DOCSLIB.ORG

4. HISTORICAL PRECIS: 4.1. Leichhardt's Journey

Total Page：16

File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb

Download full-text PDF Read full-text
4. HISTORICAL PRECIS: 4.1. Leichhardt's Journey 4. HISTORICAL PRECIS: 4.1. Leichhardt's journey The trek from Queensland to Victoria Settlement at Port Essington in 1844-45 by the Prussian naturalist, Dr. Frederich Wilhelm Ludwig Leichhardt, was a great feat of endurance and put paid to any hopes of overland trade with India by the Australian colonies. Australian interest in the north coast of New South Wales (later Queensland) first took prominence when the settlement at Port Essington was established by the British. The Governor, Sir George Gipps put forward a plan of exploration aiming to find a land route for this most northerly port in his jurisdiction in 1840, however the expense involved ruled it out. In 1843 the Legislative Council took up the idea, as did the Sydney Morning Herald, arguing that such a route would avoid the dangerous sea passage through the Torres Strait and provide a land route for the cheap Asian labour southern squatters were demanding — in the reverse direction, such a route would allow the export of cattle and horses to India. Alan Powell, in his work A Far Country writes that: This interest led to an expedition in 1845, funded by the New South Wales Treasury and led by Surveyor-General Sir Thomas Mitchell 'at the head... of a small army' as a later explorer remarked sarcastically. Mitchell found some useful cattle country in central Queensland and returned without ever getting near the borders of the future Northern Territory. A small private expedition (by Leichhardt) succeeded where Mitchell's private army could not. 19 The route taken by Leichhardt is generally followed today by the much of the alignment of the road from Wollogorang to Borroloola and on to Roper Bar. The Queensland Road stock route later followed much the same route as Leichhardt, with the exception of a section from Redbank to Seven Emus that has been bypassed by higher ground, and these overlapping themes of pioneering feats in adversity have provided a track that is considered an adventure by tourists, and European visitors in particular. The following precis has been drawn from the 1888 work of Ernest Favenc, himself an explorer, writer and artist, entitled The History of Australian Exploration From 1788 to 1888. The precis, though purportedly containing a number of unwarranted criticisms and innuendo, (see McLaren, Beyond Leichhardt) is provided complementary to the accompanying extract of the map (see Map 3) from Leichhardt's original 1847 work, Journal of an Overland Expedition in Australia from Moreton Bay to Port Essington a Distance of Upwards of 3000 Miles During the Years 1844-1845. This map is included to provide reference to the number of landmarks identified and named or described by him for the purposes of the Savannah Way project. Figure 4 is also provided for reference. The trek by Leichhardt and his party has been widely documented. Indeed the Northern Australia Collection of the Northern Territory Library lists some 31 items in its bibliography, and it is known that many more exist. Interestingly, a number of these analyse previous documentation (refer Simpson, In Leichhardt's Footsteps, McLaren, Beyond Leichhardt, et al.) in answering a century and a half of criticism where the explorer himself cannot. `Dr. Ludwig Leichhardt arrived in the colony in 1842, and travelled to Moreton Bay overland, where he occupied himself for two years in short excursions in the neighborhood, pursuing his favourite study of physical science. Leichhardt was born in Beskow, near Berlin and studied in Berlin. Through a neglect, he was excluded from the one-year military service, and thereby induced to escape from the three-yearly service. The consequence was, that he was pursued as a deserter and sentenced in contumaciam. 19. Powell, Alan. A Far Country. A Short History of the Northern Territory. Melbourne University Press. 1982. Page 63. A Desktop Survey of the Proposed Savannah Way 17 .
Load more

Recommended publications
  • Guided by Her: Aboriginal Women's Participation in Australian Expeditions
    5 Guided by her: Aboriginal women’s participation in Australian expeditions Allison Cadzow I was compelled in a great measure to be guided by her. She was acquainted with all their haunts and was a native of Port Davey, belonging to this tribe and having a brother and other relatives living among them, [Low. Ger Nown] was her native place. Though I knew she intended sojourning with them, yet there was no alternative but to follow her suggestions … George Augustus Robinson discussing Dray’s guiding in Tasmania (6 April 1830) Our female guide, who had scarcely before ventured to look up, stood now boldly forward, and addressed the strange tribe in a very animated and apparently eloquent manner; and when her countenance was thus lighted up, displaying fine teeth, and great earnestness of manner, I was delighted to perceive what soul the woman possessed, and could not but consider our party fortunate in having met with such an interpreter. Thomas Mitchell discussing Turandurey’s guiding in New South Wales (12 May 1836) The Aboriginal women mentioned above are clearly represented as guides and appear in plain view; they are not in hiding. While women did hide from white expedition members – for good reason considering 85 BRoKERS AND BouNDARIES the frequent violence of white people towards them – this was not the only reaction they had. Historians have largely ignored Aboriginal women’s involvement in exploration expeditions, though there are some notable exceptions in the work of Henry Reynolds, Lyndall Ryan and Donald Baker. Some other authors who have attended to them, such as Philip Clarke, imply that women were invariably hidden away during encounters, suggesting they were not actively involved in expeditions.1 Even when women did hide, this was not necessarily the end of the story, as they sometimes re-emerged after assessing the situation.
    [Show full text]
  • Negotiating the Colonial Australian Popular Fiction Archive
    Negotiating the Colonial Australian Popular Fiction Archive KEN GELDER University of Melbourne There is an identifiable ‘archive’ of colonial Australian popular fiction consisting of romance, adventure fiction, Gothic fiction, crime fiction, Lemurian fantasy and a significant number of related subgenres (bushranger fiction, convict romance, Pacific or ‘South Sea’ adventure, tropical romance, ‘lost explorer’ stories, and so on). Looking at this archive soon reveals both its sheer size and range, and the fact that so little of it is remembered today. Rachael Weaver, Ailie Smith and I have begun to build a digital archive of colonial Australian popular fiction with the primary aim of making this material available to an interested reading public, as well as to scholars specialising in colonial Australian (and transnational) literary studies. At the time of writing we are really only about 20% complete with around 500 authors represented on the site, although many with only a fraction of their work uploaded and with only the bare bones of a scholarly apparatus around them: a few short biographical notes, a bibliography, and the texts themselves: first editions in most cases <http://www.apfa.esrc.unimelb.edu.au/about.html>. The first entry in this digital archive is J. H. M. Abbott (1874-1953), and we have so far uploaded three novels by this author, beginning with Sally: the tale of a currency lass (1918), published as a cheap paperback by the NSW Bookstall with a cover illustration by Norman Lindsay. I should note that we take the colonial period to run at least as far as the First World War and arguably beyond, into the 1920s: where by this time the ‘colonial’ functions as an enabling signifier, a point of reference (as well as a point of origin), already receding from the present even as it continues to be animated, and reanimated, to generate a set of often increasingly nostalgic and nationalist sensibilities.
    [Show full text]
  • German-Australian Colonial Entanglements
    I German-Australian colonial entanglements: on German settler colonialism, the wavering interests of exploration, science, mission and migration, and the contestations of travelling memory Lars Eckstein and Andrew Hurley In this volume, we set out to explore various trajectories of German and Australian colonial pasts; the ways in which their histories are intricately entangled, and how they have been, and continue to be, remembered, in a range of different German and Australian contexts. We use the metaphor of ‘exploration’, here, quite aware of its tricky colonial baggage. In order to bring out some of the conceptual challenges of German-Australian colonial entanglements, let us begin this opening this introductory essay, therefore, with two vignettes about actual exploration: The first takes us to back to the year 1843, and the moment when the Prussian natural historian Ludwig Leichhardt first crossed Myall Creek in the northern reaches of New South Wales. It is a moment, we will argue, which foregrounds and helps to conceptualise some of the ambivalences and abysses of colonial entanglement. The second vignette fast forwards to our time, and to our own attempts to find traces of Leichhardt in Pioneers Memorial Park in the Sydney municipality of Leichhardt. It will foreground the aspect of remembering in the title of this volume. 1. Crossing Myall Creek Sometime in May 1843, the Prussian explorer Ludwig Leichhardt crossed Myall Creek. He did so on extensive travels between Sydney and Moreton Bay in the Brisbane area, about a year after he first arrived in Sydney in February 1842, and about one-and-a-half years before he departed on his triumphant first expedition from Moreton Bay to Port Essington II on the northern coast of the continent.
    [Show full text]
  • Watriama and Co Further Pacific Islands Portraits
    Watriama and Co Further Pacific Islands Portraits Hugh Laracy Watriama and Co Further Pacific Islands Portraits Hugh Laracy Published by ANU E Press The Australian National University Canberra ACT 0200, Australia Email: [email protected] This title is also available online at http://epress.anu.edu.au National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry Author: Laracy, Hugh, author. Title: Watriama and Co : further Pacific Islands portraits / Hugh Laracy. ISBN: 9781921666322 (paperback) 9781921666339 (ebook) Subjects: Watriama, William Jacob, 1880?-1925. Islands of the Pacific--History. Dewey Number: 995.7 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher. Cover design and layout by ANU E Press Printed by Griffin Press This edition © 2013 ANU E Press Contents Preface . ix 1 . Pierre Chanel of Futuna (1803–1841): The making of a saint . 1 2 . The Sinclairs Of Pigeon Bay, or ‘The Prehistory of the Robinsons of Ni’ihau’: An essay in historiography, or ‘tales their mother told them’ . 33 3 . Insular Eminence: Cardinal Moran (1830–1911) and the Pacific islands . 53 4 . Constance Frederica Gordon-Cumming (1837–1924): Traveller, author, painter . 69 5 . Niels Peter Sorensen (1848–1935): The story of a criminal adventurer . 93 6 . John Strasburg (1856–1924): A plain sailor . 111 7 . Ernest Frederick Hughes Allen (1867–1924): South Seas trader . 127 8 . Beatrice Grimshaw (1870–1953): Pride and prejudice in Papua . 141 9 . W .J . Watriama (c . 1880–1925): Pretender and patriot, (or ‘a blackman’s defence of White Australia’) .
    [Show full text]
  • Discursive Production of the Pacific in Australian Colonial Discourse
    University of Wollongong Thesis Collections University of Wollongong Thesis Collection University of Wollongong Year Discursive production of the pacific in Australian colonial discourse Michael Hayes University of Wollongong Hayes, Michael, Discursive production of the pacific in Australian colonial discourse, Doctor of Philosophy thesis, School of Communication and Cultural Studies, University of Wollongong, 1997. http://ro.uow.edu.au/theses/1925 This paper is posted at Research Online. The Discursive Production of the Pacific In Australian Colonial Discourse A thesis submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for the award of the degree Doctor of Philosophy University of Wollongong by Michael Hayes, B.A. Hons, M.A. School of Communication and Cultural Smdies Department of History and Politics 1997 Contents Abstract i Acknowledgements ii List of Illustrations iii Introduction 1 Chapter One: The Imagioative Production of the Pacific 35 Chapter Two: 'Bully' Hayes Adventure Narratives 91 Chapter Three: Pacific Histories 144 Chapter Four: Pacific Adventure Stories and Australian Imperialism 200 Chapter Five: Consuming Cannibalism: The Body in Australia's Pacific Archive 241 Chapter Six: Sexualising Pacific Islander Women 294 Chapter Seven: The Emergence of the Pacific Cmise: The Economies and Investments in Tourism: 330 Conclusion 375 BibHogi-aphy 381 Illustrations 405 This thesis is all my own work and has not been submitted for a degree to any other institution or university. Michael Hayes 23-2-97. Abstract The Discursive Production of the Pacific in Australian Colonial Discourse. The thesis examines the genealogy of Austrahan coloniahsm in the Pacific by examining the production of 'the Pacific' as an object of knowledge in a variety of texts, disciplines, and practices.
    [Show full text]
  • Two Wives in Krakow and a House in Treptow
    Essay: A Paradise bombed Author: Adrian Vickers ust after the Bali bombings of October 12, 2002, a colleague asked one of those curly questions academics sometimes get asked in seminars: "Has Bali’s place in Jthe Indonesian imagination now changed; is it like New York in the United States after September 11, when it became part of America’s ‘heartland’?" I thought the better question was about Bali’s place in Australia’s national imagination. Has Bali become more, or less, of an Australian "heartland" in the devastation of Paddy’s Bar and the Sari Club? How do Australians cope with the idea that our island of domesticated exotica has been made unsafe? Before the bombings, paradise island occupied a special place in our mental map of the Asian region. Bali stood apart from the rest of Indonesia at the idyllic end of a spectrum in the Australian imagination, an extension of Byron and Noosa. The bombings targeted our sense of place, a paradoxical reminder that we are still in Asia, and Indonesia is our nearest Asian neighbour. At the other end of the spectrum of Australian views about the region is the Asia of danger where Indonesia proper is found - summed up in the cliché of "living dangerously".1 Somewhere in between came the search for wealth, the Keating promise that Asia was where we would make our millions: "Living Dangerously", "Trading Asia" and "Bali Days". This essay is a eulogy for "Bali" before it was subsumed by the Asia of "Living Dangerously". The years of writing dangerously "Living Dangerously" is the most familiar and comforting image we have of our neighbourhood - comforting because it means we can stay at home while the occasional handsome, intrepid adventurer - a journalist out of the Neil Davis mould - can venture there for us.
    [Show full text]
  • The Mutineers Marooned in 1629 – Hutt River Or Wittecarra Gully?
    The Mutineers Marooned in 1629 – Hutt River or Wittecarra Gully? Rupert Gerritsen Introduction Between 1629 and 1727 at least 73 crew members and passengers from Dutch ships are known to have found themselves unwillingly but permanently detained on the central and upper west coast of Western Australia. The actual number could have been as high as 240. These people found themselves in this predicament as a result of a number of shipwrecks, other accidents or deliberate marooning. The possibility that some actually survived and perhaps even prospered on what was to them foreign shores is an intriguing one. It is also of some significance for Australian history in that it marks the beginnings of a permanent European presence in Australia. The prospect that they may have interacted, engaged and perhaps integrated with Aboriginal populations in those parts, and in so doing influenced their culture in some way, adds a further, tantalising, dimension to the historical interest engendered by this topic. It not surprising, therefore, that considerable amount of research and commentary has been generated over time in regard to these issues. Speculation about the fate of these crew and passengers began in the latter half of 19th century and early 20th century with some, such as explorer AC Gregory and ethnographer Daisy Bates, asserting that these unfortunates had actually survived, and this was evident in the physical appearance of particular Aboriginal populations. While Ernest Favenc‟s Marooned On Australia, published in 1896,1 provided a fictionalised account of the adventures of the two Batavia mutineers abandoned in 1629, the question as to the actual fate of those stranded on the west coast did not begin to be rigorously pursued until the second half of the 20th century.
    [Show full text]
  • Reading the Colonial Grotesque
    The Transvestite Adventure: Reading the Colonial Grotesque ELIZABETH McMAHON UNIVERSITY OF NSW This reading of transvestic performance in Australian fiction is in dialogue with Robert Dixon’s 1995 monograph Writing the Colonial Adventure: Race, Gender and Nation in Anglo- Australian Popular Fiction, 1875–1914. It is informed by the frameworks Dixon developed in his analysis of the relationship between literature and culture, specifically the ways in which he relates the occult effects of the literary imaginary and the political unconscious to historical contexts and their implication in the formation of Australia’s particular colonialism. More specifically still, the argument regarding colonial transvestism engages directly with Dixon’s deployment of Peter Stallybrass and Allon White’s formulation of the ‘grotesque’ and its application to the Australian colonial context. The essay revisits Dixon’s reading of the Australian grotesque as a critical optic for reading Australian colonial narratives of female to male cross-dressing to argue that the transvestite figures in colonial narratives enact performances of what Stallybrass and White schematise as the two orders of the grotesque, which are enacted in the identity formation of the collective. They write, as Dixon quotes: The first order involves the complete othering of another group. They are completely alien. This fundamental mechanism of identity formation produces the second, hybrid grotesque at the level of the political unconscious by the very struggle to exclude the first grotesque. The point is that the exclusion necessary to the formation of social identity at [one] level is simultaneously a production at the level of the Imaginary, and a production, what is more, of a complex hybrid fantasy emerging out of the very attempt to demarcate boundaries, to unite and purify the social collectivity.
    [Show full text]
  • SKILFUL SHAPING and Central Queensland
    ürQ Reviews Peter Pierce 1845, he emigrated in 1863, and worked as a jackeroo in northern SKILFUL SHAPING and central Queensland. In 1878 he led an expedition funded by the Queenslander newspaper to test the Ernest Favenc, Tales of the Austral proposed route of a railway from Tropics, ed. Cheryl Taylor, Colonial Brisbane to Port Darwin. Other Texts Series. Sydney: University of journeys of exploration followed, to New South Wales Press, 1997. Queensland and Western Australia. 211pp. ISBN 0-86840-381-4. Favenc knew the routines and rigours of survival in the bush in It looks like an exemplary 1890s ways that Paterson, let alone Bulletin career. Very soon after the Lawson, never did. He combined the start of the decade, on 15 February career of a genuine explorer with 1890, Ernest Favenc (writing as that of a writer who introduced and "Delcomyn") published a comic perhaps mythologised the wonders of yarn in the Bulletin concerning "the Austral Tropics" for a gener- cannibalism, entitled "Long Jim's ation of urban readers. Long before Appetite: A Back-Country Hair- Ion Idriess and Frank Clune, between Raiser." The dead-pan description the wars, Favenc was telling stories comes from Cheryl Taylor's of the Nicholson River and the introduction to her exemplary Rumford Plains, vividly imagining a edition of Favenc's Tales of the mysterious Australia in order to Austral Tropics, the latest in the titillate an audience susceptible to Colonial Texts Series of scholarly such material precisely because it editions of nineteenth-century thought it knew something, if not Australian literature.
    [Show full text]
  • German-Australian Colonial Entanglements: on German Settler
    Faculty of Arts Lars Eckstein | Andrew Wright Hurley German-Australian Colonial Entanglements On German Settler Colonialism, the Wavering Interests of Exploration, Science, Mission and Migration, and the Con- testations of Travelling Memory Preprint published at the Institutional Repository of the Potsdam University: https://doi.org/10.25932/publishup-44449 German-Australian Colonial Entanglements Lars Eckstein | Andrew Wright Hurley German-Australian Colonial Entanglements On German Settler Colonialism, the Wavering Interests of Exploration, Science, Mission and Migration, and the Contestations of Travelling Memory University of Potsdam University of Potsdam 2020 Published online at the Institutional Repository of the University of Potsdam: https://doi.org/10.25932/publishup-44449 1 German-Australian colonial entanglements: on German settler colonialism, the wavering interests of exploration, science, mission and migration, and the contestations of travelling memory Lars Eckstein and Andrew Hurley In this volume, we set out to explore various trajectories of German and Australian colonial pasts; the ways in which their histories are intricately entangled, and how they have been, and continue to be, remembered, in a range of different German and Australian contexts. We use the metaphor of ‘exploration’, here, quite aware of its tricky colonial baggage. In order to bring out some of the conceptual challenges of German-Australian colonial entanglements, let us begin this introductory essay, therefore, with two vignettes about actual exploration: The first takes us to back to the year 1843, and the moment when the Prussian natural historian Ludwig Leichhardt first crossed Myall Creek in the northern reaches of New South Wales. It is a moment, we will argue, which foregrounds and helps to conceptualise some of the ambivalences and abysses of colonial entanglement.
    [Show full text]
  • Indigenous Intermediaries NEW PERSPECTIVES on EXPLORATION ARCHIVES Aboriginal History Incorporated Aboriginal History Inc
    Indigenous Intermediaries NEW PERSPECTIVES ON EXPLORATION ARCHIVES Aboriginal History Incorporated Aboriginal History Inc. is a part of the Australian Centre for Indigenous History, Research School of Social Sciences, The Australian National University, and gratefully acknowledges the support of the School of History and the National Centre for Indigenous Studies, The Australian National University. Aboriginal History Inc. is administered by an Editorial Board which is responsible for all unsigned material. Views and opinions expressed by the author are not necessarily shared by Board members. Contacting Aboriginal History All correspondence should be addressed to the Editors, Aboriginal History Inc., ACIH, School of History, RSSS, 9 Fellows Road (Coombs Building), Acton, ANU, 2601, or [email protected]. WARNING: Readers are notified that this publication may contain names or images of deceased persons. Indigenous Intermediaries NEW PERSPECTIVES ON EXPLORATION ARCHIVES Edited by Shino Konishi, Maria Nugent and Tiffany Shellam Published by ANU Press and Aboriginal History Inc. The Australian National University Acton ACT 2601, Australia Email: [email protected] This title is also available online at http://press.anu.edu.au National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry Title: Indigenous intermediaries : new perspectives on exploration archives / edited by Shino Konishi, Maria Nugent, Tiffany Shellam. ISBN: 9781925022766 (paperback) 9781925022773 (ebook) Subjects: First contact of aboriginal peoples with Westerners--Australia. Aboriginal Australians--Australia. Discoveries in geography. Other Creators/Contributors: Konishi, Shino, editor. Nugent, Maria, editor. Shellam, Tiffany Sophie Bryden, 1979- editor. Dewey Number: 994.01 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
    [Show full text]
  • Recent Additions October 2016
    RECENT ADDITIONS OCTOBER 2016 Australian Literature Wild Island / Jennifer Livett 2016 INSIDE Bushman and Bookworm: Letters of Joseph Furphy / edited by John Barnes and Lois Hoffman 1995 Australian Literature ..1 Australian History ......1 Mysteries Victoria .......................1 The Serpent’s Sting / Robert Gott 2016 Other States ............... 7 Art and Artists ........... 9 Australian History Biography..................10 Family History ...........11 Australia in the Antarctic / R.A Swan 1961 [donated by David Harmer] Aboriginal Australians 11 What Happened to the Car Industry? / Ian Porter 2016 Military History .........11 Railways .................... 12 City Dreamers: The urban imagination in Australia / Graeme Davison 2016 General Periodicals .. 12 Parkland: When caravan is home / Janice Newton 2014 The Aviators: True adventures of Australian Airmen / William Joy 1978 [donated by David Harmer] The History of Australian Exploration: From 1788-1888 / Ernest Favenc 1983 ABOUT THE PMI [donated by Eltham Historical Society] 39 St Edmonds Road Prahran VIC 3181 Australia’s Secular Foundations / Malcolm Wood 2016 ABN 1316 4635 256 Waiting for the Revolution: A history of Australian nationalism / Noel Sec. Lib.: Tim McKenna McLachlan 1989 Pres: Mr Steve Stefanopoulos CONTACT The Poles in Australia: A bibliographical record 1775-1980 / Stanley Robe p 03 9510 3393 1986 E [email protected] The Australian Motor Industry: A study in protection and growth / Peter W www.pmi.net.au Stubbs 1972 OPEN: Planting the Nation [garden history] / edited by Georgina Whitehead 2001 Mon, Tue, Wed, Fri 9:30am - 4:30pm The Victory: The inside story of the takeover of Australia [politics] / Pamela Thu Williams 1997 9:30am - 7pm excluding public holidays and “Our Principle of Sex Equality”: The ordination of women in the the Christmas/New Year period.
    [Show full text]