Losing the European outlook

NOT a tarantula!

NOT a porcupine!

The early Europeans in Australia saw everything through European eyes. The wombat was a 'badger;, the echidna was a 'porcupine, and so on. The huntsman spider was a triantelope, that being a corruption of tarantula.

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.