Great Australian Journeys Read online

  Praise for other books by Graham Seal

  Great Australian Stories

  ‘The pleasure of this book is in its ability to give a fair dinkum insight into the richness of Australian story telling.’—Weekly Times

  ‘. . . a treasure trove of material from our nation’s historical past . . . you don’t have to be Australian to enjoy it, but it helps.’—Courier Mail

  ‘This book is a little island of Aussie culture—one to enjoy.’—Sunshine Coast Sunday

  The Savage Shore

  ‘A fascinating, entertainingly written, voyage on what have often been rough and murky seas’—Daily Telegraph

  ‘Colourful stories about the spirit of navigation and exploration, and of courageous and miserable adventures at sea.’—National Geographic

  ‘. . . a gripping account of danger at sea, dramatic shipwrecks, courageous castaways, murder, much missing gold, and terrible loss of life’—Queensland Times

  ‘Collected tales of exploration, epic journeys, shipwrecks, conflict and amazing survival’—Sydney Morning Herald

  Larrikins, Bush Tales and Other Great Australian Stories

  ‘. . . another collection of yarns, tall tales, bush legends and colourful characters . . . from one of our master storytellers’—Queensland Times

  Great Anzac Stories

  ‘. . . allows you to feel as if you are there in the trenches with them.’—Weekly Times

  ‘They are pithy short pieces, absolutely ideal for reading when you are pushed for time, but they are stories you will remember for much longer than you would expect.’—Ballarat Courier

  First published in 2016

  Copyright © Graham Seal 2016

  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 prior permission in writing from the publisher. The Australian Copyright Act 1968 (the Act) allows a maximum of one chapter or 10 per cent of this book, whichever is the greater, to be photocopied by any educational institution for its educational purposes provided that the educational institution (or body that administers it) has given a remuneration notice to the Copyright Agency (Australia) under the Act.

  Allen & Unwin

  83 Alexander Street

  Crows Nest NSW 2065

  Australia

  Phone: (61 2) 8425 0100

  Email: [email protected]

  Web: www.allenandunwin.com

  Cataloguing-in-Publication details are available from the National Library of Australia

  www.trove.nla.gov.au

  ISBN 978 1 76029 101 3

  Set in 11/15 pt Sabon by Midland Typesetters, Australia

  Printed and bound in Australia by Griffin Press

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  CONTENTS

  FOREWORD by Warren Fahey

  INTRODUCTION: A NOMAD NATION

  1. ARRIVING

  The First Journey

  First Encounters

  A Boy Transported

  All His Joiful Crew

  About 600,000 Acres, More or Less

  Gypsy Journeys

  To Australia by Submarine

  2. SURVIVING

  Within a Few Hours of Eternity

  Up, Up and Away!

  After Burke and Wills

  A Dangerous Visit

  Harry Stockdale’s Long Ride

  Across the Ice

  Lifeboat No. 7

  Dunera Boys

  3. DANGEROUS JOURNEYS

  Voyage to Freedom

  Ned Kelly’s Poor Driving

  The Cameleer Factor

  Wheels Across the Wilderness

  Mrs Bell’s Oldsmobile

  The Secret Order of the Double Sunrise

  The Real Great Escape

  A Jenolan Journey

  Manhunt

  4. MYSTERIOUS JOURNEYS

  Leichhardt’s Rifle

  Naming the Desert

  Lasseter’s First Find

  The Waratah Mystery

  The Diamond Flight

  Taman Shud

  Roaming Gnomes

  Tigga’s Travels

  5. COMING AND GOING

  Platypus Dreaming

  March to New Gold Mountain

  Spider Woman

  Black Lords of Summer

  Steamship to Melbourne

  The Most Beautiful Lies

  Sons of Empire

  The Great White Fleet

  The Migrant Lord

  6. JOURNEYS OF THE HEART

  The Lady on the Sand

  Pleading the Belly

  My Heart is Still Unchanged

  Footsteps of the Saint

  An Australian Lady Travels

  Les Darcy’s Girl

  Cab Across The Nullarbor

  A Crush of Crabs

  On the Hippie Trail

  Doing The Doughnut

  7. THE TRACK

  The Road West

  Roads to Ruin

  By Train to Hobart Town

  Trudging Through Purgatory

  The Stars for a Lantern

  Hardships of the Track

  Back of the Milky Way

  Kiandra to Kosciuszko

  A Forgotten Way

  8. WORKING WAYS

  Hurdy-gurdy Girls

  Cobb & Co to Melbourne

  Across the Border

  Way of the Charlatan

  Razing the Rodney

  The Magic Lantern Man

  Travelling Teachers

  The Road Urchin

  Jumping the Rattlers

  Sydney to Darwin on a Nine-bob Pony

  Foreign Fables

  9. LEAVING

  By Justice Does She Float

  The Great Trek

  The Longest Drove

  The Last Ride

  New Australia Bound

  A Snowball March

  May Gibbs Takes the Trans

  A Glimpse Into Eternity

  CHAPTER NOTES AND SOURCES

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  PHOTO CREDITS

  FOREWORD

  Graham Seal’s book of Australian journeys covers a lot of ground. One minute the reader is travelling in a convict ship with Christopher Tomlinson, a mere strip of a lad sentenced to fourteen years’ transportation to Botany Bay, and then, a hundred or so years later, aboard the Dunera with 2500 refugees escaping Hitler’s Nazis. Graham has set out to explore how we have travelled down through the years, how Australians have journeyed.

  Much of the Australian treasury of storytelling is bound by tales of great exploration—and it’s about time they were placed in the one travel bag. Some journeys, like those of Burke and Wills, Lasseter’s First Find, and the razing of the riverboat Rodney, are relatively well known. Others, mostly unknown, are tales of bravado, determination and, sometimes, sheer madness. In a land as challenging and wide as Australia it is inevitable that journeying captures much of our imagination and should be the making of great yarns. Graham Seal has the knack of the storyteller and this collection adds another dimension to our endless search for signposts to our national identity.

  Warren Fahey AM

  Cultural historian

  INTRODUCTION

  A NOMAD NATION

  Australia has long been a land of arrivals and departures. The first peoples travelled constantly around their country, following the movements of game and the seasons. Their stories are full of journeys through the landscape by creation beings that form the land and its natural features.

  When others began to arrive here they braved dangerous journeys, whether they were fishermen in search of trepang or abalone from the a
rea we now know as Malaysia, or the first Europeans to journey here from Holland. They were followed by the British and French and perhaps by the Portuguese, to judge by the many legends about wrecks of Portuguese ships along our coasts.

  The first Europeans to arrive here braved vast distances in frail craft. A few were cast away on these shores long before the arrival of convicts and their jailers in 1788. They were followed by more transports, then by free migrants, in a long chain of travel that has continued today with the arrival of boat people, refugees and asylum seekers.

  Once settlement began, people soon journeyed inland to discover the nature and extent of the continent’s interior. Exploration, pioneering and land occupation gradually and unevenly followed and what had once been an unknown southland began to reveal its secrets and its terrors. Was there a vast inland sea? Could the arid land be crossed and conquered? The great journeys of land exploration are a vital part of the modern Australian experience, complemented by equally astonishing journeys of maritime exploration as the shape and size of this vast continent—and that it was, in fact, an island—was gradually confirmed.

  Throughout the nineteenth century, people kept arriving in increasing numbers, journeying from all parts of the globe. The largest groups were from Britain, but from the very beginning new arrivals came from many countries, as well as religions, classes and occupations: they were convicts, farmers, merchants, gold diggers, administrators, soldiers, tradespeople and shopkeepers, often arriving with their entire families. Once they landed, many had further journeys to make ‘up the country’—to the diggings or even further out. These men and women were often in search of better lives than those they had left behind.

  As European settlement spread, the great distances to be covered created a characteristically Australian nonchalance about the time and difficulty often involved in undertaking even relatively short journeys. It was frighteningly easy to perish along dusty tracks, in thick scrub or arid wilderness. Accidents in rivers and creeks, on mountains and at sea, were the frequent end of everyday journeys. But the risks had to be accepted, or perhaps just ignored: the country was wide and people needed to get around it.

  And exploration did not stop here. Some sought to found a new Australia in South America. A handful of intrepid Australians journeyed further southwards to the icy unknown of Antarctica and continue to do so today.

  Within, around and between all these journeys are woven epic adventures, terrifying ordeals and more than the odd mystery—journeys of the heart, the track, of arrival and departure, of survival, danger and sometimes of tragedy. Together they add up to a picture of a restless nation, a travelling community always ready to move on, move out or take a trip to somewhere else.

  1

  ARRIVING

  So us here is off to New Holland if God will spear our lifes All with littel families, hower sweethearts and hower wifes.

  Migration song of the Henty family and workers, 1829

  THE FIRST JOURNEY

  Australia’s first journeyers came from the north. They were the descendants of the populations that moved out of Africa perhaps 70,000 years ago. But instead of going north to Europe they went south and lived in Asia, before working further south into Borneo, Java and Papua New Guinea.

  Some of those people found their way across the islands, and the seas between, onto the Australian mainland more than fifty thousand years ago. The descendants of these first peoples are now known as Aborigines. They established and evolved a culture rich in mythology, spirituality and creativity that thrived until European settlement, and continues in communities across Australia to this day.

  The only way to tell the story of this first journey is to imagine how it might have happened. First people made their way from Asia to islands further south. As they reached one and found it hospitable, they settled. Then, after perhaps a few or many generations, the younger men and women began to look with interest at another island, far away but still tantalisingly visible. What was that yonder island like? If there were people on it, were they like themselves? Perhaps they were dangerous. What about the animals? Could they be hunted for food? Perhaps there were bad spirits of some kind.

  The questions must have mounted until some brave souls, probably both men and women, were curious enough—or perhaps desperate enough—to put to sea in whatever craft they had and strike out for the unknown. This final trip across the sea may have been undertaken by many groups over time, from many islands, either by design or perhaps cast away by storms. If they survived the currents and winds, they landed. If they then survived whatever dangers awaited them in that new place, they settled—living, hunting, gathering and having children.

  Eventually, this same urge to go beyond spurred a group into a final dangerous sea journey to a very large and very distant island. These travellers landed on the northern shore of what we now call Australia.

  Upon arriving they probably followed rivers inland where they would have found plants and animals mostly unlike any they had seen before. These groups eventually split, evolving their own variations on language, customs and beliefs.

  We will probably never know exactly who the first Australians were, or exactly where they came from or why. We do know that they came as part of the great waves of humanity that rolled out of Africa time and time again. If these first Australians were indeed descended from the people who first left Africa they would be the oldest humankind outside of Africa itself. And they would have been living, hunting, building, singing, dancing and surviving in Australia millennia before other African groups reached Europe.

  They are still here.

  FIRST ENCOUNTERS

  The first known European visitor arrived on the Cape York Peninsula early in 1606. His name was Willem Jansz, master of the small Dutch East India Company sailing ship Duyfken, or Little Dove. The Duyfken was a fast and nimble craft, at 110 tons and about twenty metres long and six metres broad. She was lightly armed with eight cannon and probably crewed by fewer than twenty sailors.

  The Duyfken had sailed from Batavia, now Jakarta, along the coast of New Guinea and then to the unknown southland. Jansz was an experienced Dutch East India Company skipper, probably in his mid thirties. His orders were to search for trading possibilities in New Guinea and any other lands to the east and south. It did not go well.

  The log of this voyage has been lost and so what happened is based only on word-of-mouth accounts. These tell us that there was at least one violent encounter between the sailors and the Aborigines. When the Duyfken made a landing, probably on the Wenlock River, the crew was attacked by Aborigines and one sailor was speared to death. Jansz may have already, by this time, lost up to half his crew through fights with either Australians or New Guineans.

  It is possible that the oral traditions of the Wik people of Cape York Peninsula also hold a clue to what happened in one of these encounters. As the inherited story goes, the devils, as the Dutch sailors are called in these stories, landed and began to dig on the beach. The Aborigines were curious and through sign language discovered that the sailors were digging for water. The Wik people were recruited as labourers to dig wells and also taught to smoke tobacco, bake damper and make tea. But the Wik eventually decided that the Dutch were a nuisance, and probably evil as well. There was a fight during which both Wik people and sailors died, then the Dutch sailed away.

  With a severely weakened complement, Jansz got the Duyfken back to Batavia. His voyage had been a failure as far as the notoriously hard-to-please masters of the Dutch East India Company were concerned. However, Jansz was the first to chart a section of the Australian coast and so to begin the long process of revealing the southland previously unknown to Europeans.

  A BOY TRANSPORTED

  When possibly just a ten-year-old boy, Christopher Tomlinson stole a pair of shoes in Preston in 1830. The year before he had received four months’ imprisonment and a whipping for a minor offence. But this time he was arrested, tried at the Lancaster Quarter Sess
ions and given a sentence of fourteen years’ transportation to Botany Bay.

  Christopher was moved south to foggy London and probably held in one of the rotting ships known as ‘hulks’ that dotted the Thames. These unpleasant dwellings housed many convicts awaiting transport to Australia. In March 1831, he sailed aboard the Camden along with 197 other male convicts. They were guarded by 29 men of the 11th Light Dragoons. A few army officers and their families were also aboard as passengers, bound for service in the colony of New South Wales.

  Built in 1799, the Camden was a reasonably seaworthy vessel of over 400 tonnes with an experienced master, and a competent surgeon named David Boyter. A few of the prisoners from the hulks had not been fit enough to make the arduous voyage and were left behind as the ship departed. Many of the convicts suffered from leg ulcers from the work they had been made to do in chains on the London docks. Those who left on the Camden were mostly young and reasonably fit. At least until the ship reached the open sea—then the surgeon was busy treating his charges for seasickness.

  We do not know if Christopher Tomlinson suffered from seasickness or ulcers. Perhaps his youth and diminutive stature might have saved him from hard labour on the wharves, sparing him the ulcers. But we do know that like everyone else aboard the Camden he had to cope with life on a cramped transportation ship and the extreme climates through which they passed on their 119-day voyage to the other end of the earth.

  As they sailed south the temperature increased far above any experienced in Britain. By the time they neared Tenerife the soldiers were lying out on the deck complaining of headaches, although Boyter suspected that might have more to do with the spirits they were allowed to consume.

  After four or so weeks in the warmer latitudes the temperatures began to ease as they continued southwards. Sore throats and coughs featured in Boyter’s sick list but no more serious complaints were recorded until about a week out from their destination when the diet of salted meat began to take its toll in the form of scurvy. Fortunately, the Camden anchored at Port Jackson on 25 July 1831 with only six of her complement requiring hospitalisation. This, the surgeon’s second voyage on a transport, had been mostly untroubled.