HISTORICAL SKETCH OF QUEENSLAND

Atlas Page 55
By W. H. Traill

INTERIOR EXPLORATION

ALLAN CUNNINGHAM —by profession a botanist, and by experience and natural aptitude an explorer, who had accompanied Oxley on hi expeditions to the heads of the Lachlan and to the upper reaches of the Brisbane, and who had sailed around Australia with Lieutenant P. P. King —had been charged by General Darling, who in the meantime had succeeded Brisbane as governor, to explore the still untravelled tract which, on the western side of the great range, intervened between the heads of the Hunter River and Moreton Bay. With six "servants" and eleven horses, Cunningham, on April 30th, 1827, started from a station on the Upper Hunter, crossed the Dividing Range so a to be clear of it at the outset, and, turning northward, skirted the Liverpool Plains. In latitude thirty-one degrees two minutes he, crossed the track left by Oxley on his return journey from the interior to Port Macquarie in 1818, and still northward, passed the Valley of the Gwydir, discovered rid named the Dumaresq River, and, struggling through a tract of dismally inferior country, emerged at last, on June 5th, upon an expanse of open downs which stretched beyond the range of vision, and on which he found, although the season was the depth of Australian winter, "grasses and herbage exhibiting an extraordinary luxuriance of growth." The soil was rich a black. There was abundant and convenient water. This was the grandest discovery yet made in interior Australia. Cunningham experienced in both coastal and inland exploration, appreciated the importance of his treasure-trove. He bestowed upon this lovely and fecund champaign the governor’s name, and different portions of what, as the Darling Downs, were thenceforward for half a century to be celebrated as the most wealth-yielding tract in Australia, he named Peel’s Plains and Downs, thus commemorating in the antipodes the most distinguished British statesmen of his day.

To the eastward, the stretch of open country terminated in a swelling range of mountains. Establishing his camp in a valley at their base, Cunningham explored their ridge with a view to ascertaining whether a passage could be, effected over them to the shores of Moreton. Ray. Having been so fortunate as to distinguish remarkably excavated part which seemed to offer a practicable in the desired direction, Cunningham retraced his steps, after some difficulties attendant upon a deviation which brought into an exceedingly difficult and mountainous region —probably at the head of the Richmond River —returned without mishap to his point of departure.

Governor Darling himself, in the same year, 1827, visited Moreton Bay, and was unfavourably impressed with the situation of the station on the Brisbane River. The winding course of the stream as it approaches Brisbane renders navigation by sailing vessels very exasperating, as a breeze which is fair in one reach is foul in another, one double bend just below the town still commemorating in its name of Humbug Reach the irritation of early voyagers. Sir Charles. Darling appears to have resented some such protraction of his progress, for in a despatch to Lord Goderich he suggests the abandonment of the station, "the tediousness and difficulty of the approach rendering it extremely inconvenient." He suggested Dunwich, a knoll on the bay shore of Moreton Island, as preferable, with Stradbroke Island as a station for the first reception of prisoners. In a later despatch he states that at Brisbane the water is bad and sickness common, and mentions that good sites for farms existed six miles lower down —probably the tract subsequently and still known as Eagle Farm. Meanwhile, he decided upon sending to Moreton Bay, to enjoy the benefits of its bad water and its sickness, the prisoners remaining at Port Macquarie, whence "the worst" had previously been drafted to the same favoured and attractive spot.

In the following year Cunningham proceeded to Moreton Bay, and on his arrival Logan, with characteristic activity and promptitude, immediately organised ail expedition in which he and Cunningham attempted, by following tip the recently discovered Logan River to its sources in the mountains, to penetrate to the delightful region which lay beyond. But at this point the ranges were unassailable; they here present a bewildering complication of scarped precipices and intricate scrub, over which Mounts Barney and Lindsay rear their stupendous crests. The explorers had to retrace their steps. But two score of years later, the stockman, seeking outlying mobs of cattle among these still lonely and always awful ravines, found with astonishment, on patches of alluvial flats along the course of the mountain brooks, English peach trees, degenerated by lack of culture, indeed, but yet bearing fruit in their season —tokens, did he but know it of Allan Cunningham’s visit, for that explorer carried with him a bag of peach stones, one of which he popped into the ground wherever he halted, though but for a moment.

Cunningham, on regaining the settlement, did not long dally. Very shortly he was in motion again, this time without Logan’s company. He made his fresh start from Limestone, as Ipswich, was, then called, and directed his course up the valley of the Bremer and the tributary streams which flowed into it from the range he sought to surmount. His perseverance met with reward. He discovered a spur and a gorge which afforded access to the summit of the range with a facility which astonished him. Without difficulty he reached his old camp, thus establishing a connection between his route from the Hunter and the Moreton Bay settlement. A remarkable depression in the mountains, which is visible from the Observatory Hill in Brisbane, still bears the name of Cunningham’s Gap. But the adventurers who supposed themselves to have followed the route defined by Cunningham complained that the facilities of ascent he reported were far from being realised by them. Mr. Warner, one of the three surveyors who, so ten years later, were appointed to properly define and chart the district, and who is still a resident of Brisbane, has doubts whether the precise line of Cunningham’s route has ever been identified. It is at least certain that several accesses by which the range can be scaled, and which have in later years been chiefly used, are situated about fifty miles north of the gap discovered by Cunningham.

Ten years were yet to elapse before the Moreton Bay settlement was to be relieved from the incubus of a penal establishment; but these explorations of Cunningham had, by establishing a connection between the convict station at Brisbane, the pastoral lands of the Darling Downs, and the free pastoral settlements of the south, precipitated the hour of deliverance.

In 1829 the indefatigable Cunningham, after a visit to Sydney, again voyaged to Moreton Bay, and devoted six weeks to an exploration of the sources of the Brisbane River. Oxley had conjectured that its volume of water was derived from those swamps in which he had lost the channel of the Macquarie in 1818. Cunningham’s researches now proved the fallacy of this supposition. He traced the Brisbane to its headwaters among the eastern slopes and spurs of the main range. This was Cunningham’s final service to the exploration of the future colony. Henceforth his name ceases to appear on its records; and in the next year the exertions of the energetic Logan were terminated by a terrible event. He had pushed out with a small party consisting principally of "prisoners," on one of his frequent exploratory expeditions. His companions returned to the settlement with a story of his having left the camp alone and failed to return. Captain Clunie, the officer left in charge of the establishment, despatched a search party, who on the fifth day discovered the dead body of Logan pierced with a spear, and bearing marks of having been beaten with "waddies," as the clubs of the aborigines are termed. No question was raised at the time as to the genuineness of those appearances. To the blacks was attributed the guilt of the murder, but in later years what may at first have been the secret of criminals sworn to secrecy on pain of certain death at the hands of their associates spread into a common rumour and it is now an accepted tradition that Logan fell a victim to the desperate vengeance of his convict followers —representatives of the fury and rancour of a thousand wretched men whose lives ad been rendered a bitterness and a burden by a system of brutal terrorism which no degradation or criminality could justify one human being inflicting upon his fellow-men. More than fifteen years elapsed before the Colonial Office granted Logan’s widow a pension of seventy pounds a year in recognition of her husband’s services and fate.

BACKHOUSE AND WALKER’S VISIT.

THE charge of the settlement now devolved upon Captain Clunie, of the 17th Regiment, respecting whose period of control few records have been preserved. Under Logan’s direction some experiments had been tried and progress made in the cultivation of cotton, a Mr. Walkinshaw having in 1828 informed the Colonial Office that a bag of cotton wool sent to him from Moreton Bay was excellent. Tobacco and sugar-cane seem to have been, at any rate, thought of. A Lieutenant Breton, R.N., paid a visit to Moreton Bay during Captain Clunie’s term of office, and quotes a letter from the latter to the effect that "on the forest land near the settlement nothing but cotton succeeds, as the soil is very poor; but higher up, where our flocks are, and where we burn lime, there are thousands of acres of rich land almost without trees." Governor Sir Richard Bourke had, however, adopted Sir Charles Darling’s prejudices with respect to the place, and prepared gradually for its abandonment. In 1833 the population had risen to one thousand one hundred and twenty-eight bond males and thirty-eight free; thirty bond females, and thirteen free. Four years later the number of prisoners had been reduced to three hundred.

In 1836 two notable visitors arrived by permission at Moreton Bay. These were James Backhouse and George Washington Walker, two benevolent and adventurous Quakers, who had quitted their homes in England to spend seven years in wanderings through the penal settlements of the antipodes, seeking everywhere opportunities of alleviating the sufferings of the prisoners by gospel exhortations. Backhouse published on his return to England an account of his experiences, physical and spiritual. Where the grounds of government house and the beautiful botanical gardens of Brisbane now extend, he found a cultivated area of twenty-two acres where sweet potatoes, cabbages, and other vegetables were grown for the prisoners, and where bananas, grapes, guavas, pine-apples, and shaddocks throve luxuriantly. Sugar cane was grown in lieu of hedges, and young coffee plants, not yet of bearing age, gave promise for the future. Backhouse and his companion were unquestionably tender hearted, devoted, and self-sacrificing men; yet the callousness with which Backhouse records his impressions of the most atrocious systematic severities is absolutely shocking at the present day. For the immortal souls of the wretched sufferers he is always concerned; the subject of their future state never fails to affect him to moving language but their temporal miseries and the degradation in which he saw them plunged appear not to have touched his compassion. He records systems of perpetual flagellations, oft repeated, for even trifling breaches of discipline, with cool nonchalance. Without comment, he narrates that at Brisbane town, on occasions of special punishment, the treadmill, which stood somewhere near the present observatory, and which was ordinarily moved by twenty-five prisoners, was worked by only sixteen, who were kept on it for fourteen hours with such intermissions only as were afforded by the alternate removal of four. The "relief" thus conferred speaks eloquently of a system of tantalising torture. The rest conceded to the four men aggravated the sufferings of the remainder, twelve having to move the machine constructed for the punishment of double that number. Respecting this, Backhouse merely observes that the prisoners "feel it extremely irksome at first," but that "long practice" enables them, after working upon it a considerable number of days, "to bear the treadmill with comparatively little disgust." In a similar spirit, the worthy Quaker mentions that he saw forty women labouring in the field at Eagle Farm, some of them in irons, and among them a few who were very young. He was struck with an apparent insensibility among these degraded beings. But the depths of his nature were at length roused by one terrific revelation of iniquity-he heard an officer swearing at his gang. The constant floggings, the treadmill torture, the chained women toiling in the plantations, had failed to evoke from the good man a single expression .of pity or indignation; but the sound of an oath shocked him exceedingly, and he condemned it alone, among all the horrors he ad witnessed, as "hardening!"

If the tender mercies of the good —for Backhouse was undeniably a worthy and benevolent man —were thus limited, the imagination stands aghast at the conception of what must have been the insensibility of the worldly. The traditions of official callousness and ferocity which have bean handed down from the past to the present generation appear, thus regarded, no longer to transcend belief. It has to be considered that Backhouse and Logan belonged to a period which had opened in world wide bloodshed and universal war. Their entire generation had been brutalised. Logan had witnessed the savageries of the Peninsula war; Backhouse had been bred in England at a time when men were hanged in batches, and when the penalty of death was attached in a bloody statute book to no less than two hundred and twenty-three offences. In reviewing the frightful scene presented by the first Queensland settlement in its earliest stages, the feeling heart is enabled to accept such relief as may be extracted from the reflection that if the tyrants were, as a consequence of their education, merciless in infliction the victims were proportionately callous in endurance.

Happily, the end of this was not far off. Major Cotton succeeded to the dwindling establishment in 1837, and was followed by Lieutenant Gravatt. Of these officers there is nothing to be said. Lieutenant Gorman was the last commandant at Moreton Bay. He arrived in 1839, and was entrusted with the duty of clearing away the last relics of the penal establishment. Hitherto the settlement had been secluded from all observation. It had been a punishable offence for a free man to approach within fifty miles of any of the convict stations now the rule was relaxed. Surveyors were brought in, and the light of day began to glimmer upon transactions and individuals. One of the first results was that in 1842 Governor Sir George Gipps, in a despatch which he transmitted to the Home Office, commented on the immorality, not of the few remaining bondsmen, but of Commandant Lieutenant Gorman

MISSIONARY SETTLEMENT.

THE settlement was now in a transition state. The prohibition against the approach of free colonists was still unrevoked, but apparently its stringency was relaxed in practice. In 1841 the population had been reduced to exactly two hundred souls, but of these sixty-seven were free. In this census must have been included a remarkable little colony which had been permitted, with a very bad grace, to establish itself seven miles from the penal depot as a Christian mission for the enlightenment of the aborigines. The party was exclusively German, and had received its impulse from the Rev. John Dunmore Lang, D.D., a militant clergyman in Sydney of the Presbyterian Church, whose name thenceforth was inseparably connected with the progress of the nascent colony. Two regular ministers —the Rev. C. W. Schmidt, of the Universities of Halle and Berlin, and the Rev. C. Eipper —headed the mission. Mrs. Schmidt and Mrs. Eipper accompanied their husbands, and the rest of the party was composed of peasants and tradesmen with their families. The mission was from first to last a miserable failure. The pittance allowed by the Colonial Office for their support was utterly inadequate —twelve hundred and ninety-eight pounds sterling in four years for the maintenance of nineteen adults and eleven children-and their presence was resented by the commandant as intrusive and inconveniently near. On the other hand, not only was the expectation of evangelising the aborigines disappointed, but the missionaries had some trouble in preserving their lives from the attacks of their intended converts. Their attempts at clearing and cultivation were rendered perilous by the liability of the workers to be surprised by skulking savages. On one occasion the missionaries found themselves obliged to have recourse to the arms of the flesh, and their muskets inflicted wounds on two of a mob of blacks who were plundering their homestead. Government aid was, in the year following this episode, totally withdrawn, and the mission rapidly, and perhaps of necessity, assumed the character of a secular settlement. German Station is now an outlying suburb of Brisbane; some of the mission buildings still remain, and descendants of the original party are numerous among the citizens.

Contemporaneously with the arrival of the Germans, a Church of England clergyman, the Rev. Mr. Handt, arrived, and attempted a similar mission, with like fruitlessness. It is not unworthy of remark as indicating the direction in which at that period evangelical charity naturally gravitated that, while these efforts were being made to Christianise the aboriginal savages, there was not, nor had ever been, any clergyman ministering to the unhappy prisoners at the depot.

PATRICK LESLIE.

BUT the day of complete deliverance from the gloomy influences of criminal discipline and of criminal neglect was now close at hand. Already in 1840 Cunningham’s discoveries had begun to be turned to advantage. In that year the brothers Leslie pushed their stock from the south in search of "fresh fields and pastures new." Their leading idea was to reach the watershed of the Clarence River; but Mr. Patrick Leslie, with a companion Dr. Dobie, attended by two "servants," were completely baulked in an attempt to find a passage through the range separating the New England from the Clarence waters. Allan Cunningham and Patrick Leslie were old friends, and the former had, in Sydney, given the latter full particulars respecting his exploration, of the Darling Downs thirteen years before. Leslie, therefore, finding himself foiled in his endeavour to reach the Clarence River country, took the resolution of striking out for the Darling Downs. At that time the northernmost outposts of pastoral settlement in Australia were Gordon and Bennett’s station on the Severn River and George Wyndham’s station in the western part of the northern tract of New England. From the former of these Patrick Leslie took his departure on March 10th, 1840, attended by only one man, his assigned servant, Peter Murphy, alias Duff, a "lifer," whom he speaks of as "about the best plucked fellow I ever came across in my life, and as good a servant as man ever had." On March 20th the pioneers, having passed over the ridge separating Pike’s Creek from Sandy Creek, followed down the latter, and came in view of the lovely downs country about four miles above the present site of Toolburra Head Station. Two days were devoted to exploration of the country, and then Leslie and his follower made back for New England, arriving at Bannockburn Station on April 1st. Little time was lost in turning the investigation just accomplished to practical account. Walter Leslie was at hand with the stock etc., belonging to the brothers. Dr. Dobie persisted in trying for the Clarence, but the Leslies on April 14th struck out from their camp on Falconer’s Plains, and on June 4th the Condamine River was reached, and after a little time devoted to looking around for the best place, the drays being meanwhile drawn up on a knoll near the river, that knoll was chosen for the headquarters of the first station on the famed Darling Downs, and is now crowned by the buildings of Toolburra. The Leslies’ stock consisted of five thousand seven hundred sheep, two teams of working bullocks with drays, two horses and a dray, and ten saddle horses. They had twenty-two men, all ticket-of-leave men or assigned convicts, whom Mr. Leslie has referred to as being as good and game a lot of men as ever existed; who never occasioned us a moment’s trouble. Worth any forty men I have ever seen since."

Within three months other squatters followed the Leslies. Those portions of the Darling Downs where water is plentiful were quickly appropriated; other portions of the same rich district were occupied, and, on water failing, abandoned by pioneers who judged themselves wise —to their subsequent sorrow and repentance —to descend the range and possess themselves of the forest country on the banks of the upper Brisbane River, its affluents, and the head-waters of other streams flowing towards Moreton Bay. In 1842 Sir George Gipps reported the existence, within fifty miles of Brisbane, of forty-five squatting stations. This seems to have been a loose statement, as in 1844 official returns gave but seventeen squatting stations in the Moreton Bay district, with twenty-six on the Darling Downs. At the earlier date the export of wool was eighteen hundred bales. The later returns afford a statement of the population and stock of the two districts-the free settlers numbered four hundred and seventy-one; horses, six hundred and sixty; cattle, thirteen thousand two hundred and ninety-five; sheep, one hundred and eighty-four thousand six hundred and fifty-one.

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