Young explorers

This is an excerpt from my Australian Backyard Explorer, published by the National Library of Australia, now only available in second-hand shops, or in my revised edition, available through Polymoth Books, or from Amazon. The book won the 2010 Eve Pownall Book of the Year. It is a very different look at the way Australia was "explored" by the white invaders after 1788.

The young explorers

There was a surprising number of youngsters who went out exploring, some of them far more deliberately than Lieutenant King’s young stowaway. John Lhotsky had a youth, whom he refers to like this:

Paddy a little Irish lad performed the more minute occupation of insect catching…
—John Lhotsky, Journal.

Alan Andrews, who edited an edition of Lhotsky’s journey, worked out that ‘Paddy’ was Patrick Moore. By October 1834, Moore had run away, and Lhotsky offered a reward of two dollars for the boy’s return:

PATRICK MOORE, born in Dublin, Catholic, 13 years of age, a well looking, stout, intelligent, and rather talkative lad; brown hair, hazel eyes, and good teeth, ruddy complexion;—had on when he went away, a blue striped shirt, brown corduroy trowsers, dark striped waistcoat, a straw hat, and laced boots, rather big…

Boys would do as they were told, mainly getting wood, water and other lowly tasks, but some youngsters went for darker reasons. As we have already seen, Governor Gawler and Captain Charles Sturt took along Mrs Sturt, Julia Gawler, the governor’s teenage daughter, her teenage maid, Eliza Arbuckle, and an English boy of 18, Henry Bryan. The reasoning behind taking them comes from Eliza Davies, this being the married name of Eliza Arbuckle.

I heard a conversation between high officials, from which I learned that the policy of taking ladies with them, and bringing all back in safety, would ensure a readier sale of land in England. Capitalists would not fear the savages when ladies had traversed the country in safety.
—Eliza Davies, née Arbuckle, Diary, quoted by Monteath.

Peter Monteath cited this passage to support his view that Emily Creaghe and Bessie Favenc were expected to play a similar ‘window-dressing’ role. The aim was to ‘open up’ the Top End, and that meant showing that ‘white women’ could survive the experience of living there.

Emily Creaghe died, just after I was born... (SLNSW image)

When Leichhardt set out in 1844, he took along John Murphy who was 15, but he had met Leichhardt as a 12-year-old on the passage to Australia. On 22 September 1845, young Murphy discovered the allergenic effects of certain species of Grevillea, when he stowed botanical specimens inside his shirt. We will look at this in chapter 5.

Murphy was perhaps lucky, given that we have already met Henry Bryan who died aged 18, though we will look at both his case and also at the fate of Frederick Smith, also 18, at the end of chapter 7.

One other young explorer was Charles Whitmore Babbage, who was only about 18 when he drew the sketch of the Murray-Darling junction that you can see later in this book [In this blog entry, that image appears below.]. He had previously been out exploring with his father, the highly competent Herschel Babbage, when he was 15.

The fictionalised image on the right shows ‘an explorer’ camping out for the night. The tent is large enough to hold six men, yet only one man is shown, and one horse. The cooking pot, large enough to feed a small army, would be too large to carry on a horse, but where is the dray or cart and where are the horses to pull it? Where are the other explorers?

Perhaps they were off, looking for a way forward, but if they were, they should have waited until daylight.