BOOKS.
AUSTRALIAN EXPLORATION.*
THE records of Australian exploration are full of deeds of heroism.. For long the interior of that vast continent baffled all attempts to penetrate its mysteries. From all sides efforts were made by intrepid men, but they were either driven back dismayed at the desolation which lay before them, or, passing on like the German Leichhardt, they perished in the wastes, as remote from succour,. leaving as little trace behind them, as if they bad been swallowed up by the ice of a Polar sea. Until recent years, the great conti- nent of Australia has only been known in patches here and there near the sea-coast. Victoria, New South Wales, and Queens- land formed the fringe of its south-eastern side, but all along the shores of the great Australian Bight, and right through, the continent to Northern Australia, on the further side, an immense stretch of territory lay absolutely unknown.. On the western side of the continent only a few scattered settlers painfully held their own in and around Perth,. and along the shore of what forms the great and but partially explored province-of Western Australia. Gradually of late this state of ignorance has to some degree passed away.. Explorer after explorer has penetrated, now from this quarter, now from that, into many parts of the interior, until the provinces on the eastern coast, although still but roughly known, may now be said to have no great stretch of terra incognita within their bounds. With the western half of the continent discovery has not advanced at anything like the same pace, but a great step was- gained when Stuart penetrated to the heart of the continent in 1860, along a route by which a telegraph line was subsequently stretched right across the continent. By a singular piece of good- fortune, he seemed to have hit upon a series of water-creeks and verdant places that ran acress the continent, between two un- trodden wastes of sand and salt marshes on either hand, and he established undoubtedly that the heart of Australia was not all barren, however forbidding many parts of it may be.
But even this great step left much yet to be done. Practically half the country lay unexplored to the left of any one travelling north by this "bee-line." All attempts to cross that unknown territory had failed. Eyre had skirted the south coast of it in 1840, and narrowly escaped with his life ; Roe tried it in 1848-49,.
• Journey across the Western Inferior of Auttratia_ By Colonel V. B. Warburton With an Introduction and Additions by Charles H. Eden. London : Sampson Low and Co. and never got five degrees inland. Two brothers Gregory assailed the waste from two different points in the north at later dates, and although making important discoveries, had to turn back long before its secrets had been penetrated,—Augustus Gregory, after he had made his way far inland, through wastes and sandhills, by a path roughly at right angles to that of Colonel Warburton, and coming within a few miles of it All these travellers had used horses only in their joiumeyings through the wildernesses, and it was thought that if camels could be employed instead, the attempt might meet with more success, as horses could not stand the desert. The want of grass and water knocked them up very quickly, and they soon perished ; but camels might endure, and as camels had been for some time imported into South Australia for commercial purposes, the idea of trying them became in recent years less difficult to carry out than it had formerly been. Thanks to the enterprise and public spirit of two private citizens of South Australia, Messrs. Elder and Hughes, Colonel Egerton Warburton was ena,bled to start with a good outfit, a train of 17 camels, accompanied by two Afghan drivers, to try the experiment under new conditions. His entire party consisted of Colonel Warburton, and his son, Richard ; J. W. Lewis, the two Afghans, Dennis White (cook and assistant camel man), and Charley, a native boy. They carried six months' provisions, and their intention was to travel inland from Adelaide, the capital of South Australia, partly parallel to, partly by the telegraph line route of Stuart, until they reached a point near the centre of the continent, where they were to turn off to the west, and attempt to find their way to the west coast, through the unknown regions there. Accordingly the exploring party turned off from the telegraph at Alice's springs, some distance to the south of Central Mount Stuart, and threaded their way slowly into the unknown.
We have in the book before us, giving an account of that journey, no highly coloured story of a brilliant feat of travelling, only the bare jottings of the Colonel's diary ; but they are enough to show what a heroic effort his attempt must have been, and prove that the "wildernesses" of Australia are in some respects the most terrible stretches of barren, forlorn territory to be found on the face of the earth. A prominent peculiarity of the country is its sand-ridges, which run like half-petrified waves as far as the eye can see day after day on every side, unrelieved by any hint of green vegetation or by any bill. The land has the aspect of being in many places but lately, comparatively speaking, released from the do- minion of the ocean ; it has no high mountain capable of forming a water-shed, the source of fertility to the whole continent, and there- fore no great inland rivers. What short water-courses have been found in the rainy season run usually but a little way, and are then lost in the sand. Yet vegetation is not entirely wanting, nor is water impossible to find during the Australian summer. The aborigines roam over these wastes, and find somehow subsistence, and their wells are dotted over the country on every hand. Scrubby bushes grow in many of the furrows, and stretches of gum-tree forests now and then change the outlook for a time. But prac- tically there is no edible vegetation for many hundreds of miles ; such water as there is does no good to the earth. beeause there is no soil, and only here and there can it be found by digging. Rain falls plentifully at times, but it sinks into the sand and disappears, leaving, for the most part, no trace behind it, or at best, forming brackish pools. The presence of the scrub makes the desolation even more horrible than it otherwise would be, through the tantalising suggestions which it always holds out of food and drink where none can be had. Where sweet water is found, it is oftenest amid bare rocks of granite, where grass cannot grow, or under deep banks of sand, in what are known as native wells.
Through these wilds Colonel Warburton and his party wandered for many months. They left Adelaide on the 21st September, 1872, and reached a settlement on the De Grey River, at the other end of their journey, sixteen miles from the Western- Australian coast, on the 11th of January, 1874. They started with seventeen camels, and ended with two ; four ran away, three were left behind, seven were killed for food, and one poisoned itself in feeding. As near as possible, taking into account the wanderings backwards and forwards, to this side and to that, in search of water, the Colonel estimates that they had gone 4,000 miles in that time, and half of their way was one long privation. The camels' flesh had no sustenance in it, for the poor brutes were worn so with fatigue and hunger—for it was but little nourishing food they could reach—that when their flesh was boiled no single bubble of fat was formed on the water. Mostly it was eaten raw, cut in strips and dried in the sun ; and with no better food than this, except an occasional bird that offered
but the mockery of a meal, and with little water, or some- times none at all for days, the strength of the party gradually gave way, till they would have all perished at the last, had Colonel Warburton not sent Lewis on with two camels and one of the Afghans, to try to find the De Grey River station, and bring relief. A rush bad been made through the last stretch of desert, and it had left the two Warburtons utterly prostrated ; only three camels remained, and one of these was done up so, that after reaching the banks of the Oakover, affluent of the De Grey, it wasted away as if still in the desert with nothing but scrub to eat, unable to profit by the nourishment that better pastures afforded. All the party could not proceed, therefore, with any hope of reaching help. Fresher pastures in a solitary land brought them no food ; there were fishes indeed, but they had no nets to catch them with ; birds, but they were too weak to shoot a sufficient supply. So Lewis was sent ahead, and the others were to wait and subsist as they could until he came back. They had the spent camel to kill and chew at, and by one means or other might keep life in for a week or two. It was their only chance. Everything was gone now—abandoned in the desert—except the rags they stood in, and one more stroke must be played for dear life. And it was won ; Lewis came back with horses, and supplies, having ridden his camels 170 miles down stream to the place of succour. But for these marvellous animals, indeed, the journey could never have been undertaken, or if it had, and if the party had persevered, their fate on the route they followed must have been that of Leichhardt. As it was, they had many hair-breadth escapes, and many pains, if not much variety of adventure. There were no elephants to hunt, nor lions to slay, but there was more sheer hard work and endurance than if there had been. When their travelling was across, instead of parallel to the sand-ridges or curves, the fatigue was horrible, and the heat impossible to be borne. Consequently much of the travelling had to be done at night, rendering it more difficult for them to find their way. It was a year of drought, too, for that dry region even ; and often in the day the men could get no rest for a small black ant, that swarmed under every bush, and haunted them all along the latter part of their journey, so that they could not lie behind any shelter. The only refuge from its attacks was the broiling hot sun, and exposed to his vertical rays the Colonel and his followers had often to seek what repose they could after a long night's march. In short, this exploration was one heroic effort throughout, and Colonel Warburton deserves to take a higher rank amongst travellers than we in this country are willing to accord to those who devote themselves to Australia. It lacks the poetic, social, and romantic sporting associations of Africa ; these men are only "prospecting for new sheep-rims," we are apt to think, and we rate their exploits accordingly. Yet no more daring feat of travelling was ever done, we believe, than this journey across the western
half of Australia must have been. Its results, small as they at first seem, may be very important in the future history of the western colony, should the experience thus gained lead, as is likely, to further examinations of the land north and south of the Colonel's line of march, under conditions leis dangerous. To those who care to read of a good piece of work manfully performed, we may at any rate commend this modest narrative. Both it and Mr. Eden's introduction are well worth perusal. We have, indeed, said so much on the main portion of the book, that no space is left for Mr. Eden's share ; yet he contrives to NA in brief space a very stirring account of what had been done before Colonel War burton's day, and his introduction is anything but dull reading.
Previous page
