European Discovery and Exploration of Australia

By Erwin Feeken

The map of Australia abounds with fascinating geographical place-names, the origins of which have, for long, been hidden in the journals of our early explorers. Now after nine years of research, Erwin Feeken, a highly qualified cartographer, and his wife, Gerda, have finalised the first complete record of Australian geographical place-names and the most comprehensive general reference work on Australian exploration ever published.

In European Discovery and Exploration of Australia, there are twenty-three beautifully drawn four-colour maps plus index showing the routes of more than 120 explorers with the locality of their named features numbered to accord with a Key to the Maps. The place-names in the Key have been numbered approximately in chronological order of their naming, though places found during a single expedition have been grouped together. There is also a gazetteer containing over four thousand place-names alphabetically arranged with notes on their origins. The map reference numbers (in brackets) form a cross-reference with the Key to the Maps.

The work is introduced by a foreword from Lord Casey and an essay on the nature of Australian exploration by Professor O. H. K. Spate, director of the Research School of Pacific Studies, Australian National University. The text, comprising a survey of Australian exploration, is arranged in the form of biographies of the explorers (describing, for the first time, several almost unknown figures) with emphasis on their expeditions and under the following headings: “The Approach to Australia”; “Exploration before Settlement, 1606–1788”; “From Botany Bay to the Blue Mountains, 1788–1813”; “Land and Sea Expeditions, 1813–1901.” This section of the book is very fully illustrated with 18 full-colour plates and some 150 black-and-white photographs, mostly reproductions of early prints. Concluding the book are bibliographies of sources and references, a list of illustrations, and an index of explorers and ships.

The comprehensive nature of this work will ensure that it becomes a valuable reference book for students, while the text and illustrations will appeal to all who are interested in our history. Collectors of Australiana will welcome this most attractive addition to the ever-increasing number of available publications.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris AU
• Release date: Jun 21, 2019
• ISBN: 9781543401684

Erwin Feeken

Erwin and Gerda Feeken emigrated to Australia from Germany in 1954, the year they were married, in order to pursue their interest in geography and the history of exploration. They lived first in Sydney and then moved to Hobart where Mr Feeken began his career in cartography. In order to explore the country (and accompanied by a fourteen month old daughter) the Feeken family then embarked on a bicycle trip from Hobart through the Central Highlands of Tasmania to the north coast, then from Melbourne via Orbost on the Princes Highway and Canberra to Sydney: this pilgrimage is a good indication of their dedication to the cause of Australian Exploration! After three years in Darwin, they moved to Canberra in 1960 and Grafton in 1961, in 1962 returning to Canberra, where Mr. Feeken became colour designer for geological maps with the then Bureau of Mineral resources, now Geoscience Australia. Erwin and Gerda Feeken became interested specifically in Australian place names in 1960 when they began reading the published journals of Sir Thomas Mitchell. They found that the origins of many place names were hidden in these and other journals and that no gazetteer of them existed. Research into the origin of Australian place names, thus begun, became so absorbing that it took up most of their leisure time and grew in the course of time into the book “Discovery and Exploration of Australia”, in time for Captain Cook’s bi-centenary for discovering the east coast of Australia, in 1970. This book, “European Discovery and Exploration of Australia” is a revised edition.

Book preview

The

European Discovery and

Exploration of

Australia

Erwin H. J. Feeken

Gerda E. E. Feeken

With an Introductory Essay By

O. H. K. Spate

Copyright © 2019 by Erwin Feeken. 726127

ISBN:   Softcover       978-1-5434-0169-1

             Hardcover     978-1-5434-0170-7

             EBook           978-1-5434-0168-4

Library of Congress Control Number: 2017909988

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

Rev. date: 06/20/2019

Xlibris

1-800-455-039

www.xlibris.com.au

The map of Australia abounds with fascinating geographical place names, the origins of which have for long been hidden in the journals of our early explorers. During 1970, after nine years of research, Erwin Feeken, a highly qualified cartographer, and his wife, Gerda, had finalised the first complete record of Australian geographical place names as given by explorers and the most comprehensive general reference work on Australian exploration ever published.

In this edition, The European Discovery and Exploration of Australia, all the features, including 23 beautifully drawn four-colour maps, have been retained, plus index, showing the routes of more than 120 explorers with the locality of their named features, numbered to accord with a key to the maps. The place names in the key have been numbered approximately in chronological order of their naming though places found during a single expedition have been grouped together. There is also a gazetteer containing over 4,000 place names alphabetically arranged with notes on their origins. The map reference numbers (in brackets) form a cross-reference with the key to the maps.

The original work was introduced by a foreword from Lord Casey and an essay on The Nature of Australian Exploration by Professor O. H. K. Spate, director of the Research School of Pacific Studies, Australian National University. The text, comprising a survey of Australian exploration, is arranged in the form of biographies of the explorers (describing for the first time several almost unknown figures) with emphasis on their expeditions and under the following headings: The Approach to Australia; Exploration before Settlement, 1606–1788; From Botany Bay to the Blue Mountains, 1788–1813; and Land and Sea Expeditions, 1813–1901. This section of the book is very fully illustrated with 12 full-colour plates and some 140 black-and-white photographs, mostly reproductions of early prints. There are 23 four-colour maps showing explorers’ travel routes by land and by sea. Concluding the book are bibliographies of sources and references, a list of illustrations, and an index of explorers and ships.

The comprehensive nature of this work should ensure that it becomes a valuable reference book for a new generation of students while the text and illustrations will appeal to all who are interested in our history of exploration. Collectors of Australiana will welcome this most attractive addition to the ever-increasing number of available publications.

Erwin and Gerda Feeken immigrated to Australia from Germany in 1954, the year they married, in order to pursue their interest in geography and the history of exploration. They lived first in Sydney and then moved to Hobart where Mr Feeken began his career in cartography. In order to explore the country (and accompanied by a 14-month-old daughter), the Feeken family then embarked on a bicycle trip from Hobart through the Central Highlands of Tasmania to the north coast, then from Melbourne via Orbost on the Princes Highway and Canberra to Sydney: this pilgrimage is a good indication of their dedication to the cause of Australian exploration! After three years in Darwin, they moved to Canberra in 1960 and Grafton in 1961. In 1962 the family returned to Canberra where Mr Feeken rejoined the Bureau of Mineral Resources, occupying positions in colour design of geological maps, field mapping, and assistant chief cartographer.

Erwin and Gerda Feeken became interested specifically in Australian place names in 1960 when they began reading the published journals of Sir Thomas Mitchell. They found that the origins of many place names were hidden in these and other journals and that no gazetteer of them existed. Research into the origin of Australian place names, thus begun, became so absorbing that it took up most of their leisure time and grew in the course of time into the book: The Discovery and Exploration of Australia.

The present edition, The European Discovery and Exploration of Australia, is designed to keep interest in Australian exploration alive generally but, in particular, to recreate curiosity among today’s education authorities, teachers, and, ultimately, students.

Foreword

I am glad to write a Foreword to Mr Erwin Feeken’s book, which I believe is quite a remarkable one that is most relevant to the Cook Bicentenary. Two hundred years after Cook, one naturally turns to think of the work of the men who unveiled our continent both by land and sea. Mr Feeken, through his maps with accompanying indexes and introductory biographies of the explorers, has provided a very comprehensive and accurate survey of the progress of Australian exploration.

Mr Feeken is a West German by birth, who came to Australia only sixteen years ago (in 1954). With no resources other than his own education and skills, he has held a number of appointments of progressive importance, with the Tasmanian Hydro-Electric Commission, the New South Wales Water Conversation and Irrigation Commission, the Geography Department of the Australian National University, and is now in a position of consequence with the Bureau of Mineral Resources of the National Development Department at Canberra. His work has always been connected with cartography in one way or another. He is a superb cartographer and to date this book is his great achievement.

Although Mr Feeken is a cartographer by profession and the research which led to the compilation of this text was carried out in his spare time over a number of years, his thoroughness, his dedication and his patience have created a work of real scholarship and I am sure that this compendium of exploration in Australia will become an essential reference book for historians of the period.

One must admire Mr Feeken’s resolution and persistence and his obvious love of his adopted country, in carrying out his self-imposed task of writing this book.

Melbourne,

January 1970

Lord Casey

Contents

Foreword

The European Discovery and Exploration of Australia

The Nature of Australian Exploration

The Approach to Australia

Exploration before Settlement, 1606– 1788

From Botany Bay to the Blue Mountains, 1788-1813

Land and Sea Expeditions, 1813–1901

Gazetteer of Australian Place Names

Key to the Maps

The Maps

Bibliography

List of Illustrations

Acknowledgements, First Edition

The writing of this book began by chance. When, in 1960, we withdrew one of the rare explorer’s journals from a bookshelf of the Australian National University’s Library we were thrilled by the very existence of such documents. Journals of exploration are not to be found in the old European civilisations and this was something new and exciting. Numerous enquiries revealed that our adopted country, Australia, had left the absorbing subject of the explorers and their discoveries largely untapped, and we set immediately to work; the result is contained in this book.

The work laid down here could not have been completed without the aid of several government and other organisations, and the assistance of kind people who went out of their way to promote the project.

We wish to thank the Director of Pacific Studies of the Australian National University, Professor O. H. K. Spate, who wrote the introduction and also read our manuscript and offered valuable criticism. The staff of the National Library has been most obliging in providing us with explorers’ journals and other material requested, and we should like to thank Mesdames P. Fanning, V. Gibson and J. McKay for their patience and particular attention. Mr T. Knight, the map curator, spent a good deal of time in showing us all the maps that were likely to be of interest to us; his knowledge of the history of Australian maps was of great benefit. Mr D. Reid, the photographer, supplied us with excellent illustrative material. The maps and photographs supplied by the National Library for reproduction have been separately acknowledged under the title List of Illustrations.

The Menzies Library of the Australian National University lent us a substantial number of the explorers’ journals, and the archives of the Mitchell Library, the Oxley Memorial Library of Queensland, the State Library of South Australia, the James Battye Library in Perth, and the State Library of Tasmania produced valuable supplementary material which is also listed in the List of Illustrations The facsimile editions of explorers’ journals, published by the South Australian Library Board, were of great value.

To Mr Rainer Swoboda we extend special thanks for preparing the atlas of historical maps from materials provided. He not only drew them with great patience and skill, but also contributed valuable ideas for their design. We are under obligation to Mr O. Berkelbach van der Sprenkel of the Australian National University and Mr K. A. Townley of the Bureau of Mineral Resources for their kind support in bringing the publication of our work closer to reality. Our friend Mr John Herlihy, formerly of Canberra, patiently spent many hours in his darkroom to provide us with a number of the illustrations. Mrs P. Drake-Brockman of Canberra kindly gathered information for us which made it possible to include a short biography of Frederick S. Drake-Brockman, one of the last great explorers.

We are indebted to the Bureau of Mineral Resources, Canberra, for their assistance in producing some negatives and typeset for the maps, and for the useful hints offered by several of their officers.

ERWIN FEEKEN

GERDA FEEKEN

Canberra, 1970

Foreword to the Second, Revised Edition

Andrew Glikson

Earth and Paleo-Climate Scientist

The original book The Discovery and Exploration of Australia, based on extensive field geographic and literature research by Erwin and his wife Gerda Feeken, manifest the best in the tradition of early explorers such as Matthew Flinders (1774-1814) and Ludwig Leichhardt (1813-1848). Spending more than 10 years on the preparation of the original and unique compendium of Australian exploration, summarizing diaries, plotting routes on maps and travelling to many of the outback areas explored by Ernest Giles, John Eyre, Charles Sturt, John McDouall Stuart and others, Erwin and Gerda produced a volume that remains a must for anyone interested in the subject. Travelling in an old Holden car almost every year with their five daughters, the couple visited several regions in the outback, meticulously recording their observations which, in 1970, with the help of the geographer Oskar Spate (1911-2000) led to the publication of this remarkable tome of Australian history and geography. Accompanying the meticulous documentation of biographies and travel records of the first explorers are detailed maps of their treks, of unique significance for anyone interested in records of the outback during the 18th and 19th centuries. This included a search for relics and graves of early explorers such as Burke and Wills around Coopers Creek. Erwin’s and Gerda’s enthusiasm for the wilderness of the outback is an inspiration to his friends and family. During our joint trips in central Australia I have experienced his sense of adventure, methodical investigations, love of nature, and great respect and kindness to the Aborigines. His trips, based on careful planning and time tables, have become a magnet to colleagues and friends, including from overseas. Erwin’s studies included a survey of saltlakes in South Australia and Western Auustralia, examination of caves and blowholes, in particular in the Nullarbor Plain, charting of the morphology of dunes and other land forms.

In more recent years, while accompanying two geologists to the Rawlinson Range on the eastern margin of the Gibson Desert in a renewed search for Lasseters Reef, Erwin took the opportunity, in May 2005, to further identify explorer Ernest Giles’ routes and geographic features named by him. On Erwin’s last journey, during almost six months in the second half of 2007, he travelled with his granddaughter Kiah around Australia as well as to the centre, covering almost 29 000 kilometres. On this journey Erwin checked out points of landings by the early navigators as well as geographic features in the interior, particularly in the Kimberley and Pilbara regions. Since then he has been assembling new data for the second edition. The revised book European Discovery and Exploration of Australia, is of the greatest interest and is highly rcommended.

Notes to the Second, Revised Edition

The Discovery and Exploration of Australia, printed in the year of the bicentenary of Captain James Cook’s discovery of the East Coast of Australia, has long been out of print. From time to time, enquiries had been made as to the availability of the book, more so in recent years. Two entire generations have passed since its first publication, and it is the younger people to whom this new edition is directed. I consider it a dilemma that students do not develop an intimate historical and geographical knowledge of this country, Australia, at school. My five children, during the sixties and seventies, were not allowed to study geography and history simultaneously. This problem is still with us. Young people are not interested in the daily news because they can’t relate stories to localities. In other words, they are unable to connect history with geography.

The recordings of the European Discovery and Exploration of Australia are unique. This had only been possible where Europeans invaded countries, populated or not, and where the explorers recorded their findings on paper, often under great hardship. Once explorers had returned to their homelands, handwritten notes and sketches were transformed into print. Thus, I was able to obtain many journals on Australian Exploration and extracted the data, as reproduced in this book.

The book focuses on the exploration of Australia by Europeans, thus presenting a Eurocentric view of the idea of discovery. I recognise and acknowledge that Australia’s original inhabitants were people of diverse language groups who had a relationship with the country, which far surpassed the understanding of the European invaders.

While efforts are being made now to create a more balanced and accurate history from the Aboriginal perspective, I believe that there is still great value in recalling the feats of the European explorers as these were integral to the shaping of the nation of Australia from that time on.

I hope that the younger generations have a renewed interest in how this continent was transformed from terra incognita into Australia.

Erwin Feeken, Bywong, NSW

February 2018

The European Discovery and Exploration of Australia

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Maris Pacifici map, published by A. Ortelius, Amsterdam, 1570

The Nature of Australian Exploration

THE NAVIGATORS

— por mares nunca dantes navegados

– over those never-navigated seas

CAMOENS Os Lusiadas

The high proportion of ancient rocks and the generally subdued relief of the surface of Australia mark it out, geologically speaking, as the oldest of the continents; in point of ‘discovery’, it is the youngest but for Antarctica. Really, of course, we do not know when the first discovery was made; we so often speak loosely of discovery as meaning merely the first sighting or exploration by Europeans, though it is obvious that since most lands that Europeans came to were already inhabited, they must have been discovered by somebody long before. However, this European usage can be rationalised by taking discovery as meaning that the definite existence and nature of a given country were firmly placed on written record, available to seamen, merchants, and scholars all round the world. Although the Chinese, for example, clearly had such records for most of Asia with more detail (and sometimes more accuracy) than Europeans possessed before the Portuguese and Spaniards pioneered the ‘great age of discoveries’; yet for the world at large, this placing of facts on enduring record was basically a European achievement. So although the prehistorians have definitely established that the Aborigines were in Australia much

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The Vlamingh Plate.

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Willem Janszoon, in the Duyfken, discovers the Australian continent, 1606.

earlier than had been until recently thought probable (in fact, as much as 30,000 years ago), we can still speak reasonably of Australia as the last inhabited continent to be discovered.

Far back into the past—even (faintly) into Greek and Roman times—we can trace references to a legendary Terra Australis or ‘Great South Land’ in the Antipodes. According to some theories, such a great land mass was necessary to the balance of the globe; references in scripture and in the writings of the Christian fathers were quoted for or against. In the later Middle Ages, such speculations received a new impetus from the reports of Marco Polo on a great island of ‘Java Maior’ lying roughly south of Sumatra: Polo’s topography, based on the tales of the seamen and merchants with whom he travelled, was sadly confused; and the necessity of explaining or accounting for his many imaginary islands yet farther south—Luca Antara, Veach, Maletur—afforded a fine field in which Renaissance cosmographers and cartographers could display their academic virtuosity. with them, the theory of its existence as a balance to the northern continents was probably the main factor in keeping speculation alive.

But the legend also played its part in inspiring proposals for exploration, as with Bouvet, whom we shall meet later, and Alexander Dalrymple, who in 1769 published An Account of the Discoveries Made in the South Pacific Ocean Previous to 1764, which was devoted about equally to proving the existence of a vast Austral continent and to securing for Dalrymple command of an expedition to go there. Actually, Dalrymple’s most useful service was to give currency to the forgotten Torres-Prado voyage of 1606 from the New Hebrides to the Philippines through Torres Strait: this established the insularity of New Guinea, which had been known at places along the coast since 1545, and hence had an important bearing on future voyages, including Cook’s. When, however, the Royal Society did secure from the admiralty two ships to undertake such a voyage as Dalrymple proposed (and more particularly to observe the Transit of Venus at Tahiti in 1769), Dalrymple himself was passed over: it was unthinkable that one of His Britannick Majesty’s ships should be put in charge of any but an officer of the Royal Navy, and he would accept nothing less than command. So Cook was chosen, and in the course of making many positive discoveries, he performed, with his usual thorough efficiency, the negative task of demolishing Terra Australis: any such land mass must lie, as indeed it does, in very high Antarctic latitudes. But the legend lingered on, transformed into a poetic myth that inspired much of the verse of Bernard O’Dowd and Rex Ingamells.

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Dirck Hartog on Dirk Hartog Island, 1616.

Essentially, the very late discovery of Australia results from the continent’s position in respect of the great latitudinal windbelts, the westerlies, which blow round the world in the southern ocean, the south-east trades, which sweep the Pacific from about latitude 30° S, northwards towards the equator. The westerlies shift somewhat to the north in the southern winter so that the southern extremities of Australia are then within their range. In 1497 the Portuguese Vasco da Gama sought India by running up the east coast of Africa, where there were settled ports with Arab merchants and therefore pilots; and although his countrymen soon found shorter routes across the Indian Ocean by using the changing monsoons, they left it to the Dutch, a century later and with rather better ships, to strike out across the south of that ocean. Their new route involved running before the westerlies and then making their northing to reach Batavia (now Djakarta), which they founded in 1619; this avoided the bases farther west where the Portuguese were still strong in Goa and Ceylon. But sooner or later, some captain was bound to under-reckon the amount of easting he had made from the Cape of Good Hope or to be forced too far east by a westerly gale, and so overshoot his turning point. And that meant that he would make a landfall, if not a wreck, somewhere on the western coast of Australia. Hence, while the first definitely recorded European sighting of any part of Australia belongs to the Duyfken in the Gulf of Carpentaria (1606), there were many more sightings on the west coast, leaving behind such precious memorials as those of Dirk Hartog and Vlamingh.

It is, however, entirely possible that we do not really know who was the first European ‘to set a boot-print on our shores’. Since the early European explorers were as avid for gold as for spices, many of the local people who found their visits inconvenient or dangerous were only too willing to oblige by directing them to mountains or islands of gold that were always a little farther on. We know definitely from the historian João de Barros that between 1518 and 1522 the Portuguese fitted out two expeditions to find the ‘Isles of Gold’, which were specifically stated to be one hundred leagues south-east of Sumatra. We do not know what happened to these expeditions; but if they had any results at all, these could well have been kept secret, for in certain circumstances, this was a definite Portuguese policy. We do know, for they exist today, that between 1540 and 1566 no fewer than fifteen maps were produced at Dieppe (then an important cartographic centre), and from the place names there can be scarcely any doubt that they were drawn from Portuguese sources.

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This early Dutch picture is entitled Black swans drifting at Rottnest Island.

All of these maps show a large land mass corresponding quite well in general, though not in detail, with Australia. As Matthew Flinders put it, ‘the direction given to some parts of the coasts, approaches too near to the truth, for the whole to have been marked from conjecture alone’. At about the end of the sixteenth century, Manuel Godinho de Erédia, half-Portuguese and half-Macassarese and a cartographer in Malacca (which was still a Portuguese stronghold), was fired by ‘those verses and ballads and chronicles of the Empire of Mattaram, which tell of that ancient navigation’ to Isles of Gold always a little farther to the south-east. But for bad luck, Manuel Godinho might have left that first boot-print. It is not likely that the Dutch would have passed up such hints as indeed is made clear by the preamble to Tasman’s instructions, which lay stress on ‘invaluable treasures, profitable trade-connexions, useful commerce, excellent territories, vast powers and dominions’—adding, as an afterthought, that there might be souls to be saved for Christ. (The Portuguese usually put this first and sometimes acted on this priority.)

The reality of Australia proved distressingly different. Spices, gold, silks, were all absent; and it was easy enough to doubt if the Aborigines had souls. In less than half a century, as a result of accidental landfalls such as the famous and tragic wreck of François Pelsaert on Houtmans Abrolhos and of the deliberate voyages of Abel Tasman and Pieter Nuyts, the Dutch had acquired a remarkably good knowledge of the shores of the western two-thirds of the continent, which they named not inappropriately (except on the scores of size and productivity) New Holland. Unfortunately, there was little or nothing to attract trade, settlement, or further voyaging; and they were not inclined to adventure for adventure’s sake. So they stopped just where they should have pressed on, for Nuyts reached a point just short of the relatively more hospitable shores of Eyre Peninsula: the south-east, much the most favourable part of the continent for European purposes, remained unknown. Oddly enough, that item in their reports, which struck some contemporaries as most startling, was quite true and simple; but black swans were against nature!

By the middle of the seventeenth century, the Dutch had made up their minds about New Holland: there was just no point to the place. Even so, it is difficult to account for the long gap, nearly 120 years, between Tasman and Cook. Analogy with the eastern coasts of other continents in the same latitudes should surely have suggested that beyond the

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Abel Janszoon Tasman.

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Governor General Anthonio van Diemen.

Carpentaria-Nuyts Archipelago line, there would lie much better country. There were indeed the comprehensive plans of de Lozier Bouvet around 1740. These are particularly interesting as they represent in one way the last serious appearance of Terra Australis (but for Dalrymple) in a soundly based proposal by a man whose record shows him to have been a first-class seaman and leader. Bouvet was inspired by the voyage of the Norman Sieur de Gonneville in 1503. Gonneville probably ended up in southern Brazil, though the geographers placed ‘Gonneville’s Land’ anywhere between Virginia and the Moluccas (the Spice Islands of the East Indies); but to Bouvet it was obviously Terra Australis and a most attractive place. Bouvet acquired two ships from the French East India Company and, on New Year’s Day 1739, found Bouvet Island, a scrap of rock and ice, which is the most remote spot on the globe, a thousand miles from the nearest other land. This was clearly not Terra Australis, and Cook, who searched for the island, finally doubted its existence; but Bouvet, undaunted, put up a scheme for establishing a French base in Quiros’s Terra Austrialia del Espiritu Santo, the New Hebrides, which by this time was thought of as being on the north-east coast of Queensland. Bouvet’s project was very well planned, and had he received the ships he asked for in 1740, his course would have anticipated Cook’s by 30 years: New South Wales might have been Nouvelle Galles du Sud or (since Bouvet came from Brittany) Nouvelle Bretagne.

This is a might have been like Erédia’s, but the project is also of significance as it throws light on the mercantilist ‘cold war’ between France and the ‘maritime powers’ of Britain and the Netherlands. It was aimed at creating a base, naval and commercial, whence the trade of the East Indies could be dominated; and similar considerations were not absent in the planning of any of the great circumnavigations and trans-Pacific voyages of the eighteenth century. Even the voyages of Cook and Bougainville, though, in fact, as well as in publicity primarily devoted to the advancement of science, had an eye to any more material advantages that might be picked up.

As we have seen, the set of the westerlies accounts for the priority in discovery of the Australian west coast; the east was hardly likely to have been discovered accidentally. For one thing, there was much more shipping from the Atlantic into the Indian Ocean round the Cape of Good Hope than there was into the Pacific by Cape Horn or the Straits of Magellan. By 1770 there had been ten voyages between Magellan’s (1520) and Bougainville’s (1768), which crossed the Southern Pacific from the east despite the difficulty of rounding South America against the stormy westerlies; but the set of the south-east trades slants over the roof of Australia, as it were. After the dangers and extreme discomforts of Cape Horn, navigators were usually only too happy to make quick westing and northing at the same time before these remarkably steady winds, which took them into warmer latitudes and among islands whose delights as places for rest and recreation soon became almost proverbial among seamen. So a large number of small islands were discovered, although Magellan himself amazingly

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James Cook.

Captain Cook taking possession of the eastern coast of Australia, 1770.

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Captain Cook’s Tablet, near Cape Solander.

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The ‘remarkable animal’, first seen by Cook near the Endeavour River.

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Sir Joseph Banks.

enough saw only two all the way across Polynesia and Micronesia. If anyone was to find the east coast of New Holland, he would have to go and look for it purposefully, and that is what Cook did.

It is scarcely necessary, with the bicentenary upon us, to describe in detail Cook’s careful charting of the whole coastline from Cape Howe to Cape York. In any case, important as this aspect of his work naturally is to Australians, it is but one part of a vast total achievement, in equatorial and in polar regions, under Arctic and Antarctic skies. The great Portuguese Vasco da Gama and Ferñao Magalha???s (Magellan) displayed qualities of intellectual as well as physical daring and of leadership, which was as ruthless as it had to be. They started from a base of dense geographical ignorance, and their work was done with ships and navigational aids far inferior to Cook’s; but they alone can be mentioned with James Cook in the trinity of absolutely outstanding navigators. In all this, the peculiar glory of Cook is ‘his industrious valour’, unresting but unhasting thoroughness, the determination to know what could be known, which he brought to the solution of problem after problem. In small things as in great, he had no use for surmise (as distinct from the careful and rational calculation of probabilities) and less than no use for shortcuts. These qualities were as fully displayed on the coast of New South Wales and in the Barrier Reefs as in his great sweeps through the Pacific and around Antarctica.

Not even Cook could do everything in one voyage, and he left some details to his successors. The most important of these was the question of the insularity of Van Diemen’s Land, and one may regret that he did not put into Port Jackson; although in lieu, he and Banks did give to our language and our history an unforgettable phrase in Botany Bay. Of his successors on Australian shores, the most notable were the Frenchmen Nicolas Baudin and Louis de Freycinet and Cook’s countrymen Matthew Flinders and George Bass. In keeping with one of the more admirable aspects of the Napoleonic regime, a feature of the French expeditions was the wealth of scientific and artistic talent they brought with them, although (like Cook) the practical seamen were often impatient with the ‘scientifick gentlemen’, who were always wandering off after bugs or botany when just round the next cape there was a delightful bay waiting to be charted. But they have left us such charming pictorial representations as are reproduced on the previous page.

These and other French explorations, whether under monarchy or republic, were carefully planned and fully equipped by governments very solicitous of their own prestige. Very different indeed were the vessels available to Flinders and Bass: the Tom Thumb was well named and might seem better fitted to navigate the waters of Lake Burley Griffin than the open coast of New South Wales while it was the poor condition of the colonial vessel Cumberland, which forced Flinders to put into French-held Mauritius and face years of imprisonment. Despite this poverty in material resources, Flinders was rich indeed in the skills and courage needed for his craft, and his great work A Voyage to Terra Australis is a fitting monument to an indomitable but unlucky man: A copy was placed in his hands the day before he died (19 July 1814). Although the word had been used before, it was Flinders who in this book first gave real currency to the name AUSTRALIA.

With Flinders, the coastal outlines were completed, though there were many details to be filled in, particularly in the north-west. This ‘plugging of gaps’ was the work of a number of able naval officers, of whom Phillip Parker King and John Lort Stokes were the most notable. The latter gave us the name of Darwin, ‘after an old shipmate’ then unknown but later to become the greatest biological scientist of the nineteenth century. (Both Charles Darwin and Thomas Huxley gained some of their early experience—and the latter a wife—on our shores.)

Dampier’s survey of Shark Bay, 1699.

New Holland

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THE BUSHMEN

—but I must go where the water leads me

JOHN MCDOUALL STUART

Stuart’s short spare sentence sums up the major factor in the course of Australian land exploration. But at first, the water led nowhere, except into the dead-end canyons of the Blue Mountains. The land was distressingly different not only from the well-watered and long-tamed landscapes of north-western Europe but even from the nearest analogy available to the first Europeans venturing inland from Port Jackson. That analogy was naturally the recently explored east of North America, and there the natural avenues of penetration into the interior were by great systems of rivers and lakes: the St Lawrence, the Hudson-Mohawk, the Great Lakes, with easy portages over into the Mississippi. It was 25 years before any significant breakout was made from ‘the gaol’, the County of Cumberland between Sydney and the Hawkesbury. Then Blaxland, Lawson, and Wentworth went through essentially by following ridges, not valleys—as indeed their remote forebears had done, following not the tangled valleys but the open ridgeways to dot their rude settlements on the more open patches of lighter soil in the forested lowlands of western Europe. But that was in a distant age, long since forgotten. There was no penetration of the interior by great navigable rivers, for there were no such rivers.

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Charles Sturt near Depot Glen, February 1845.

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Louis de Freycinet at Shark Bay, 1818.

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Fall of Cobaw on the Campaspe River, Victoria.

In the humid east the mountains lay in a long curve, keeping fairly close to the bulge of the coast. The numerous reliable streams headed back into wild country, forested and deeply dissected, with rocky gorges or lofty waterfalls often within 50 or a hundred miles of their mouths; and many of the longer rivers flow not across but along the grain of the country, with short transverse sections often sunk in deep gorges such as those of the Shoalhaven. There are only two real gaps across the Eastern Highlands made by the Hunter River and the Kilmore Gap north of Melbourne. For this reason, once the tablelands had been gained by a few defiles, exploration (and pastoral expansion) fanned out, following down the streams of the Murray-Darling system in search of either a great estuary or an Inland Sea, neither of which exist or else spreading laterally along the tablelands, later picking a way to coastal ports by devious and difficult tracks,which more often than not avoided the main rivers. The lateral expansion, however, was remarkably swift: land was being taken up around Canberra within 10 years of the first crossing of the Blue Mountains, 200 miles to the north.

Once the breakthrough was made, the major outlines of the land were established with remarkable rapidity. It took at least three centuries, or rather more, from the founding of the first Spanish settlements on the North American mainland until the outlines of the interior of that continent were broadly known—at least two centuries to cover with reasonable accuracy and detail the area now occupied by the United States alone. That area is almost exactly the same in extent as Australia; but our 3,000,000 square miles, though for the most part a far more difficult and harsh environment, were effectively known within about 75 years, from the crossing of the Blue Mountains in 1813 to Alexander Forrest’s journey from the De Grey River to the Overland Telegraph in 1879. In fact, the basic outlines of the whole interior were discovered in not much over half a century. This is a remarkable achievement, even allowing for the lack of any real resistance by the indigenous inhabitants.

The physical environment was indeed baffling. In the south-east, there was no real desert—that was met with later—but the great woodlands and savannahs were utterly different from the temperate humid landscapes of western Europe and eastern North America. In particular, the rivers just did not behave like the ‘normal’ rivers, which the explorers (most of whom were not Australian born) had been used to. In the semi-arid plains, they continually split up into braided channels, branches taking off and reuniting in a confusing tangle: indeed, the very word anabranch, used for this geographical feature, is Australian in origin, coined in 1834 with reference to the Darling. Too often a promising stream, instead of swelling into a great river as its course was followed down, dwindled into a chain of waterholes or became dissipated over gravelly or sandy flats, breaking up into a bundle of ill-defined and often completely dry creek beds.

There are many references to this improper and puzzling behaviour of the streams. A few from Sir Thomas Mitchell will suffice:

This new river was there fully 100 yards broad… . When we might see water again was rather a desperate thought, for we had witnessed our abundant little river, wholly absorbed in a deep mass of dry sand, for such was the bed of the larger.

The river was found to spread into separate channels, in which I did not readily recognise it, until I found them again united in a splendid reach of water under steep banks.

Clement Hodgkinson on an expedition from Port Macquarie to Moreton Bay, 1843.

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It was pleasant to see a great river thus supplied by the waters collected only amongst the swelling undulations and valleys of the country through which it passed, like the rivers of Europe. The river we had discovered seemed, in this respect, essentially different from others in Australia, which usually arise in mountains, and appear to be rather designed to convey water into regions where it is wanting, than to carry off any surplus from the surfaces over which they run.

The first two of these extracts from his journals were made within four days in the winter of 1846 when he was on the Belyando in east-central Queensland; the last is particularly ironic, for the river was not ‘essentially different’ from the other Australian rivers so accurately described. To Mitchell it seemed ‘typical of God’s providence’, and he therefore gave it ‘the name of my gracious sovereign, Queen Victoria’; but it is, in fact, the Barcoo, a headwater of Cooper Creek, which flows—sometimes—into the desolate salt flats of Lake Eyre.

Even more disconcerting was extreme seasonal variation: it is hardly too much to say that one man’s paradise might be another man’s desert according to the season. The best expression of this is perhaps Augustus Gregory’s reflections on Sturt’s Creek, south-east of the Kimberleys, in February 1855:

Numerous small channels from one to two feet deep, but they were all perfectly dry and had not contained water for more than a year; there were, however, marks of inundations in previous years … had it then been visited by an explorer, the account of a fine river nearly a mile wide flowing through splendid plains of high grass, could hardly be reconciled with the facts I have to record of a mud flat deeply fissured by the scorching rays of a tropical sun.

And Sturt himself speaks of ‘ponds, strictly speaking the dregs only of what had been such’.

Not only drought and flood, but heat and cold alternated savagely. Sturt in 1845 found it ‘cool and pleasant’ at 95°; a week later it was 119°, and for three months the mean shade temperatures were 101°, 104°, and 101°: screws fell from boxes, lead from pencils, combs split, ink dried on the pen as he wrote. A few months later he is complaining of the cold at 24°. Add to this flies, ants, mosquitoes’.

Even flying in comfort over the country between Cooper Creek and the Simpson Desert, where Sturt turned back from his great inland thrust of 1845–46, one can scarcely repress a shudder of horror at this landscape so utterly inhuman as to seem almost actively hostile. There is beauty in the long red welts of the sand ridges, but the muddy ochres and greys and dirty whites of claypans and saltpans are repellent in the extreme. Even in the more favourable areas around the western slopes, it is all but impossible to imagine the difficulties facing the explorers without a deliberate exercise in the art of ‘controlled forgetting’: we must wish away the fences and the roads and most of the pastures. Driving on a good highway between Cassilis and Coolah, one simply cannot see, in the wooded hills to the north, the lofty almost impassable range Allan Cunningham described; and although when one reaches the summit at Pandora’s Pass the view of the wooded but pastoral plains to the north is fine enough, one cannot but wonder at the importance that he attached to this inconsiderable gap. He could not very well have foreseen that, since the plains on each side would develop very similar, if not identical, pastoral economies and would find their outlets to the east. His great discovery would come to be occupied merely by an unfrequented bush road; but, more important, we can hardly make sufficient allowance for the blinded view of a man painfully pushing on horseback through the bush or for the dazzling exhilaration of the view from the summit.

It is not surprising then that the explorers’ narratives reflect chiefly three experiences, in the order excitement, monotony, disenchantment. There are, of course, moments of high drama: Sturt’s emergence into the Murray; Eyre’s stumble on the whaler in Mississippi Bay after his epic struggle around the Bight; the death beneath Aboriginal spears of Kennedy; or the finding of King, the one survivor of the Burke and Will’s dash across the continent. There is much heroism, much more that is not heroic in any romantic or dramatic sense but simply the relentless self-denying persistent day-to-day courage of tired men forcing themselves onwards to an unknown ever-evasive goal. There is sometimes a romantic mystery, most of all, perhaps, Sturt’s strange tale of how, in an empty desert, black specks high in the air swiftly grew larger, to reveal themselves as hundreds of kites, which swooped close to view the travellers then as mysteriously turned away.

But when one reads the narratives in bulk, it is impossible to avoid the monotony: polygonum flats, gibber plains, sand ridges, low sandstone scarps and breakaways, and gloomy plains—these recur over and over until it is no wonder that Oxley could say

the naming of places was often the only pleasure within our reach; but it was some relief from the desolation of these plains and hills to throw over them the association of names dear to friendship, or sacred to genius.

It is noticeable, however, that although the later phases of exploration were on the whole naturally in more and more difficult terrain, particularly the great western deserts traversed by Giles and Warburton, the note of disenchantment is less strong and less frequent than it is in earlier narratives such as those of Oxley and Sturt. The latter indeed had more than his

share of ill fortune. His noble discovery of the Murray ended less nobly; the magnificent waterway—the only river of Australia that could even faintly have matched the great navigable arteries of the other continents—ended not in a great estuary or delta where a huge commercial metropolis might thrive but in the shallow sand-barred lagoons of Lake Alexandrina, utterly useless even for a minor port. And on his great foray towards the centre, he had the bad luck of a more than usually savage season so that for nearly six months his party was locked up, unable to go forward or back because they were tied to a dwindling supply of water, ‘locked up in the desolate and heated region into which we had penetrated, as effectually as if we had wintered at the Pole’.

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Horrocks camps in the Barossa Range,

from the painting by S. T. Gill,

a member of the expedition.

King George Sound, WA

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It is no wonder that Oxley should have been disillusioned as his west-flowing rivers petered out into weird and seemingly endless reed swamps, and Sturt’s sufferings, heroically as he faced and outfaced them, could not fail to stamp a melancholy even on a soul fortified by his strong piety. The later explorers—the Forrests and the Gregorys, Giles, and Gosse—were not so disenchanted because, in the first place, they knew from the work of their predecessors that whatever happened, much of the country they would traverse would be harsh and sterile in the extreme and, secondly, their sights were pitched lower: there would be no vast inland lakes, no Australia Felix such as Mitchell had found in Victoria, no El Dorado such as he thought he had found on the Barcoo, but there might be, and indeed there was, much fair to good pastoral country of a sort, which they and their pastoral friends knew how to handle. This was their more modest treasure.

Most Australians live in those well-watered south-eastern and south-western quadrants where the landscape has been in large part humanised, where the lines of life are undeniably as pleasant as under any clime. The photographs on pages 215-16 give some idea of the varieties of terrain, mostly frightful, which faced the explorers of the deep interior. In studying them, scale must always be kept in mind: the photographs represent strips a couple of miles across, yet very often weary men and half-starved horses had to face not tens but scores of miles of such country. Not a few brave men laid down their lives in the task of unveiling Australia, yet the wonder must be that the casualties were so few. These were men of skill as well as courage, and that skill was one new to many of them: the art and science of bushcraft.

Only slightly less important than the differences in physical environment between Australia and the other continents explored by European intruders were the differences in the social environment. Perhaps the nearest analogy to much of Australia on the geographical side would be the great savannahs of inland Brazil, south of the Amazon forests, and, so far as the indigenous populations were concerned, this would also have been the nearest social analogy, since, unlike North America or Africa south of the Sahara, these vast expanses of open wood and grassland had no warlike tribes, no definite kingdoms or chieftaincies. But the social base for exploration was wildly different; the sertão (the word is exactly equivalent to bush) of Brazil was explored, mainly in the seventeenth century, by the bandeirantes or ‘banner men’ of Sao Paulo. These were great armed parties consisting of a core of Portuguese and mixed bloods and a following of sometimes hundreds of slaves, who wandered around the country in great sweeps, which might take three or more years, settling down at intervals to plant crops (and bear children). They were supposed to be seeking gold, but as that was not found for nearly two centuries, and then in already relatively settled country (corresponding to, say, Bathurst in relation to Sydney), the presumption is that they liked the life; sheer love of adventure is a neglected factor in history. It is obvious that neither settler nor Aboriginal society in Australia provided a base for exploration in this extraordinary manner.

In North America the course of exploration was much affected not only by the presence of great river systems but also by organised and often warlike tribes, who in the west were rendered highly mobile and militarily effective by the acquisition, from the early Spaniards, of the horse. The conquest of the Aztec empire in Mexico gave the Spaniards a firm base for the penetration of what is now the south-west of the United States, initially by military expeditions, later and more lastingly by Franciscan missions. The French, rapidly pushing up the Great Lakes and then down the Mississippi, readily adapted themselves on the frontiers to Indian ways so that the coureurs de bois and the fur trappers and traders (many of whom were métis, half-Indian, half-white) formed as it were an informal advance guard, later stiffened by Scots organisation in great trading companies. Between the Canadians, French, and British, in the north, the Spanish in the south, and the settled Thirteen Colonies along the Atlantic seaboard and the westwards movement from these colonies filling the country east of the Mississippi, there remained the Indian-held country of the Great Plains and the mountains of the west. When, in 1803, by the purchase of Louisiana from Napoleon (who had no prospect of holding it), the young United States laid a sort of general claim to this huge area, Jefferson sent out the official expedition of Lewis and Clarke (1803–06), which in one journey spanned right across from the Mississippi to the Pacific and back. Although, of course, there was always much informal private enterprise activity ahead of the advancing front of settlement, and the Mormon occupation of Utah recalls in an odd way the bandeirantes, the major early explorations had an official character. Actually, ‘private enterprise’ had been ahead of official exploration in most areas, and perhaps few of the official parties reached places never before visited by white men. But we must recall the definition of ‘discovery’ with which we began: it is not only a matter of sighting but of sighting placed on the record. Official action was military to begin with (and the military post perforce played a large part in ‘the winning of the west’) and later took the form of the great surveys of the United States Geological Survey. Commercial enterprise took a hand but in a very different style from the probing single-handed pastoralists of Australia: it was a matter first of organising the great convoys that made their way to new gold rushes and then of the transcontinental railway surveys. In all this, an important factor was not only the risk of Indian attack but the fact that the Indian tribes were, so to speak, known and defined groups; one could get definite information about them and their country from their neighbours. Apart from some similarity in manner of life between cowboys and stockmen—and it was only a rough approximation—very little of the American experience can be matched in Australia.

Even more is this true of the African experience. Here it was not only a matter of warlike tribes but of definitely organised, if barbaric, states; and there were other factors such as the expansion of Islam into central Africa (which…

(which seemed to call for Christian counter-missions), the activities of Arab slave traders, and, above all, perhaps, the rivalries of the imperialist powers. Many expeditions were not only run by military men but had the definite object of staking national claims often by establishing military posts. They were organised as political acts. None of these factors applied in the slightest in Australia; the only one that could have done so was the urge to save souls, and in the last century few Australians outside the capitals had any illusions about the potentialities of Aboriginal souls—with a few exceptions such as the heroic Spanish Benedictine Dom Salgado of New Norcia, they had rather the illusion that Aborigines had no souls, and Australia had no Livingstone.

The Australians of the nineteenth century were therefore in a unique position when they faced the task of penetrating a continent that in itself was geographically unique. They knew that there was little real risk of Aboriginal resistance. Unless the tales of Leichhardt’s fate be true—and they were merely tales without a scrap of evidence to go on. The only deaths by hostile action were those of a very few individuals—Kennedy, Gilbert on Leichhardt’s main journey, Eyre’s overseer Baxter (and he was killed by members of the party, not ‘myalls’)—and against these, the sole survivor of Burke’s northern dash owed his life to friendly Aborigines. But once they had passed the last squatting station, they were swallowed up in a void; except in a very small way, they could not rely on getting information of the next stages as they went along, and there was usually no way in which they could relay information back to base.

Although parties were often small, this is not to say that some expeditions were not mounted on a large scale, particularly (though not solely) in what may be called the ‘middle period’ between the exploration of the south-east and that of the great western deserts. Augustus Gregory had seventeen men with him on the North Australian Expedition (1855–56), with no fewer than 50 horses and 200 sheep. This is outranked by Sir Thomas Mitchell’s expeditionary force of 1845–46: 30 men, 11 drays and carts with two boats, 112 bullocks, 17 horses, and no fewer than 250 sheep as walking provisions. But then the surveyor general, a peninsular veteran, seems to have taken the second word in his title rather literally and pitched camp with a military precision, which, it seems safe to say, would hardly have struck later tough bushmen as strictly necessary. But some of the greatest journeys were made by a handful of men … or even two, or one; and the great lumbering drays used in the more official expeditions in the east were replaced by camels and large numbers of horses—Stuart in 1861 set out with seventy-one and returned with forty-eight.

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Edmund Lockyer, who established the settlement of Albany on King George Sound, WA, in 1827.

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Wellington Cave, discovered by Sturt and Hume, 1828.

Sturt went down the Murray with only six companions, of whom five were convicts; Leichhardt’s astonishing march to Port Essington was carried out with ten men; Eyre set off along the edge of the Nullarbor with only one white man and three Aborigines, and came through with himself and the Aborigine Wylie. Although Burke moved off from Melbourne with a small (and inefficient) army of eighteen men with camels and horses, on his dash from Cooper Creek to the Gulf of Carpentaria, he took only three, lost one (rather discreditably) on the return, and, finally, through sheer blundering by himself and his base party, threw away his own life and that of his second in command, Wills. Later, the deep forays into or across the deserts were on a similar scale. Warburton took his son, two other whites, one Aborigine, and two Afghan camel drivers; Forrest in 1874 went right through the desert, well inland (nearly on latitude 27°), with only six men; Giles took three men with him in 1874 and six men in 1875. One can only begin to imagine the loneliness of these tiny parties and the bonds that must have united men like Giles and Tietkens. Sometimes the bond was, in fact, a family one: the Warburtons father and son, the Gregory and Forrest brothers; a proud family heritage indeed.

As for the organisation and financing of the expeditions, it is difficult to find any standard pattern. Many of them were purely private enterprise, a small group—such as Blaxland, Lawson, and Wentworth in the Blue Mountains—self-financed, and perhaps with no very definite plan. Sometimes such parties would receive some government assistance or be helped by pastoralists on the frontier of settlement anxious to find new runs. The expeditions of the official surveyors, such as Oxley and Mitchell, were, of course, official in every sense, wholly planned and equipped by the colonial government. But perhaps the majority of the explorers had mixed backing, made up of government contributions and private subscriptions, often in fairly large single contributions from the squatting interests such as those of Sir Thomas Elder. The Burke and Wills Great Northern Expedition was very much (indeed, too much) a matter of Victorian colonial pride: the government, one large subscriber, and a public appeal financed the most lavishly equipped and perhaps the most miserably conducted of all the expeditions. The South Australian government was particularly forward in encouraging exploration, offering £2,000 for the first crossing to the Gulf of Carpentaria and making smaller grants in advance for exploration in the country between Eyre Peninsula and Lakes Eyre and Torrens.

Such, then, were the physical and human conditions in which the Australian explorers did their work; it remains to trace briefly the main phases in the opening of the continent. The details will be found elsewhere in this book.

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Stokes is attacked by Aborigines at the Victoria River mouth.

The Australia of 1813 (excluding Tasmania) really consisted of no more than an imperfectly known coastline and the County of Cumberland, the ‘gaol’ in the little lowland, about 30 miles by 20, around Sydney. The Blaxland raid into, rather than over, the Blue Mountains was simply an initial reconnaissance; but within ten years the base of more or less known country had been extended to comprise most of the Nineteen Counties (proclaimed in 1829), a great semicircle of land stretching along the coast from Taree to Moruya, 150 miles on each side of Sydney and inland for 150 miles to the Liverpool Range, Orange, and the Murrumbidgee west of Canberra. In 1824 Hume and Hovell linked this large tract with Port Phillip. The stage was set for the first of the great targets: the ‘Inland Sea’.

Already by 1818 Oxley had followed the Lachlan and Macquarie Rivers down to dreary expanses of reedy marsh but there was a vast amount of continent beyond these points; and the trends of the upper courses of the rivers—Lachlan, Macquarie, Namoi, Dumaresq, and so on—were encouragingly to the north-west: they must go somewhere. So as part of the publicity for new settlements, The Friend of Australia in London published a map (1837) showing a vast river, rivalling the Amazon, flowing right across the heart of the continent to debouch in a great estuary or delta on the Kimberley coast: an entrancing vision and had it been true the history of Australia would have been vastly different (for one thing, it might have been inhabited, in the north, by Malays). More sober visions were spectacular enough: there must be, surely, a great inland lake, a Mediterranean, collecting the drainage of the great curve of mountains running so close