FROM a period antecedent to the time when South Australia was proclaimed a British dependency to the present, there has almost always been an exploring party in the field. The number of brave and resolute men who have penetrated the inhospitable and trackless wastes of the interior is very great. To specify which of them are most entitled to honour from their fellow colonists would be exceedingly invidious, and even to attempt a selection of those who have rendered the most eminent service is to undertake a task of no small difficulty. The narrative of their exploits is more thrilling than any romance. Their courage, resourcefulness, determination, and endurance are worthy of the highest praise, and the fruits of their toils and privations are being gathered by prosperous thousands who have followed in their wake. The various enterprises were to a large extent interdependent, for each success or failure prompted in one way or another to further attempts. Those that were conducted under the auspices of the government of South Australia, or promoted by the liberality of its colonists, form a series of brilliant and heroic achievements that compare favorably with any similar labours elsewhere. It will be most convenient for our purpose to suspend here the current of our narrative, and deal with these explorations consecutively, connectedly, and apart from the other contemporary aspects of colonial history. To give all the details of them that are worthy of narration is out of the question, for the published records would furnish a small library; but some account of the more important is essential to any historical sketch, inasmuch as the central position, vast extent, and topographical character of South Australia have necessitated more arduous labours of this kind than have been needed in all the other Australian colonies put together. As the first, and one of the most sensational efforts to penetrate the mysteries of the interior was initiated while Colonel Gawler was governor, such an account may appropriately be introduced here.

IN the year 1840, the country to the east and south of Adelaide was becoming fairly well known. Overlanding parties with cattle had traversed it by various routes running roughly parallel with each other, between the great bend of the river Murray, in the north, to the mouth of the Glenelg, near the southeastern extremity of the colony. Away, to the north and west, however, there was an immense untrodden wilderness of which scarcely anything was known, save from the observations of Captain Flinders and his officers in the "Investigator." The blank on the map of Australia nearly thirty years afterwards was the largest of any similar terrestrial space on the globe, excepting only the polar regions. There was a strong desire in Adelaide to open overland communication with Perth in Western Australia, and the subject was much discussed. Mr. Edward john Eyre in a published letter affirmed his conviction that no practicable route existed near the coast, but he believed one might be found farther inland. Public attention was thus directed to northern exploration, and eventually Mr. Eyre volunteered to lead a party in that direction. His offer was accepted, and an outfit provided, towards which the government granted one hundred pounds, besides rendering assistance in other ways. No better man could have been found. He had travelled and explored in both east and west Australia, was one of the first to bring cattle overland from New South Wales, had ample experience as a bushman, and was intrepid and tenacious to a fault. After a farewell banquet at Government House, he started, accompanied by a gay and gallant cavalcade for some miles, on June 18th 184o, carrying with him a silken Union Jack —presented by the ladies of Adelaide —which it was his ambition to unfurl in the centre of the continent. None of the party imagined that twenty years would elapse before that point was reached.

When Captain Flinders in 1802 urged the boat of the "Investigator" up the creek at the head of Spencer’s Gulf till its oars touched either bank, his naturalist, Robert Brown, climbed the mountain that bears his name, and they both saw a mountain still farther north which they named Mount Arden. This was Mr. Eyre’s first objective point. His party consisted of six white men and two black boys; they had with them thirteen horses, forty sheep, and provisions for three months, and it was arranged for a further supply to be sent to the head of Spencer’s Gulf. During the previous year he had penetrated as far as the basin of Lake Torrens, his farthest point being by the governor named Mount Eyre. The prospect thence was dreary and repulsive. The wide and glistening expanse of the lake was a barrier to the westward, but he derived encouragement from the continuance in undiminished elevation of the Flinders Range as far as the eye could reach, and hoped he might find water and feed for his horses along its slopes. All the way to the he-ad of the gulf he was delighted with the country through which he passed. After fourteen days’ travelling, he reached the neighbourhood of Mount Arden, where he formed a depot to serve as a base of operations, but from that time his difficulties began. He found the basin of Lake Torrens utterly destitute of both water and grass. The lake itself was a tantalising delusion; it appeared to be about twenty-five miles across, and to be wider to the northward. Its surface consisted of a crust of salt about an eighth of an inch thick, below which was soft mud. Every attempt to reach the water’s edge —if there were water —was baffled. At one point he struggled onward for six miles till the horses sunk to the saddle-girths in the slime. The mirage was a constant deception —mountains, hundreds of feet in altitude, diminished to hillocks on close inspection, and huge rocks to mere clods lying on the saline surface. Every attempt to proceed northward by keeping to the ranges was defeated. A chain of immense salt lakes, which were supposed, though erroneously, to be connected, seemed to stretch from the west to the east in the form of an immense horseshoe, and after months of severe struggling, he was forced to abandon his cherished purpose. Beaten, but not yet finally repulsed, he determined to try the western route, and made his way to Port Lincoln for a fresh start. After enduring great hardships, he at length reached Fowler’s Bay, a little cutter named the "Hero" acting as a kind of tender to the party. Thence, despite the most pressing solicitations to return, he set himself, with one white companion and three natives, to the accomplishment of his terrible task. Eight hundred miles of desert lay before him, but it would have broken his heart to turn back. His black companions ‘proved treacherous, and two of them, being probably caught pilfering the stores, shot the overseer in the night, and decamped with nearly all the provisions. Mr. Eyre was a short distance away watching the horses, but bearing the report of the gun, hastened to the camp to find his solitary white comrade weltering in blood and breathing his last. The horror of the situation is difficult to realise. There were still six hundred miles of unknown and presumably desert country between him and his goal. Only about forty pounds of flour, four gallons of water and a little tea and sugar were left, and he was practically alone; yet still his stout heart upheld him, and he would not —could not —retreat. The country was one sheet of rock, and the dead had to be left unburied, so when morning came Eyre and his black boy hurried away. Hemmed in between impassable scrub on one side and the sea on the other, he slowly struggled on. Living on dried horseflesh, eaten raw, and covering stretches of barren country as much as one hundred and fifty miles in length, without water, his only companion a selfish and untrustworthy aboriginal, his case was desperate indeed. When almost at the last gasp, he was relieved by a French whaling barque, commanded by Captain Rossiter, and finally reached Albany after such a twelve months’ experience as few mortals have ever known. By his fifteen hundred miles of travel along the coastline, he had proved that it was unbroken by any watercourse leading into the interior, and that there was no practicable route for land traffic between the western colonies.

EYRE’S failure to reach the centre could not be accepted as final, and three years afterwards Captain Sturt was despatched by the Imperial Government on a similar quest. He was as familiar with the river systems as any man, and hoped by following the Murray and Darling till he reached a northerly latitude, to outflank the obstacles that had proved insurmountable when attacked in front. To a certain extent, the expectation was fulfilled, but other and equal difficulties were encountered. Leaving the Darling at Lake Cowandilla, Sturt worked his way in a north-westerly direction to the Barrier Ranges. At a place still farther north, which he called Rocky Glen, he formed a depot, and was literally unable to move from it for six months. It was a kind of oasis whence advance and retreat were alike impossible until the season changed. Trial trips in every direction revealed the fact -that his party was locked up in a desolate and heated desert as effectually as if they had wintered in the midst of Arctic snows. The heat was intolerable, causing the ink to dry on the pen, and the fingernails to break like glass. Scurvy and mental depression seized the officers, and one of them died. The men’s hair and the wool of the sheep ceased to grow. The provisions were reduced in weight, and packages almost fell to pieces. Despite all this, a bold push was made by a lightly equipped party for the centre of the continent. Toiling through a desert of reddish-brown sand where nothing else was visible right away to the horizon, they came on a kind of sandy ocean with billows fifty to sixty feet high in distressing monotony. Next, Sturt’s Stony Desert, without a blade of vegetation, herb, or shrub, stretched in hideous vastness before them. Thirty miles farther they reached an immense plain of clay, with gaping fissures rent by solar heat, which made travelling both difficult and dangerous; but there was neither grass nor water. Then more ridges of sand stretching for scores of miles were encountered. A watercourse which they named Eyre’s Creek at length gladdened their eyes, but it soon died out; and when four hundred miles from the depot they were compelled to retrace their steps, though within one hundred and fifty miles of their goal. After a short rest at the depot Sturt again started with two men and discovered Cooper’s Creek with its splendid pastoral country; but two hundred miles farther on was again face to face with the horrors of the stony desert. There was no alternative now but death or a final retreat, for another summer was approaching. Their horses were exhausted; they were themselves crippled by scurvy and harassing toil, distressed by hot winds and drifting sand only by the greatest exertion and self-denial did any of them return alive. They reached Adelaide in a wretched condition after nineteen months’ absence, during a great part of which they had been mourned as dead. It is worth noting that the major portion of the country of which Sturt drew so horrible a picture is now occupied by squatters, and along a section of his route there have lately been inundations covering thousands of square miles. This is by no means the only instance in which the reports of explorers have to be modified by taking into account the variations of climate and of season.

THE draughtsman of Captain Sturt’s party was John M’Douall Stuart, whose services were frequently referred to in highly appreciative terms by his leader. Undeterred by the desolation witnessed while on Sturt’s expedition, but profiting by its warnings, he made repeated examinations of the country in the vicinity of Lake Torrens searching for pastoral areas, in which he was highly successful. Messrs. Chambers and Finke supplied the means for these journeys in the course of which Stuart made the important discovery that the vast shallow depression that had baffled Mr. Eyre is not the continuous salt marsh it was by him supposed to be. Between the northern limit of Lake Torrens and the southern extremity of Lake Eyre he found a succession of artesian springs, the deposit from which formed mounds rising considerably above the level of the surrounding country. These and other permanent waters enabled him to fix a new base for northern exploration, and suggest a more practicable route. Being suitably equipped by the public spirit of his employers, he led a strong party in that direction. On April 14th, 186o, he sighted what he called a most remarkable hill —like a locomotive with a funnel. The latter proved to be a monolith of sandstone, quite perpendicular, one hundred and fifty feet high from the base, twenty feet wide, and ten feet deep. In honour of one of his patrons, he named it Chambers’ Pillar. Less than three weeks afterwards he found by his observations that he was camped in the centre of the continent, and on the highest point in the vicinity, which he named Central Mount Stuart, he proudly unfurled the British flag. From this point he pressed on northward, continuing the plan of making short lateral trips east and west, so as to discover the most practicable route, till by the hostility of savage blacks, scarcity of provisions, and the weakness of his party, he was compelled to return.

The chief difficulty, however, had now been conquered. Mr. Stuart’s report being so encouraging, the parliament voted a sum of two thousand five hundred pounds, and with twelve men and forty-nine horses, he left Chambers’ Creek station in the far north on New Year’s Day, 1861. This time it was not the attacks of natives, but impenetrable scrub and the want of water that drove him back after reaching to within four degrees of the northern coast. Still trusted and still undismayed, he was again sent out within a month of his arrival at Adelaide. The Victorian expedition under Burke and Wills had already left Melbourne. It was a race between the colonies, and between Burke and Stuart, which should first cross the continent. The latter was so confident and undaunted that he promised the governor he would wash his feet in the Indian Ocean before his return. The Victorian party had the start in point of time, and the shortest distance to travel, its objective being the Gulf of Carpentaria; but the story of its brilliant success and terrible disaster has already been told. Stuart, taking advantage of his previously gained knowledge, and avoiding the line of country he had found impracticable on former journeys, reached without serious hindrance the fertile and well-watered regions within the influence of tropic rains. He pronounced an immense extent of country he traversed the finest he had ever seen. At length he heard the wash of the waves, but kept the knowledge to himself till, penetrating through scrub matted with vines, the party was startled by a shout of "the sea!" from F. W. Thring, the third officer, who had ridden a little in advance.

Thus the feat was accomplished. A record was cut deeply into a large tree, which still stands to bear its witness, and to another the Union Jack was securely nailed. Liberal grants were made to the members of the successful party, who received a perfect ovation on their return to Adelaide, their passage along the streets of the city resembling a royal progress. Mr. Stuart received a grant of a thousand square miles of grazing country, and in all three thousand pounds in cash. He did not long enjoy his honours and rewards. Disabled, half-blind, and nearly dead at times, he had struggled on while there was work to do, but the privations, borne with indomitable courage, told upon him when the conflict was over, and he died in less than seven years. Other explorers may have equalled him in personal qualities, but few have returned to the attack with more persistency, and the labours of none have been crowned with such signal success. By his means, territory was opened for pastoral occupation large enough to make half a dozen European kingdoms. The Imperial Government rewarded South Australian enterprise by annexing the Northern Territory to the colony, thus enlarging it by five hundred and twenty-three thousand six hundred and twenty square miles. A route was discovered, along which the construction of a telegraph line was rendered possible; the stations on which have formed starting-points for further exploration; and the whistle of the locomotive is now heard far away beyond the point whence Eyre returned in hopeless despair.

WHILE Stuart was out on his fifth journey the tidings came of disaster to the expedition under Burke and Wills. Victoria, Queensland, and South Australia sprang to the rescue. John McKinlay, a practised explorer who knew the northern districts well, having occupied country near Lake Torrens, was in Melbourne. A telegram from Adelaide requested him to lead a relief party into the interior, and such was his promptitude that in three weeks he was on his way. On reaching Cooper’s Creek, he found the grave of Gray, and shortly afterwards learned the fate of Burke and Wills, although the sole survivor, King, had been a month before rescued by E. J. Welch of the Alfred Howitt Relief Expedition, which left Melbourne the same year McKinlay had set out from Adelaide. Leaving Cooper’s Creek, the latter then, according to his instructions, explored the country to the northwest towards Central. Mount Stuart, and running short of provisions made his way towards the Gulf of Carpentaria, which he reached by following the course of the river Leichhardt. Here he hoped to have met the Burke relief vessel "Victoria," but was disappointed; to save his party from perishing, he turned eastward through Queensland, seeking for a cattle-station. The travelling was excessively difficult, but eventually Port Denison was reached, and thence Melbourne, thirteen months after leaving Adelaide. The hardships endured were incredible. The fierce heat prostrated the men, and even the bullocks were sun-struck. Drought at one time and floods at another involved imminent peril. Sun-dried horse and camel flesh became the staple, if not the only food. In spite of all, McKinlay won the honour of being the first man to cross the continent from one sea-beach to another, and what is more remarkable, at the first attempt.

Three years afterwards, the settlement at the Northern Territory being in danger of total collapse, he was sent to explore in that region. It was one of the wettest seasons ever known. Land travelling became impossible, and while on the banks of the river Alligator the floods so environed the party that there seemed no hope of escape from a lingering death by starvation. It was extricated by an exploit that shows the kind of stuff explorers ought to be made of. Most of the horses had been killed for food, and McKinlay slaughtered the rest and stretched their hides over a rude framework of saplings to make a kind of punt, victualled the strange craft with their flesh, and voyaged in it for several days down the river and across Van Diemen Gulf to Adam Bay. Both alligators and sharks were attracted by the smell of the fresh skins, and the waves nearly swamped the frail bark again and again, but after several days of terrible toil and danger the party safely arrived at Escape Cliff at the entrance of Beatrice Bay.

In person, McKinlay was one of the finest of South Australian explorers. He stood six feet three and a half inches high, upright as a poplar, and with a presence both commanding and majestic. In disposition he was mild and gentle, yet firm and resolute combining caution with intrepidity. His fellow-townsmen of Gawler, where he resided during the later years of his life, were peculiarly fond and proud of him. After his death they erected a monument to his memory, consisting of an obelisk of polished Aberdeen granite resting on freestone arches, over the footpath of their principal street. Its foundation-stone was appropriately laid by another distinguished explorer —John Forrest, of Western Australia —and on the face that overlooks an old and unused cemetery there is an inscription which, after recording his deeds, concludes with the following descriptive lines

Brave, yet gentle; resolute, yet unassuming;
Formed to command, yet stern to none;
Who knew to obey.
He was at once admired and loved.
To his country he has bequeathed a name
Which she may proudly add to the bead-roll
Of her distinguished men." .

cont...