Exploring by sea and land

Once the white people had invaded Australia, their exploration began with sea trips where people landed or used boats to penetrate the continent. In 1790, Arthur Phillip progressed up the Hawkesbury River in an attempt to reach what were then the Carmarthen Ranges, a name that was about to be replaced by the Blue Mountains. This work was carried out in boats that might be sailed, but for the most part, were rowed. Phillip mentions in a despatch "an eye-sketch made by Captain Hunter, as we rowed up it".

The problem in the early days was that while the Hawkesbury entered the Pacific to the north of Sydney, it swings south under the Blue Mountains, and in the end, has its source in the high ground to Sydney's south, not far form the coast. And because exploration was going on in bits and pieces, the river gained three names: the Wollondilly in its higher reaches, the Nepean to Sydney's west, and the Hawkesbury to Sydney's north. Until decent surveys were done, it was hard to link them up, even though people soon began to suspect that these three rivers were one.

At a time when beasts of burden were scarce in the colony, and needed more for ploughing and general cartage, explorers got into the habit of using watercraft to get themselves well on the way to their goal using boats or ships, and so a pattern was set, of boosting a party into unknown territory by boat or ship. This meant they could begin fresh, having passed any number of intervening obstacles, and with their stores complete.

The bush around Sydney was bad news for anybody going on a long journey. The 200-million-year-old Hawkesbury sandstone was laid down in a river delta somewhat like Bangladesh, where the sand was washed and rewashed, until it was more than 200 metres deep. Then this was covered by other sediments and squashed till it formed tough sandstone. later still, the cover was ripped off, and the sandstone ground down to a flat coastal plain.

Augustus Earle, The Blue Mountains.

Then came the explorer-killer: the sandstone was heaved up in the west to make the Blue Mountains, and heaved up to a lesser extent near the sea — either that or the sea level fell. Either way, water running off the sandstone began to cut into the stone, ever so slowly. Sandstone has a curious property: it show jointing patterns, sets of weak vertical planes that are created by stresses as the rock forms, and in the Hawkesbury sandstone, they ran and run basically north-south and east-west, and this is where the water ran, wearing away the stone and establishing a pattern of gullies and valleys and chasms, not unlike a fern leaf.

Then came the final blow: the sea level rose, filling in the river valleys and making the deep waters of Sydney Harbour and other harbours north and south. The tough rock made steep cliffs wherever the rock was worn away, and this offered conditions where ships could moor close to the shore, and not ground at low tide, but what was excellent for sailors was horrid for landsmen, who needed to get around the water, or use boats to cross it. Sydney is marked by that heritage to this day, a city of bridges and tunnels, curving roads, and in some places, streets drawn by distant draughtsmen, oblivious of the cliffs that break the neatly drawn streets into fragments.

But while today's Sydneysiders can get around the cliffs and water gaps, the explorers faced a much grimmer battle — not that any of that mattered to the armchair experts, as we can see from a safely anonymous grizzle in Saunders's News-Letter, dated January 30, 1797:

Letters from Port Jackson, dated the 21st of December, 1795, mention that the settlement was then in a very flourishing state, and that the harvest, which was then collecting, was so abundant as to be thought equal to two years' consumption. The only scarcity was that of animal food. The capital of the colony is Sydney town, [t]he other settlements are Hawkesbury and Parra Matee. The productions of the country are but few. at least, they have not been fortunate enough to make any recent discovery; the interior is, however, little known.

The following fact is a striking instance of the want of enterprise and activity. A few days after the first arrival of the colony (now eight years since) a bull and six cows strayed from their keeper into the woods. A fear of venturing far amongst the natives, then somewhat hostile, repressed all attempts to regain them; indolence succeeded these fears, and no search was ever instituted. Some time since, an officer's servant, shooting in the woods, between twenty and thirty miles from Sydney, discovered them, and conducted the Governor and his party to the spot, where they found a heard (sic) consisting of nearly sixty head of remarkably fine cattle. The bull attacked the party. who, with some difficulty, escaped unhurt. That a neighbourhood of thirty miles by land, presenting no unusual obstacles to an adventurer, should, in the almost starving state of the colony, have remained unexplored for so long a period, is not to be accounted for otherwise than by the apathy or despondency of the settlers.

In areas of interest, the land did indeed present unusual obstacles. That was something that could occasionally be remedied by the use of watercraft, and so people sought for the Australian great rivers that would take them unerringly into the heart of the continent, and in the interim, they poked their noses in, wherever they could, seeking new places where settlements might be established, anchorages where storm-ravaged shipping might put in and lie at rest, and other convenient discoveries. So it was that in 1801, a small group set out to investigate the Hunter's River, but we will let Governor King set the scene, in the words he used to the Duke of Portland to describe the expedition in which the lost Mount Harris was named.

The Coal River, 70 miles to the northward of this place, which was seen by a lieut't of the Reliance in 1798, and named by him "Hunter's River," not having since been examined or any survey taken of it, I was anxious to ascertain how far it might be accessible to vessels, and could be depended on for a supply of coals, and as the service allowed Lieut.-Colonel Paterson's absence, I accepted his offer of accompanying Lieut. Grant in the Lady Nelson on that service.

A number of explorers in the 1830s and 1840s had sea support, from the Waterwitch, used by Eyre to remain in contact with the South Australian government, to Beagle supporting Grey on the coast of Western Australia, Rattlesnake and other vessels supporting Kennedy in his ill-fated Cape York jaunt, while in 1855, Augustus Gregory had the use of a small schooner, Tom Tough, and the barque Monarch.

There were several adventures and misadventures along the way: Gregory was to explore along the line of the Victoria River, previously visited by Captain Stokes, some 14 years earlier. The naval captain had taken boats up the river as far as they could go, but without horses and suitable equipment, there was a limit to how far they could go.

No such impediment would be allowed to stand in the way of Gregory, and Tom Tough was crammed to the gunwales with horses to ride and carry things, sheep to eat, drays, blacksmith's tools, powder, shot, guns, saddles, saddlebags, waterbags, tents and much more, though some of this would be left at their shore base, where they would return from time to time. All the same, they took a fair amount with them, and on one trip in January 1856, Gregory lists the following supplies taken for a party of nine men:

Horses: 27 pack-horses with pack-saddles; 3 pack-horses with riding-saddles; 6 riding-horses. Provisions for five months: Flour, 1,470 pounds; pork, 1200 pounds; rice, 200 pounds; sago, 44 pounds; sugar, 280 pounds; tea, 36 pounds; coffee, 28 pounds; tobacco, 21 pounds; soap, 51 pounds. Total, 3,330 pounds. Equipment: Instruments, clothing, tents, ammunition, horseshoes, tools, etc., 800 pounds; saddle-bags and packages, 400 pounds; saddles, bridles, hobbles, etc., 900 pounds. Total, 5,430 pounds.

There were drawbacks to using ships close to the shore, and at one time, Monarch spent two weeks high and dry and canted over on a reef, to the immense discomfort of the horses she was carrying, and the sheep were not particularly improved by living in a sloping hold for two weeks. Later, Tom Tough would be seriously damaged after she ran onto rocks while working up a river, to the extent that the hold partly filled with water, spoiling some of the food.

One of the ship's boats was also leaky, and being left unbailed one night, she sank, drowning eleven sheep, which had presumably been left in there to save them from the "alligators", the crocodiles which had already seized and killed a kangaroo dog, and also tried to attack some of the horses. Still, in the end the schooner had enough tools to be able to cut logs and make timbers so that she could sail off to Timor for more stores, and one of the advantages was that she had carried a "portable boat", a primitive inflatable made of fabric coated with india rubber, which unfortunately perished, so that the boat proved less useful than they had hoped.