The Explorers
Text Classics
TIM FLANNERY was born in Melbourne in 1956. He received degrees
from La Trobe University, Monash University and the University of
New South Wales. In 1984 he became the principal research scientist in
mammalogy at the Australian Museum in Sydney, a post he held until 1999.
His groundbreaking book
The Future Eaters
(1994) won the South
Australian Premier's Literary Award, a New South Wales Premier's
Literary Award and the Age Non-Fiction Book of the Year award.
Throwim Way Leg
(1997), an account of his explorations in Papua New
Guinea, was a bestseller.
In 1999 Flannery was the visiting chair of Australian studies at
Harvard University, and became director of the South Australian Museum.
The Weather Makers
(2005), a defining work on climate change,
was published around the world. It debuted on the
New York Times
non-fiction bestseller list, and became a bestseller in the US, Australia,
Canada and Germany.
Soon after being named the 2007 Australian of the Year, Flannery
took up a position at Macquarie University, Sydney, in environmental
sustainability.
Here on Earth
was published in 2010.
Flannery has made contributions of international significance to
the fields of palaeontology, mammalogy and conservation. Sir David
Attenborough ranks him âin the league of the all-time great explorers
like Dr David Livingstone'.
In 2011 Tim Flannery was appointed chief commissioner of the
federal government's Australian Climate Commission. He is a governor of
WWF-Australia, a director of the Australian Wildlife Conservancy and
chairman of the Copenhagen Climate Council.
ALSO BY TIM FLANNERY
Mammals of New Guinea
The Future Eaters: An Ecological History
of the Australasian Lands and People
Mammals of the South-West Pacific and Moluccan Islands
Throwim Way Leg: An Adventure
The Eternal Frontier: An Ecological History
of North America and its Peoples
Country: A Continent, a Scientist and a Kangaroo
The Weather Makers: The History and
Future Impact of Climate Change
We Are the Weather Makers: The Story of Global Warming
An Explorer's Notebook: Essays on Life, History and Climate
Here on Earth: An Argument for Hope
Among the Islands: Adventures in the Pacific
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Introduction and this edition copyright © Tim Flannery 1998
All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright above, no part of this publication shall be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the publisher of this book.
First published by The Text Publishing Company 1998
This edition published 2013
Cover design by WH Chong
Internal design by Anthony Vandenberg
National Library of Australia
Cataloguing-in-Publication data:
The explorers.
Bibliography.
ISBN 9781921922435.
eISBN 9781922148643
1. Explorers â Australia. 2. Australia â Discovery and exploration. I. Flannery, Timothy Fridtjof.
919.404
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Sincere thanks are due to my editor Michael Heyward who conceived the idea of this book, edited the pieces I selected, sculpted and polished my contributions, checked original sources, located new material, and asked the really important questions. George Thomas and Alexandra Szalay proofread the manuscript, greatly improving it with their suggestions. Emma Gordon Williams has been tireless in her efforts to locate the most obscure works.
Some of the most significant material herein was drawn from extremely rare books or unpublished archival records. Such material is priceless and access to it quite rightly restricted. Carol Cantrell (rare books), May Robertson (archives) and the other staff of Information Services at the Australian Museum deserve special thanks for giving me their time, and access to the material in their care. Jennifer Broomhead of the Mitchell Library, and Tim Robinson of the Sydney University Archives also deserve special thanks for their help in locating and contextualising important archival records. I am also very grateful to Des Cowley and Gerard Hayes of the State Library of Victoria who found many important books for me.
To Annaâmay all your explorations be happy ones
This unknown country is the fifth part of the terrestrial globe, and extendeth itself to such length that in probability it is twice greater in kingdoms and seignories than all that which at this day doth acknowledge subjection and obedience unto your Majestyâ¦to all the titles which you already do possess you may adjoin this which I represent, and that the name
TERRA AUSTRALIS INCOGNITA
may be blazoned and spread over the face of the whole world.
P
EDRO DE
Q
UIROS
, R
EPORT TO
K
ING
P
HILLIP
III
OF
S
PAIN
, 1610
CONTENTS
This Extraordinary Continent
by Tim Flannery
George Augustus Robinson, 1831
Thomas Livingstone Mitchell, 1836
John McDouall Stuart, 1858â60
Alexander and Frank Jardine, 1864
Hedley Herbert Finlayson, 1931
by Tim Flannery
Drunken camels were the bane of the Burke and Wills expedition. They consumed prodigious quantities of rum, better used perhaps to soothe the pillows of the doomed explorers. The only female member of Ernest Favenc's expedition to Queensland's Gulf country in 1882â83 never got to publish her remarkable story of endurance in the face of sickness, death and privation. Her journal lies all but forgotten in the archive of Sydney's Mitchell Library, the list of baby clothes at the back suggesting she was pregnant for at least part of the journey. In February 1869 G. W. Goyder, surveyor-general of South Australia and martinet, was dispatched to survey and found the settlement of Darwin. He was watched by the Larrakia people who, when they decided it was safe to contact the strangers, held a corroboree, giving pitch and word perfect renditions of âJohn Brown's Body', âThe Glory, Hallelujah', and âThe Old Virginia Shore'. This âwhite-fella corroboree' had been traded from the Woolna people, who memorised the tunes while lying prone in the wet grass at night, spying on surveyors who were working near the Adelaide River. Who, in this instance, were the explorers?
It's an illustration of just how rich the stories of Australian exploration are that neither the Larrakia's corroboree nor Burke's camels made it into this book. In assembling these accounts I had wanted to offer the reader the experience of being a fly on the wall at exemplary moments in Australia's history. To be there, looking over Governor Phillip's shoulder as he chooses the location for the infant settlement of Sydney; to accompany John McDouall Stuart in his moment of triumph at reaching the centre of the continent; and to join the young William Wills as he lies alone, dying of starvation on a full stomach, at Cooper Creek. But then I discovered that the records of Australia's explorers offer so much more. In them, the unexpected is commonplace. So much that is new and extraordinary, both trivial and profound, crowds in on the reader. Events, glimpsed across the barriers of time, language and environmental alienation, continue to puzzle weeks later. One finds humanity at its extreme; acts of unimaginable cruelty are juxtaposed with those of compassion and self-sacrifice. George Evans played games with frightened Aboriginal children to cheer them up. Other explorers were murderers.
Why were the explorers there? What made them do it? The answers are as varied as the explorers themselves. Some were simply obeying orders. Others had set out in search of new grazing land, illusory cities or imaginary seas. Some were careful calculators of risk, while others played a terrifying sport of brinkmanship with their own lives. Some were looking for lost comrades, while a few were made explorers by fate, having set out to do something completely different.
For all its wonder, Australia's exploration history has been bowdlerised, debased and made insipid for generations of Australians by those with particular political and social agendas. In my last year of primary school I fidgeted whenever stern Miss Conway raised the topic of the explorers. A map of Australia would be produced, across which ran a confusion of dotted, dashed and coloured lines. I was bored because I did not know the country the map represented. The men were just names, their journeys snail-trails across paper. No attempt was made to bring exploring to life, perhaps because the inconvenient details about Aborigines and barren wastes would have simply got in the way of the main message: that the Europeans had triumphed. Somehow, those lines granted possession of a continent. And in that message, all of the subtlety, the excitement and wonder of exploration was lost.
Perhaps it is the very realisation that exploration was a sort of conquest which has caused it to fall so far out of favour with many contemporary Australians. It is now commonly thought of as a kind of abominationâthe penetration of a fragile continent by ruthless, rough-handed, pale-skinned men who probed, desecrated and killed in their quest for personal vainglory. Yet as I read the words of the men and women, black and white, who carried the endeavour, I find that this is as far from the true heart of Australian exploration as were the deadly boring history lessons of my childhood.
For me, Australian exploration is a very different thing. It is heroic, for nowhere else did explorers face such obdurate country; and it depended on black people far more than on white. In the end it was a failure, for few discovered the fertile soil and abundant water they so yearned for. Yet it has enriched us immeasurably, for it turned the lens on that most fascinating otherâa whole continent as it was on the day of European arrival. A continent that, through vast transformations, was to become my home.