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| NOT a tarantula! |
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| NOT a porcupine! |
So in some ways,
the early explorers who were born and raised in Europe had problems when it
came to travelling in Australia. They followed river valleys, being used to
glaciated landforms where the valleys were broad and easy to travel. In the old
Australian geology, where chasms had been carved by millennia of rare floods,
that was not a good move. The valleys were steep-sided and hard to get out of,
and the narrow defile at the bottom was usually blocked by rock fragments that
had tumbled down at some point in the past. Worst of all, there was usually no
water flowing swiftly, gurgling along, as there would be in any decent European
valley.
In the same
way, based on what was known of other continents, Major Mitchell was willing to
believe in the myth of a great river, stretching across the continent, even
though careful mapping of the coast had failed to reveal the mouth of a great
river. He had been told by a liar that the river existed, and that was enough
for him. It began with a wild tale from a runaway convict called Clarke,
otherwise known as "the barber". Clarke returned to settled areas and
said he had heard from the Aboriginal people of a river called the Kindur,
running to the north-west, and he said he had decided to follow it, hoping to
reach another country. Ernest Favenc argues plausibly that Clarke's tale was
spun to save him from a flogging when he returned, but naturally enough, Clarke
the barber claimed that it was all true.
Clarke said
that he began at the Liverpool Plains, and followed a river which he said the
natives called the Namoi. Along the way, Oxley's River Peel, the river that
Tamworth lies on, joined in. He crossed the Namoi and reached what he took to
be the Kindur, which he followed for 400 miles before the Namoi joined it. The
river was navigable, and flowed on, he said. He was not sure how far it went,
but it never, he asserted flowed to the south of west. In other words, here was
a perfect path to strike off up into northern Australia.
A gullible
government fell for it, as governments so often do, because they wanted to
believe. So the acting Governor, Sir Patrick Lindesay, sent Mitchell out in
November 1831. He went across the Peel, over the Hardwicke Range, and reached
the Namoi about three weeks later. Expecting a navigable river, the party had
come equipped with canvas boats, but these snagged in the river, and so the
party reverted to horseback. They reached the Gwydir, turned west along it for
80 miles, then struck north to a grand river that Mitchell found bore the local
name of Karaula. He followed this down till the Gwydir joined it, and by this
time, given that it was heading south, he concluded that this was the Darling
River.
All the
same, if the Kindur River was a non-starter, all the water had to flow
somewhere, so the prospect of an inland sea remained good. Just as the
originators of the European culture saw their world as surrounding the
Mediterranean Sea, so the new Australians dreamed of an inland sea, hopefully
with snow-capped alps somewhere about the Gibson Desert, but not everybody was
convinced. Eyre certainly was doubtful.
Keep in mind
that Eyre had tried to reach central Australia along the line of the Flinders
Ranges, and had fallen back. That was why he set out around the Great
Australian Bight, because he hoped to find, at some point, more gentle and
welcoming country to his north, so that he could turn right and reach a land of
milk and honey. It was not to be, and wilting under the blast of hot
northerlies (he likened them to the blast of a furnace), Eyre wrote:
There was no
misunderstanding the nature of the country from which such a wind came; often
as I had been annoyed by the heat, I had never experienced any thing like it
before. Had anything been wanting to confirm my previous opinion of the arid
and desert character of the great mass of the interior of Australia, this wind
would have been quite sufficient for that purpose. From those who differ from
me in opinion (and some there are who do so whose intelligence and judgment
entitle their opinion to great respect), I would ask, could such a wind be
wafted over an inland sea? or could it have passed over the supposed high, and
perhaps snowcapped mountains of the interior.
In time, the
Australian-born explorers like Hume would cease to be a minority, and the
Europeans who believed they were born to lead would be replaced by men like the
Forrests and the Gregorys, along with supple-minded explorers who were born
elsewhere, but who had learned to relate to the country.
Mitchell was
a perfectly adequate observer of the lay of the land, the way it sloped and
drained. Because of this, he could diverge from the Gwydir, yet know, when it
joined the Darling, that this river could from its position and size, only be
the Gwydir, but if he had geographical sense, he lacked some of the other
senses that an explorer needs to survive, thrive, and produce a complete
picture, not only of the line of advance, but the country for a hundred
kilometres or more on either side. Anybody could do micro-exploring, just by
hopping on a horse and staying alive, but big-picture exploring required an
instinct that could generally only be acquired by experience that usually was
only available to those born in Australia.
Sturt and
Eyre began with European eyes, yet they seem to have acquired a sense for the
land. Leichhardt arrived at the Gulf of Carpentaria with no idea that there
were crocodiles there. He was derided by Mitchell and his cronies because he
set out to live off the land (and as we have seen, was up to eating anything
even remotely edible) but he succeeded, unlike the egotistical Major, who
needed gigantic stores to keep going, and treated each excursion as a military
campaign.
