The New South Wales Government Made Praiseworthy Efforts To Rescue The Missing Traveller.

About a year after Leichhardt visited Port Essington, the Government abandoned the settlement, and the prevailing opinion in the

Colony of New South Wales at that time was, that Leichhardt had not been able to reach Eyre's Creek, but had been forced up north, from his intended route, the inland-sea theory still prevailing, and that he had probably returned to the old settlement for relief. Therefore, when he had been absent two years, the Government despatched a schooner to the abandoned place. The master of the vessel saw several of the half-civilised natives, who well remembered Leichhardt's arrival there, but he had not returned. The natives promised the master to take the greatest care of him should he again appear, but it is needless to say he was seen no more. The Government were very solicitous about him, and when he had been absent four years, Mr. Hovendon Heley was sent away with an outfit of pack-horses and six or seven men, to endeavour to trace him. This expedition seems to have wandered about for several months, and discovered, as Mr. Heley states, two marked trees branded exactly alike, namely L over XVA, and each spot where these existed is minutely described. There was at each, a water-hole, upon the bank of which the camp was situated; at each camp a marked tree was found branded alike; at each, the frame of a tent was left standing; at each, some logs had been laid down to place the stores and keep them from damp. The two places as described appear so identical that it seems impossible to think otherwise than that Heley and his party arrived twice at the same place without knowing it. The tree or trees were found on a watercourse, or courses, near the head of the Warrego River, in Queensland. The above was all the information gained by this expedition. A subsequent search expedition was sent out in 1858, under Augustus Gregory; this I shall place in its chronological order. Kennedy, a companion of Sir Thomas Mitchell into Tropical Australia in 1845, next enters the field. He went to trace Mitchell's Victoria River or Barcoo, but finding it turned southwards and broke into many channels, he abandoned it, and on his return journey discovered the Warrego River, which may be termed the Murrumbidgee of Queensland. On a second expedition, in 1848, Kennedy started from Moreton Bay to penetrate and explore the country of the long peninsula, which runs up northward between the Gulf of Carpentaria and the Pacific Ocean, and ends at Cape York, the northernmost point of Australia in Torres Straits. From this disastrous expedition he never returned. He was starved, ill, fatigued, hunted by remorseless aborigines for days, and finally speared to death by the natives of Cape York, when almost within sight of his goal, where a vessel was waiting to succour him and all his party. Only a black boy named Jacky Jacky was with him. After Kennedy's death Jacky buried all his papers in a hollow tree, and for a couple of days he eluded his pursuers, until, reaching the spot where his master had told him the vessel would be, he ran yelling down to the beach, followed by a crowd of murderous savages. By the luckiest chance a boat happened to be at the beach, and the officers and crew rescued the boy. The following day a party led by Jacky returned to where poor Kennedy lay, and they buried him. They obtained his books and maps from the tree where Jacky had hidden them. The narrative of this expedition is heart-rending. Of the whole number of the whites, namely seven, two only were rescued by the vessel at a place where Kennedy had formed a depot on the coast, and left four men.

With Captain Roe, a companion of King's, with whom he was speared and nearly killed by the natives of Goulburn Island, in 1820, and who afterwards became Surveyor-General of the colony of Western Australia, the list of Australia's early explorers may be said to close, although I should remark that Augustus Gregory was a West Australian explorer as early as the year 1846. Captain Roe conducted the most extensive inland exploration of Western Australia at that day, in 1848. No works of fiction can excel, or indeed equal, in romantic and heart-stirring interest the volumes, worthy to be written in letters of gold, which record the deeds and the sufferings of these noble toilers in the dim and distant field of discovery afforded by the Australasian continent and its vast islands. It would be well if those works were read by the present generation as eagerly as the imaginary tales of adventure which, while they appeal to no real sentiment, and convey no solid information, cannot compete for a moment with those sublime records of what has been dared, done, and suffered, at the call of duty, and for the sake of human interests by men who have really lived and died. I do not say that all works of fiction are entirely without interest to the human imagination, or that writers of some of these works are not clever, for in one sense they certainly are, and that is, in only writing of horrors that never occurred, without going through the preliminary agony of a practical realisation of the dangers they so graphically describe, and from which, perhaps, they might be the very first to flee, though their heroes are made to appear nothing less than demigods. Strange as it may appear, it seems because the tales of Australian travel and self-devotion are true, that they attract but little notice, for were the narratives of the explorers NOT true we might become the most renowned novelists the world has ever known. Again, Australian geography, as explained in the works of Australian exploration, might be called an unlearned study.

Enter page number Go  Previous Next
Page 7 of 200
Words from 6248 to 7252 of 204780