Part 1 (2/2)
In making preparations for this expedition, the means of conveyance by land and water required the earliest consideration. These were strong bullock-drays and portable boats. Horses and light carts had been preferred by me: but the longer column of march, and necessity for a greater number of men, were considered objections; while many experienced persons suggested that the bullocks, though slow, were more enduring than horses. [* The results of this journey proved quite the reverse.] Eight drays were therefore ordered to be made of the best seasoned wood: four of these by the best maker in the colony, and four by the prisoners in c.o.c.katoo Island. Two iron boats were made by Mr. Struth, each in two parts, on a plan of my own, and on the 17th of November the whole party moved off from Paramatta on their way to the proposed camp at Buree.
I joined the party encamped at Buree on the 13th of December, having rode there from Sydney in four and a half days, and on the following Monday, 15th of December, 1845, I put it in motion towards the interior. The Exploring party now consisted of the following persons:--
SIR T. L. MITCh.e.l.l, Kt., Surveyor General, Chief of the Expedition.
EDMUND B. KENNEDY, Esq. a.s.sistant Surveyor, Second in command. W.
STEPHENSON, M.R.C.S.L. Surgeon and Collector of objects of Natural History. PETER M'AVOY, Mounted Videttes. Charles Niblett, William Graham, ANTHONY BROWN, Tent-keeper. WILLIAM BALDOCK, In charge of the horses.
John Waugh Drysdale, Store-keeper. Allan Bond, Bullock-drivers. Edward Taylor, William Bond, William Mortimer, George Allcot, John Slater, Richard Horton, Felix Maguire, James Stephens, Carpenters. Job Stanley, Edward Wilson, Blacksmith. George Fowkes, Shoemaker. John Douglas, Barometer carrier. Isaac Reid, Sailor and Chainman. Andrew Higgs, Chainman. William Hunter, With the horses. Thomas Smith, Patrick Travers, Carter and Pioneer. Douglas Arnott, Shepherd and Butcher. Arthur Bristol, Sailmaker and Sailor.
8 drays, drawn by 80 bullocks; 2 boats; 13 horses; 4 private do.; and 3 light carts, comprised the means of conveyance; and the party was provided with provisions for a year:--250 sheep (to travel with the party), const.i.tuting the chief part of the animal food. The rest consisted of gelatine, and a small quant.i.ty of pork.
With the exception of a few whose names are printed in italics, the party consisted of prisoners of the Crown in different stages of probation, with whom the prospect of additional liberty was an incentive so powerful, that no money payment was asked by them or expected, while, from experience, I knew that for such an enterprise as this I could rely on their zealous services. The patience and resolution of such men in the face of difficulties, I had already witnessed; and I had hired three of the old hands, in order the more readily to introduce my accustomed camp arrangements. Volunteers of all cla.s.ses had certainly come eagerly forward, offering their gratuitous services on this expedition of discovery; but discipline and implicit obedience were necessary in such a party to ensure the objects in view, as well as its own preservation; and it was not judged expedient, where some prisoners were indispensable as mechanics, to mix with them men of a different cla.s.s, over whom the same kind of authority could not be exercised.
Following the same road by which I quitted Buree, in 1835, my former line of route across Hervey's Range lay to the left. The party thus arrived at Bramadura, a sheep station occupied by Mr. Boyd. It was on the same chain of ponds crossed by me on the journey of 1835, and then named Dochendoras Creek, but now known as the Mundadgery chain of ponds. These ponds had been filled by heavy rains which fell on Tuesday the 9th December--the day on which I left Sydney, where the weather had been clear and sultry.
A tornado or hurricane had, on the same day, levelled part of the forest near this place, laying prostrate the largest trees, one side of which was completely barked by the hailstones. Many branches of trees along the line of route, showed that the wind had been very violent to a considerable distance.
16TH DECEMBER.--Some of the bullocks missing: the party could not, therefore, quit the camp until 11 o'clock. The pa.s.sage of the bed of the chain of ponds (which we travelled up) was frequently necessary, and difficult for heavily laden drays, which I found ours were, owing, chiefly to a superabundance of flour, above the quant.i.ty I intended to have taken, but supplied to my party, and brought forty miles by my drays before my arrival at the camp.
We halted at another sheep station of Mr. Boyd's. Here I perceived that h.o.r.ehound grew abundantly; and I was a.s.sured by Mr. Parkinson, a gentleman in charge of these stations, that this plant springs up at all sheep and cattle stations throughout the colony, a remarkable fact, which may a.s.sist to explain another, namely, the appearance of the Couchgra.s.s, or Dog's-tooth-gra.s.s, wherever the white man sets his foot, although previously unknown in these regions.
17TH DECEMBER.--Set off about 7 A.M. and travelled along a good road, for about 6 miles. Then, at a sheep station, we crossed the chain of ponds, following a road leading to Dr. Ramsay's head station, called Balderudgery. Leaving that road, and, at 7 miles, taking to the left, we finally encamped on Spring Creek, after a journey of about 9 miles. We had pa.s.sed over what I should have called a poor sort of country, but everywhere it was taken up for sheep; and these looked fat; yet not a blade of gra.s.s could be seen; and, but for the late timely supply of rain, it had been in contemplation to withdraw these flocks to the Macquarie.
Calling at a shepherd's hut to ask the way, an Irish woman appeared with a child at her breast and another by her side: she was hut-keeper. She had been there two years, and only complained that they had never been able to get any potatoes to plant. She and her husband were about to leave the place next day, and they seemed uncertain as to where they should go. Two miles further on, a shoemaker came to the door of a hut, and accompanied me to set me on the right road. I inquired how he found work in these wild parts. He said, he could get plenty of work, but very little money; that it was chiefly contract work he lived by: he supplied sheep-owners with shoes for their men, at so much per pair. His conversation was about the difficulty a poor man had in providing for his family. He had once possessed about forty cows, which he had been obliged to entrust to the care of another man, at 5S. per head. This man neglected them: they were impounded and sold as unlicensed cattle under the new regulations.
”So you saw no more of them?”
”Oh, yes, your honour, I saw some of them AFTER THEY HAD BEEN SOLD AT THE POUND!--I wanted to have had something provided for a small family of children, and if I had only had a few acres of ground, I could have kept my cows.”
This was merely a pa.s.sing remark made with a laugh as we walked along, for he was one of the race--
”Who march to death with military glee.”
But the fate of a poor man's family was a serious subject: such was the hopeless condition of a useful mechanic ready for work even in the desolate forests skirting the haunts of the savage. So fares it with the DISJECTA MEMBRA of towns and villages, when such arrangements are left to the people themselves in a new colony.
18TH DECEMBER.--The party moved off about 7 A.M., and continued along a tolerable road, crossing what shepherds called Seven Mile Creek, in which there was some water; and a little further on we quitted the good beaten road leading to Balderudgery, and followed one to the left, which brought us to another sheep station on the same chain of ponds, three miles higher up than Balderudgery. Having directed the party to encamp here, I pursued the road south-westward along the chain of ponds, anxious to ascertain whether I could in that direction pa.s.s easily to the westward of Hervey's Range, and so fall into my former line of route to the Bogan.
At about five miles I found an excellent opening through which the road pa.s.sed on ground almost level. Having ascended a small eminence on the right, I fell in with some natives with spears, who seemed to recognise me, by pointing to my old line of route, and saying, ”Majy Majy” (Major Mitch.e.l.l). I little thought then that this was already an outlying picquet of the Bogan Blacks, sent forward to observe my party. The day was hot, therm. 97 in the shade. The chain of ponds, there called ”the Little River,” contained water in abundance, and was said to flow into the Macquarie, in which case the Bogan can have but few sources in Hervey's Range.
The station beside which we had encamped, comprised a stock yard, and had been formerly a cattle station belonging to Mr. Kite. It was now a sheep station of Dr. Ramsay's, and there was another sheep station a mile and a half from it, along the road I had examined. Thus the country suitable for either kind of stock is taken up by the gradual encroachment of sheep on cattle runs, not properly such. This easily takes place--as where sheep feed, cattle will not remain, and sheep will fatten where cattle would lose flesh. Fortunately, however, for the holders of the latter description of stock, there are limits to this kind of encroachment. The plains to the westward of these ranges afford the most nutritive pasturage in the world for cattle, and they are too flat and subject to inundations to be desirable for sheep. A zone of country of this description lies on the interior side of the ranges, as far as I have examined them. It is watered by the sources of the rivers Goulburn, Ovens, Murray, Murrumbidgee, Lachlan, Bogan, Macquarie, Castlereagh, Nammoy, Peel, Gwydir, and Darling; on which rivers the runs will always make cattle fat. There are two shrubs palpably salt, and, perhaps, there is something salsolaceous in the herbage also on which cattle thrive so well; and the open plains and muddy waterholes are their delight.
Excessive drought, however, may occasionally reduce the owners of such stock to great extremities, and subject them to serious loss. The Acacia pendula, a tree whose HABITAT is limited and remarkable, is much relished by the cattle. It is found only in clay soils, on the borders of plains, which are occasionally so saturated with water as to be quite impa.s.sable; never on higher ground nor on any lower than that limited sort of locality, in the neighbourhood of rivers which at some seasons overflow.
In such situations, even where gra.s.s seems very scarce, cattle get fat; and it is a practice of stockmen to cut down the Acacia pendula (or Myall trees, as they call them) for the cattle to feed on.
At this sheep station where we had encamped, I met with an individual who had seen better days, and had lost his property amid the wreck of colonial bankruptcies--a tea-totaller, with Pope's Essay on Man for his consolation, in a bark hut. This ”melancholy Jaques” lamented the state of depravity to which the colony was reduced, and a.s.sured me that there were shepherdesses in the bus.h.!.+ This startling fact should not be startling, but for the disproportion of s.e.xes, and the squatting system which checks the spread of families. If pastoralisation were not one thing, and colonisation another, the occupation of tending sheep should be as fit and proper for women as for men. The pastoral life, so favourable to love and the enjoyment of nature, has ever been a favourite theme of the poet. Here it appears to be the antidote of all poetry and propriety, only because man's better half is wanting. Under this unfavourable aspect the white man first comes before the aboriginal native; were the intruders accompanied by women and children, they could not be half so unwelcome. One of the most striking differences between squatting and settling in Australia consists in this. Indeed if it were an object to uncivilise the human race, I know of no method more likely to effect it than to isolate a man from the gentler s.e.x and children; remove afar off all courts of justice and means of redress of grievances, all churches and schools, all shops where he can make use of money, then place him in close contact with savages. ”What better off am I than a black native?” was the exclamation of a shepherd to me just before I penned these remarks.
19TH DECEMBER.--The party moved along the road I had previously examined.
<script>