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CHAPTER 1
In the Blood
It lies beyond the farming belt Wide wastes of scrub and plain A blazing desert in the drought A lake-land after rain; To the sky-line sweeps the waving grass, Or whirls the scorching sand — A phantom land, a mystic land! The Never-Never Land.
— Henry Lawson, The Never-Never Country
Most Australians are accustomed to believing there is little worthy of note in their brief 220-year history. Against the great currents of world events, the clash of cultures and the rise of empires, Australia's slightly embarrassing origins as a British penal colony seem insignificant. Yet scratch the dusty surface and there are remarkable stories to be found, rich nuggets of human drama so peculiar they scarcely seem credible.
It was a down-on-his-luck American who first noticed the unexpected exuberance of Australian history. Mark Twain, broke and forced to make a lecture tour to restore his finances, travelled widely in Australia in 1895 and later wrote that Australia's history:
... is so curious and strange that it is itself the chiefest novelty the country has to offer ... It does not read like history, but like the most beautiful lies; and all of a fresh new sort, no mouldy old ones.
It is full of surprises and adventures, and incongruities, and contradictions and incredibilities; but they are all true, they all happened.
One of the events that got Twain thinking about the odd place he had landed in was the annual gathering in Adelaide celebrating the beginnings of the colony of South Australia. Held in high antipodean summer in the sleepy days between Christmas and New Year, most invitees found it a bit of a chore. Nevertheless, they abandoned the leftover plum cake and headed long distances to the capital for a formal luncheon with the mayor and governor. Among those pioneers present on December 28, 1895, was a sheep farmer, Harry Wilkins, rising sixty years with the wind-battered face and dark tanned hands of a man who had spent his life outdoors. His journey had taken a full day by horse and rail through the barren plains of scrub and red dirt that threatened to overrun the modest hills guarding the colony's only city. Usually he made the effort because he ranked as an honoured guest. By some accounts, Harry was the first-born son of South Australia.
Twain found the luncheon "a stirring spectacle; stirring in more ways than one for it was amazingly funny, and at the same time deeply pathetic; for they had seen so much, those time-worn veterans and had suffered so much and had built so strongly and well."
It's likely Twain spoke with Harry Wilkins that day, and heard him tell in measured tones a story or two about the early days of the colony. We don't know if he met the youngest of Harry's thirteen children, seven-year-old George Hubert, who'd come along for what was quite likely his first trip to the city. But we can be sure that George remained proud of his father's unique place in the history of the State, because for the rest of his life he kept the faded newspaper clipping that reported the luncheon and Twain's wry observations of it.
* * *
From its inception South Australia was to be a model colony and, for a British possession, one conceived with unusually noble aims. On a crushingly hot summer's day in 1836, on the shores of the Southern Ocean, the new governor, Captain John Hindmarsh, read the proclamation establishing the Province of South Australia.
There were barely 200 settlers gathered there under the shade of strange trees amid the shrill calls of outlandish birds, standing on the edge of a distant world with little more than hope to guide them. As Governor Hindmarsh moved among the assembly, he would have spared a private word with William Wilkins and his heavily pregnant wife, Mary. The couple and their two boys had arrived some weeks earlier aboard the little brig Emma, one of the nine ships that had sailed from England that year as part of a grand experiment in social engineering. The professions of their carefully selected fellow passengers reflected the needs of the new settlement: carpenter, wheelwright, labourer, bricklayer, boat-builder, accountant.
Mary Wilkins had staggered ashore after five months and eleven days at sea, weakened by her confinement, the poor food and unspeakable discomforts of the fearsome crossing. She was from a farming family in Somerset, while William had come from a line of London innkeepers descended from Huguenot refugees. Like most of the settlers, William and Mary were "respectable paupers" who, with youth and suitable references, could secure free passage on the lower decks. Their purpose was to help populate the settlement and Harry Wilkins, born just three days after the proclamation ceremony, seems likely to have been the first surviving settler child; in any case, that was the family legend. Beyond this, little is known of the couple's origins, as their papers were lost in a fire that swept through the settler tents soon after they came ashore.
The Wilkins family arrived with a one-way passage and were now cast adrift, no past to return to and only the slightest hold on the vast forbidding land about them. Together with the other settlers, whose average age was just nineteen, they would build a new nation or perish trying.
The Act of the British Parliament establishing South Australia is a curious document, equal parts business plan and colonial adventure. The colony was planned as a profit-making venture that might become a beacon for similar enterprises throughout the Empire. It was the only Australian colony created by parliamentary law, and optimistically included a requirement that it be developed at no cost to the "Mother Country." The Act established an emigration fund (to be repaid from future earnings) to assist wives and children to travel with their husbands, and, most unusually, it forbade convict transportation. Britain, with its crowded cities and impoverished countryside, was in social tumult and had little interest in Australia apart from its convenience as a repository for the surplus inmates of jails and rotting prison hulks. It was nearly fifty years since the first convicts had been transported to Botany Bay, and the sum of British settlement since then comprised little more than a handful of penal colonies on the coast and some miserable prison islands.
The colony of South Australia was therefore something quite different both in origin and intent. It began as an entrepreneurial initiative based on the untried principles of Edward Gibbon Wakefield, surely the most colourful rogue ever to call himself an economist.
Wakefield was better known to the British public as a mesmerising cad who had abducted a girl of means for the purposes of securing her family's wealth and political connections.
Wakefield found his victim at Mrs. Daulby's Seminary for the Daughters of Gentlefolk near Liverpool. Ellen Turner was an attractive fifteen-year-old, the daughter of a Cheshire banker and mill owner, and Wakefield devised a complicated stratagem to trick her into eloping with him. Chased around the country and across the Channel by Ellen's vengeful father and uncles, the couple was eventually apprehended on the pier at Calais and the marriage annulled by a special Act of parliament. Wakefield stood trial for felonious abduction and unlawful marriage. As described at the time in the remarkable account of notorious crimes, the Newgate Calendar or Malefactor's Bloody Register,4 the trial was a sensation attended daily by fainting ladies and a series of outlandish witnesses.
Wakefield was sentenced to three years' imprisonment at Newgate Gaol, on the site of what is today London's Central Criminal Court. There, surrounded by convicts bound for Botany Bay, he had ample opportunity to consider the ills of penal settlement. Wakefield wrote a series of fictitious letters, as if sent from the evil colony of Sydney, and devised a radical social experiment which he outlined in A Proposed National Society, for the Cure and Prevention of Pauperism, by Means of Systematic Colonisation. In short it was a plan to select the most capable of the poor, sell them cheap land in the new colony and build a model society. "The object," he wrote, "is not to place a scattered and half-barbarous colony on the coast of New Holland, but to establish a wealthy civilised society."
Thus, in a peculiar mixture of philanthropy, scandal and commerce, the Colonisation Commission for South Australia was born. Its chairman was the brilliant economist Robert Torrens, whose interest in colonies went well beyond the theoretical. He believed the commission could build on Wakefield's theories, and proclaimed that South Australia would become the greatest rice and wool growing country of the world, and that its favourable climate could produce opium for the China trade. The opium was never tried, the rice failed, but the wool eventually did quite well.
Torrens hyped the project like a burlesque barker, extolling the advantages of the far colony that he had never seen. Beyond a few cautious forays inland, the immense interior of Australia was virtually unknown to all but its native inhabitants, who were themselves equally mysterious to the early European visitors. Yet in that first year of 1836 some 546 emigrants rolled the dice on a new life, driven not by religious persecution or corrupt courts, but the simple desire to escape poverty — Australia's first economic refugees. Aboard frail ships like the little schooner John Pirie, which weighed barely 100 tons, they made the dreadful passage. Prey to pirates and often wracked by disease, these ships were undertaking the longest sea journey on Earth.
William and Mary Wilkins were taken by the ideas of the philandering Wakefield and the promised paradise of Torrens. But they would be soon disabused of any thoughts of a comfortable crossing from their old world to the new. Early accounts of the ship journey describe the suffocating heat below decks, vile food, stagnant drinking water and frequent storms from which even hardened sailors suffered.
At journey's end they found Port Misery, presumably named after the bleak tidal mudflats and mangrove swamps they had to wade through to reach dry land. Eventually it would become the port of Adelaide, named after the consort of King William IV To the 300 native Kaurna people, the area where Adelaide stands was called Tandanya, which means "the place of the red kangaroo." Their reward for peacefully welcoming the Europeans was complete subjugation followed by a devastating outbreak of smallpox. That William and Mary Wilkins, their two boys and unborn son all survived the journey and the first year seems, in retrospect, almost miraculous.
William Wilkins must have saved what money he arrived with from the early fire as he soon established the first hotel in the colony — a profitable business in a town that would grow to a city of more than 15,000 in just five years. He was twenty-nine and not about to waste the time he had left. A second hotel followed, and another, and at his own expense he built a slaughter yard and a bridge across the Torrens River. There were prosperous years but the impoverished administration never made good its promise to repay him for his building work, which caused William financial difficulties. He eventually died a frustrated man just ten years after his arrival. Left with six children, Mary remarried and continued to run the one remaining tavern.
Harry Wilkins was eager to make his own way and at just sixteen was drawn, like many others, to the newly discovered goldfields in Victoria. For three years, he moved about the wild, overcrowded goldfields where 70,000 hopeful "diggers" had flocked from every corner of the Earth. They represented nearly one-third of the entire population of the colony of Victoria, distorting its economy and threatening its fragile government. The youngster had thrown himself into a wild frontier of greed and grog.
As a publican's son, Harry Wilkins would have been well aware of the influence of alcohol on the goldfields, and this may go some way to explaining his later conversion to a severe Methodist wowserism, so strict that later he would not allow his musically talented son to play a piano.
He returned home wiser if not richer, to take up work as a drover, evidently saving enough money and displaying sufficient prospects to impress the proprietor of the successful Victor Harbour Guest House, who agreed to a marriage with his daughter, Louisa Smith. For four years the young couple ran the public house which still stands at the mouth of Australia's longest river, the Murray. And there beneath its corrugated iron roof and the smell of stale beer, they planned their escape.
Drawn to the outdoor life, Harry was keen to explore the lands then opening beyond the hills above Adelaide. The family loaded a bullock cart and pushed its way 120 miles inland, through the green hills of the Clare Valley already carrying the first vineyards, along the road that stopped at the copper town of Burra, to the tanned plains spread beneath the colony's only real mountain.
Mt. Bryan is just tall enough to catch a sprinkling of snow in a harsh winter, but for the most part is barren, scarred on its sides by unsuccessful attempts at copper mining. Mt. Bryan East, where the Wilkins family settled, was never a township. It was surveyed and laid out, but very few of the allotments were ever taken up. Those who did venture here were encouraged by the findings of the Deputy Surveyor General of the new colony, a young Liverpool immigrant, George Woodroffe Goyder, who in 1857 had reported with some amazement that dry lakebeds were full of fresh water and that the land was fertile. His published comments sparked tremendous interest and led to a rush for lease applications as pioneers set off to find this Promised Land. They knew nothing of the narrow margin that separated the chance of success from the certainty of disaster in Australia's capricious and brutal interior.
Among those joining Harry and Louisa Wilkins on the journey north was a young German immigrant, August Wilhelm Pohlner, and his elder sister, Pauline. The Pohlners also moved beyond the rail head at Burra, but by chance stopped a little way south of Mt. Bryan. There August founded a pastoral farm, Tooralie, and it stands today still run by his descendants. Harry Wilkins went a little further on, just a few miles, yet all that remains of his years of struggle are ruins. Between the two farms, invisible to the eye, is a barrier as real as any wall: Goyder's Line. Still marked on some maps of South Australia, it divided the hopeless farmlands from the merely heartbreaking.
The first great drought came in 1863, quickly wiping out the first wave of pastoralists. As if to atone for his earlier optimism, Goyder returned to traverse on horseback a 3,000-mile frontier, accurately measuring the rainfall patterns that delineated the southern boundary of the inhospitable and drought-ridden saltbush country. Below the line, rainfall exceeded 9 'A inches annually, making it suitable for farming, but above it the land could only sustain scattered pastoral use, and even then not reliably. This barrier separated Harry Wilkins from August Pohlner, and it meant that on average he could expect less than two-thirds the rainfall of his neighbour. In such marginal conditions, the distance between them, a half-hour trot on horseback, could be the difference between life and death.
The Wilkins' family Bible, received as a wedding present, records the barest details of their life together, but each date holds a story of their struggles. Their first child is entered without a name, presumably stillborn. Their second child, also named Harry, would die before his first birthday. In all, Harry and Louisa would suffer the pain of burying five of their thirteen children in this lonely new land. The nearest settlement was the little township of Hallett, nearly 12 miles away along a dusty track that still hasn't been sealed. It once had a rail station that connected the region to civilisation, but that was closed many years ago. Today there are a few dozen people living there and only its position astride the interior highway connecting Adelaide to Sydney seems to prevent it being blown off the map altogether. But if Hallett is unimpressive, at least it still exists — Mt. Bryan East is a land of ghosts, travelling backwards in time. The settler farmers who followed Harry and Louisa Wilkins walked off the land decades ago, leaving behind their homes, some extensive with wide verandahs and parlours, others little more than a room and a fireplace. It's so isolated even the vandals haven't bothered to trouble it, and the empty homesteads stand much as they did when abandoned, windows open and gates ajar. Photos of the little church and schoolhouse from the 1940s show telegraph poles connecting the remaining community, but today even the poles are gone. The church is abandoned and roofless, the schoolhouse an overnight stop for intrepid bushwalkers. Campers are wise to use it as a marker — take a wrong turn out here and you could be lost for days.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "The Last Explorer"
by .
Copyright © 2011 Simon Nasht.
Excerpted by permission of Skyhorse Publishing.
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