiments accompanied the hearse on the way to burial, and houses and shops along the way to interment were draped in purple and black. The Age claimed 40 000 people wept. Stuart’s interment was a far less crowded affair at London’s Kensal Green cemetery.
The death of the explorers had redeemed all their failures. The fact that the country they had travelled was of little economic promise was forgotten in a paroxysm of grieving. They had sacrificed all to find the undefined and to know the as-yet-unknown. But while Stuart’s expedition had practical results, there was nothing practical to be gained from Burke and Wills’ journey. Even the long rectangle of desert and tropics that then lay between the western border of Queensland and the eastern border of South Australia and the Northern Territory was not acquired, since Queensland was permitted to subsume that sliver of country to complete its mass.
The funeral of Burke and Wills was a massive recognition of the idea that Australia’s core was malign and unfair. The Royal Commission of Inquiry began its sittings in late November 1861 but found very little to blame in either the planning or execution of the expedition.
GENTLEMAN TRANSPORTEES
By 1860 the idea of Australia
as the place for the less talented or more disreputable young Briton was well established in British culture. It would long continue to be so. In Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest (1895), a wastrel young man named Algernon is told that his uncle ‘said at dinner the other night that you would have to choose between this world, the next world, and Australia’.
Charles Dickens can be seen as typical of a number of nineteenth-century bourgeois Englishmen who saw Australia as offering possible redemption for unsatisfactory sons. Sometimes young gentlemen were sent for moral turpitude. Joseph Furphy would give voice to a young man of this type in Such Is Life (1903). At a camp in the Riverina a group of bushmen, drovers and bullockies hear a young English gentleman tell how he was detected ‘in a liaison with a young person who resided with my uncle’s wife as a companion. Whereupon my lady used her influence with the demd old dotard, and I was cut off with a shilling. However, he gave me a saloon passage to Melbourne . . .’
It is famously known that as a boy Charles Dickens worked in a so-called blacking factory—that is, a factory which made shoe polish and dispensed it in bottles. Surrounded by squalor and coal barges, he had yearned for beauty and education and, when he came to affluence and success, he was pleased to be able to send his own sons and daughters to good schools—three of his sons attended a fashionable boarding school in Boulogne—and to share with them a series of increasingly fine residences from Devonshire Terrace to Tavistock House and the beloved Gad’s Hill Place in Kent. In these transits of success, Dickens picked up from meetings with such folk as Caroline Chisholm, the great promoter of emigration to Australia, a particular view of the distant colonies. In the last issue of his magazine Household Words in May 1859, he wrote an article on Chisholm’s schemes, and published a number of letters from emigrants to Australia. He himself wrote, ‘It is unquestionably melancholy that thousands upon thousands of people, ready and willing to labour, should be wearing away life hopelessly in this island, while within a few months’ sail—within a few weeks when steam communication with Australia shall be established—there are vast tracts of land, of country where no man who is willing to work hard . . . can ever know want.’
He exploited that destination in his imaginative work as a place to send a failed gent such as Mr Micawber, the hapless debtor in his novel David Copperfield (1850). Aboard the emigrant ship, Micawber cried, ‘This country I am come to conquer. Have you honours? Have you riches? Have you posts of profitable pecuniary emolument? Let them be brought forward. They are mine!’ Micawber rises in Australia to become a magistrate at a fictional place named Port Middlebay. In Great Expectations, which Dickens began writing in 1860, Magwitch, a transported convict who returns to England illicitly but as a wealthy man, was also indicative of popular British belief in Australia’s being a less mentally and morally testing environment for success. If former convicts could do well in Australia, young gentleman should have no trouble at all.
Dickens’ tenth child and youngest son, Edward Bulwer Lytton Dickens, and his sixth son, Alfred D’Orsay Tennyson Dickens, were both future Australian immigrants. Alfred acquired the family pet name Skittles, and the younger Edward was called Plorn. But despite the fond nicknaming of his children, Dickens could often think he had too many of them—ten, of whom nine survived to adulthood. Dickens said of Alfred that, ‘I have always purposed to send [him] abroad.’
Dickens’ interest in Australia had been piqued again when in 1862 he met Sir Charles Nicholson, who had served as a doctor in New South Wales and whose interest in archaeology led to his name being attached to a museum of archaeology in Sydney University. He had published a book, The Australian Colonies, Their Condition, Resources and Prospects, which Dickens devoured with his customary energy. Enthusiasm for Australia was also at work in the mind of the novelist and British Post executive (inventor of the red post-box) Anthony Trollope, when he gave permission for his son Frederic to emigrate to Australia in 1863. Young Frederic wrote back enthusiastic reports of station life which might well have reached Dickens through his friendship with his fellow novelist.
These factors caused Dickens, with whatever degree of enthusiasm from his son, to decide on Australia as a place for Alfred. Alfred had been working at an importer’s involved in trade with China, but now he was off to a place of greater opportunity. Like many notable Britons sending their sons to Australia, Dickens wrote to a friend, Sir Charles Layard, undersecretary in the Foreign Office, to ask him for references for Alfred, and supplied some of his own. At the time of his departure Alfred was twenty years old and a man of fashion; after his son’s departure, Dickens received bills for eleven pairs of kid gloves and other items Alfred had taken to Australia. His ship arrived in Melbourne in early August 1863. An English friend of Dickens, the Reverend G.K. Rusden, had worked on bush stations before becoming Clerk of Parliament in Victoria. Rusden and Sir Charles Nicholson took an interest in young Alfred, and advised him on possible employment in the bush. He became manager of Conoble, a sheep station nearly 100 miles (150 kilometres) north of Hay, in flat, drought-prone country, a planet away from the England of Dickens’ novels. He wrote from there, as plucky British lads were meant to, that he was ‘as happy as a king’.
In 1867 Dickens withdrew young Plorn from school, telling his headmaster that he intended for him ‘an active life’, and determining that this should be in Australia. Dickens had already suspended Edward’s study of Latin and said that the boy should apply himself to ‘a general improvement of his acquaintance with the properties of the things he will have to subdue to his use in a rough wild life’. At the boat train at Paddington, bound first for Plymouth, with his brother Henry travelling with him to that port to see the sixteen-year-old Plorn off, Dickens was distraught. ‘I shall never forget, so long as I live, the parting that took place between my father and my brother Edward, his youngest and best loved son,’ Henry would later report. Dickens would never see either Alfred or Plorn again. Indeed, thanks to the relentless pace of his work, he was eroding his health and had only two more years to live. As for his sons—whom we shall revisit later—they would suffer many Antipodean tests and tragedies of a kind Dickens could not have anticipated, and one can see through them the gulf between what Europeans expected of Australia, and what Australia was. In the meantime, his Australian sons would demonstrate, at the peril of their very souls, that in Australia rainfall was destiny.
BEING BLACK AND WHITE
By the 1860s, the Bible, newspaper editorials and various branches of science seemed to underpin the potent belief that to be white was to be God’s elect. Across the north of Australia, the battle for land between the two races was in full flower. In the southern regions of Australia, the battle had already been won. People in cities and ‘settled districts’ were already finding evidence in science, the Gospels and social science that the conquest, if regrettable, was inevitable. First of all, the concept of the Great Chain of Being, a proposition deriving from Aristotle, was a given in the European view of the cosmos. One of its main planks was the principle of gradation. At the base of being were rocks, at the apex was God, beneath him angels, and beneath angels, man. Inevitably Christians stood highest amongst mankind’s creeds, and Europeans highest amongst the races of man. Aborigines were thought lowest. Phrenology, the science of grading humanity by studying the shape of the head and the size of the brain inside it, had been used to explain the criminality of convicts. But it also explained the low state of Aborigines. Founded by the Australian physician Franz Joseph Gall in the 1790s, and adapted by the Scottish brothers George and Andrew Combe, phrenology had such respectability that men with high qualifications could assure audiences in the south-eastern cities that, scientifically, the Aboriginal skull showed deficiencies in morality and brain power, and an excess of aggression and powers of observation (hence their capacity to track animals and men).
The Aborigines also had reason to fear certain colonial interpretations of Darw
in’s The Origin of Species. More in sorrow than in hate, the Age declared in January 1888, ‘It seems a law of nature that where two races whose stages of progression are brought into contact, the inferior race is doomed to wither and disappear . . . in accordance with a natural law which, however it may clash with human benevolence, is clearly beneficial to mankind at large.’ Thus, too much kindness only delayed an inevitable obliteration.
It would be wrong to see such opinions as deliberately malign. They were taken as science by decent people, on the basis of expert ideas powerfully arrayed to support them. It was phrenology which made Truganini, the Tasmanian Aborigine, very nervous of what would happen to her body after her death. William Lanney, her husband, seen as the last surviving full-blood Tasmanian Aborigine, had died in 1869 and his corpse had been immediately dismembered and beheaded. ‘I know that when I die the Museum wants my body,’ Truganini told a clergyman. She had good reason to be fearful that her head would join the hundreds on display for the use of scholars in museums in Australia and throughout the world. Indeed, after her death in 1876, the Dandridge family, who had protected her in life, buried her at midnight in the remains of the old Female Factory at the Cascades. It was scientific men from the Royal Society of Tasmania, not ghouls, who exhumed her body in December 1878 and kept it in a secure part of the museum for study by scientists. But ultimately, in the early twentieth century, as she had feared, she was placed on public display. She would again be buried—with honours and more publicly than the first time—a hundred years after her death.
This premise of God-given white supremecy influenced not only settlers but began to penetrate some Aboriginal minds as well. One of the most tragic cases was that of a young man named Harry Bungaleenee.
In 1846 a story arose in Gippsland that a white woman had become a captive of the natives. One of three expeditions which set out from Melbourne to find her carried with them handkerchiefs with advice about escape printed in English on one side and, since the Port Phillip region was pervasively Scottish, Erse, the tongue of the Highlands and Islands, on the other. In fact this white woman was utterly mythical, but one of the Aborigines persecuted for concealing her was a man of the Kurnai people named Bungaleenee, who was for a time captured and held in prison in Melbourne.