John King: Ireland's Forgotten Explorer - Australia's First Hero

By Eric Villiers

In 1861 an Irish-born explorer emerged from the Australian outback, sole survivor of the country's greatest expedition. John King from Moy, Co. Tyrone, had crossed the arid continent and discovered tracts of rich, fertile land. With eight men dead, King's triumph was one of the world's great feats of endurance and thousands gathered to crown him Australia's first hero ...

Yet within weeks the handsome 22-year-old had been airbrushed from popular history. It was determined that King, an 'Irish working man' was an unsuitable champion and the two dead leaders of the party, the Anglo-Irish gentleman, Robert O'Hara Burke and English scientist William Wills, would be history's heroes. Mentally and physically, King was a better equipped explorer than Burke or Wills.

Educated at a Quaker primary school, King lived through the Great Famine, graduated after seven years at a tough Dublin military college, fought in the Indian Mutiny and was a teacher, linguist, musician, army sharpshooter, horseman and camel handler.

This story reveals the string of injustices done to John King by powerful contemporaries and subsequent historians, and on the 150th anniversary of his survival, seeks to give him his rightful place in the Burke and Wills historiography.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Ulster Historical Foundation
• Release date: Jun 1, 2012
• ISBN: 9781908448668

Eric Villiers

Former Portadown Times journalist, Eric Villiers, author of Ireland's first 'soul' singer (2002) and John King: Ireland’s Forgotten Explorer – Australia’s First Hero.

Book preview

As a reporter, editor and freelance journalist in Northern Ireland, Eric Villiers covered everything from the troubles and politics to crime and sport. Along the way the history of modern Ireland became an abiding interest and led to his research into ‘forgotten news’: the untold stories, scandals, cover-ups and triumphs of Irish men and women who have been airbrushed from popular history because of the contemporary social, racial, political or cultural imperatives that shaped their lives and reputations.

In the 1990s having moved into newspaper management he completed an honours degree in literature and history with the Open University, which helped propel him further into a world of forgotten stars and villains in the Victorian and Edwardian eras.

His contributions in this area include a book – on a forgotten Irish music hall star – entitled Mary Connolly: Ireland’s First Soul Singer and articles for newspapers and magazines including History Ireland and Stage, the London-based weekly trade paper for the arts and entertainment industry.

A lithograph, ‘John King Sole Survivor of the Burke and Wills expedition to Carpentaria’. Attributed to De Gruchy and Leigh

John King

Ireland’s Forgotten Explorer

– Australia’s First Hero

ERIC VILLIERS

ULSTER HISTORICAL FOUNDATION

FRONT COVER

Burke’s Death

Painting by William Strutt, which dramatically depicts the death tableaux, complete with revolver in his hand, just as Burke had intended.

COURTESY OF THE STATE LIBRARY OF VICTORIA

Published 2012

by Ulster Historical Foundation,

49 Malone Road, Belfast BT9 6RY

www.ancestryireland.com

www.booksireland.org.uk

Except as otherwise permitted under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, this publication may only be reproduced, stored or transmitted in any form or by any means with the prior permission in writing of the publisher or, in the case of reprographic reproduction, in accordance with the terms of a licence issued by The Copyright Licensing Agency. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside those terms should be sent to the publisher.

© Eric Villiers

ISBN: 978-1-908448-04-0

DESIGN AND FORMATTING

FPM Publishing

PRINT MANUFACTURE

Jellyfish Print Solutions

Contents

FOREWORD

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

PREAMBLE

Introduction

1    From Famine to Fame

2    Music, Culture and War

3    Burke Finds a Fellow Soldier

4    Commotions and Promotions

5    A Christmas Cosmic Epiphany

6    King of the Outback

7    Burke Ruins Last Chance for Survival

8    The Rescue of King

9    A Hero is Born … and Buried

10  Honours, Dishonour and Extraordinary Secrets

Epilogue

NOTES

BIBLIOGRAPHY

INDEX

Foreword

Like the rest of my family, I grew up hearing the story of how my forebear, John King, was the first man to cross Australia and return alive. An essential feature of the story was that he survived only through the kindness of the Aboriginal people who looked after him and fed him nardoo seed. In November 2001, through the Australian Aboriginal Ambassador to the European Union, I finally had the opportunity on behalf of my family to thank the Yandruwandha people, for saving my great-great-grand-uncle’s life.

The Aboriginal Ambassador, Ms Isobel Coe, was calling on me as Speaker of the Northern Ireland Assembly, and the didgeridoo she presented to me in the Speaker’s Office that day is still displayed in the Stormont Parliament Buildings. It was 140 years after they had saved him, but we are fortunate when in life we can complete unfinished business or right an injustice in our own past or that of our community.

That is also what Eric Villiers is doing in this book, for while John King’s survival ranks alongside any of the thrilling stories of exploration and discovery across the world, his endurance, and ultimate success has never received due attention, not least in his homeland. Mr Villiers not only puts that right in his book, but he also explores the fascinating question of why John King, feted as a hero immediately on his return, then faded from history. It is a special feature of this excellent book that not only historical but social justice is served by telling John King’s story again. I say social justice, because this is not only the extraordinary tale of a heroic working-class Irishman, but the story of the generosity and hospitality of the Aboriginal people of Coopers’ Creek. Neither should be forgotten.

JOHN, LORD ALDERDICE

HOUSE OF LORDS, LONDON

Acknowledgements

It is thanks to a small band of family genealogists, local historians and conscientious librarians that I was directed towards the realisation that John King’s character and motivation had long been misrepresented. The kernel of this book is the idea that an accident of birth wrongfully excluded King’s name from the ranks of the nineteenth century’s most famous explorers. Across 150 years Burke and Wills historians have been apt to classify King as a sort of accidental, or – as one of them put it – ‘an unlikely explorer.’ It is truer to say that young John King determined – as the Star Trek quotation has it – ‘to boldly go where no man has gone before.’ Barely past his twentieth year he had already crossed the Atlantic and Indian oceans having attached himself to the Victorian Exploring Expedition long before it set out from Melbourne in 1860 to solve the world’s last continental mystery.

My project was born in the silence of the Irish and Local Studies Library in Armagh where I came across several short articles and pamphlets squeezed into odd spaces around much more prestigious historic tomes. Mostly these ‘papers’ – anonymously written for local history groups or by family descendents – sketched the story of King, and although they did not major on his character, they did have a re-occurring theme that was a collective corrective to the general view expressed in historiography that he had gone out into the world uneducated. Here – chiefly in the work of the late William Alderdice – were the first hints of the injustice done to him and his reputation.

All that is not to say that I dug out this material myself, on the contrary it was the library’s chief officer Mary McVeigh and her deputy Kieran McConville who drew my attention to the various sources. At that early stage I was treating the venture as something that could be usefully turned into a feature article for a regional daily such as the Belfast Newsletter, where it duly appeared, appropriately enough, since the paper had been around to report the crossing in the first place. And so my thanks to Mary and Kieran for helping to kick off the process that culminated in this book.

The feedback from the wider King family, enthusiasts and local historians after that article appeared sparked the idea that there might be a television documentary to be made, particularly so since the 150th anniversary was looming in 2010–11. I floated the idea with several media contacts before Tom Murphy and Mary Murphy of the ‘stop. watch television’ company in Dublin expressed an interest in taking it forward with a view to having it commissioned by broadcasters in Dublin and/or Belfast. Unfortunately not long after that, news came through that another Dublin documentary maker was close to finishing a series based on Burke and Wills from an Irish angle. Understandably Stopwatch felt unable to continue.

Nevertheless I have to thank Tom and Mary for their encouragement and direction in that early research, for without it, the book project might not have happened. Prior to their involvement it had not seemed that a story built around King could generate enough material to sustain a book. Afterwards having interviewed, or been in contact with King relatives, including Lord Alderdice, his brother David Alderdice and others like Phil King in New Zealand, a book took shape in my mind.

Gathering the necessary background material in Irish libraries, institutions and newspaper archives was relativity simple – my real problem was in sourcing stuff from halfway around the world in Australia. It was here that Australian historian Dave Phoenix, arguably that country’s foremost expert on the Burke and Wills Expedition, came to my rescue. Not only is the website that he helps to administer (www.burkeandwills.net.au) the most comprehensive and easiest to access single source for Burke and Wills information, his guidance helped steer me away from embarrassing mistakes in details. I am sure there are other errors I have made but thanks to Dave I hope the core material is sound.

Dave is an historian who – having literally followed in the explorers’ footsteps by trekking the Burke and Wills trail – believes that for the practical historian ‘a stout pair of boots’ is an essential item of equipment. As he says these are necessary for anyone if they are to fully understand the sufferings and hardships the explorers endured:

Burke and his team were men of the Victorian age. They were pioneers whose value system was a product of the era in which they lived. The expedition itself was ultimately a shambles, but it departed with the best intentions. Today it would be unthinkable to attempt to explore under the conditions endured by these men 150 years ago. Global acculturation, changing humanitarian attitudes towards hardship and individualistic approaches to personal sacrifice mean the achievements seen in 1860 could never be repeated today.

His observation about the application of twenty-first century perspectives to historic events was a valuable corrective, as I championed King and became aggrieved at his treatment by his contemporaries.

Detail was another area where I was grateful for the editorial input of two others: Thomas and Donna McQuade who read my penultimate manuscript and spotted more than one inaccurate description. By going over my text with such care they went above and beyond the call of duty as my ‘Australian cousin and cousin-in-law.’

Again in this area I must thank Fintan Mullan, Executive Director of the Ulster Historical Foundation, Belfast, and his two readers, who like Donna and Thomas sat in judgement on my manuscript and improved it with their blue pencils.

Thanks too to David Armstrong and Ivor Smith whose work on a 2011 exhibition in Moy to mark the 150th anniversary of the Burke and Wills Expedition, lifted awareness of John King in the local media and community in general. Their work also put me in touch with Brendan Duffy and James Kane of the O’Neill Country Historical Society, who have helped behind the scenes to broadcast my efforts and boost my aim of launching the book in John King’s own backyard.

I am grateful too to Iain Frazier, Chief Executive of Dungannon and South Tyrone Borough Council for opening the file the council has kept on John King, enabling me to acquaint myself with the high level of interest – however fleetingly – King had created in newspapers, schools and history groups across the past forty years. Iain also prepared the way for the Borough’s Mayor to come on board, as it were, to help launch my book. Here too my thanks to Eileen Forde of the Mayor’s office who showed patience and understanding as we planned, postponed, planned again, postponed again, the book launch.

My thanks also to the Burke and Wills Historical Society for the magnificent work they have done and continue to do on their website: www.burkeandwills.net.au. Similarly, thank you to Bevan Leviston of the Melbourne tour company, White Hat, for providing me with contemporary newspaper sources and quotations, notably the Age, which I would otherwise have missed.

For their permission to use various images my thanks to: Museum Australia (www.museum.vic.gov.au); National Library of Australia (www.nla.gov.aus) and the State Library of Tasmania (www.images.statelibrary.tas.gov.aus).

Finally my deepest appreciation goes to my wife Helen for listening patiently and encouraging me as my project boomeranged back and forward from history article to documentary to book.

ERIC VILLIERS

Preamble

In 1944 in a paper on two of Australia’s most famous explorers, read to the Royal Historical Society of Victoria, John McKellar spoke of visiting Melbourne General Cemetery where Robert O’Hara Burke and William John Wills are entombed side by side. As McKellar considered the epitaph engraved on the 36-ton granite memorial, ‘Companions in death … Associates in renown,’ a friend standing beside him added, ‘But the best man I think lies elsewhere.¹

This book tells the story of that dislocated man, John King from Moy, County Tyrone, the only survivor of that first epic crossing of Australia in 1861, a venture that claimed the lives of seven men and went down in history as ‘The Burke and Wills Expedition’. Although largely forgotten King’s triumph remains one of the world’s great feats of endurance and as the 150th anniversary of his survival passes, it is timely to reclaim for him a more appropriate place in the historiography of the Burke and Wills saga and examine why he continues to be excluded from the pantheon of heroic explorers.

A map of the routes taken to and from the north coast by the Burke and Wills Expedition.

ILLUSTRATION COURTESY OF HAMLYN PUBLISHING, LONDON

Introduction

For mid-nineteenth century explorers the failure to conquer Antarctica and Australia was an affront to European civilisation in an age when imperial expansionism and heroic individualism had peaked. While the Antarctic fascinated a few it was Australia that drew international adventurers like moths to a flame. As decades came and went every attempt to penetrate the interior was beaten back, a good many men lost their lives and even an entire expedition disappeared. As the 1860s approached myths about arid deserts, mineral-rich mountains and a vast inland sea fed the popular imagination, adding spice to the race that had developed between the continent’s competing colonies to ‘lift the veil.’ A verse in the Melbourne Punch in November 1860 captured the growing excitement:

A race! A race! So great a one

The World ne’er saw before;

A race! A race! Across this land

From south to northern shore

In 1859 in the Colony of Victoria – rich with new-found gold – a quasi-scientific body in Melbourne, the Royal Society of Victoria, had announced details of a ‘grand plan’ to find a route to the northern coast. The Society’s Exploration Committee would assemble and supervise the largest expedition in the country’s history. Using Indian camels a party would cross and re-cross the continent on a 4,000-mile journey to the Gulf of Carpentaria. On 20 August 1860 the Victorian Exploring Expedition, twenty-six camels, twenty-three horses, nineteen men and six wagons left Melbourne waved off by thousands of gloriously optimistic citizens.

Almost a year later with no news from the explorers, amid rumours of