ECOLOGICA – NEW EYE ON LIFE The low rocky escarpments of the Grey Range would have become an all-too familiar sight for Charles Sturt while his ailing party were ‘imprisoned’ by waterless desert at Depot Glen in north-western New South Wales for six months in 1845. Photo: Jen Silcock Illuminating the dawn of pastoralism Ecologist Jen Silcock shows how the journals of early European explorers can help us understand ecological change in inland eastern Australia. Charles Sturt’s expedition suffered many travails in the Simpson Desert, a region he described as looking like ‘the entrance to hell’. The conditions he described as ‘nothing ideal’ included a fierce gale and heat that broke his thermometer. Photo: Jen Silcock ‘The peculiar mode of Australian exploration seemed to be to launch nobly into the unknown, ... go blind from sandy-blight, and then die of hunger, thirst, snakebite, native spears, or all four.’ Robert Hughes, 2006, Things I Didn’t Know remember a sticky afternoon in a country classroom. The fans But the journals of these explorers have much to offer beyond whirred ineffectually overhead as my grade 4 class clumsily the anecdotal and the quirky, the mysterious and the macabre. Iplotted the routes of Hume and Hovell, Blaxland, Lawson They recorded the country, plants, animals and people of and Wentworth, Sturt, Mitchell and Stuart on our traced maps of inland Australia just prior to the rapid and all-encompassing Australia. I was bored and hot, and didn’t much care when the Blue wave of pastoral settlement. There were just 20 years between Mountains were crossed or precisely where a long-dead, bearded Edward John Eyre’s 1840 expedition to South Australia’s salt man walked across my map. lakes – the first to enter the arid zone – and the arrival of the This is how most Australians are introduced to the men we call first pastoralists. Within the next 30 years, the pastoral frontier The Explorers – as a blur of dry facts and squiggles on maps. If, enveloped nearly all of inland eastern Australia. after this unpromising beginning, you are later inspired to pick up Because so few records predate this momentous watershed and a book on Australian exploration, you find their stories not so dull. so few places have been left unaffected by pastoralism, debates Popular articles and books emphasise their myriad quirks and the continue to be had about how much the landscape has changed ordeals they faced. Tales of folly, hardship and heartbreak dominate: and what has caused it. The musty journals of the explorers Hume and Hovell arguing over a frying pan, Sturt lugging a boat could have great relevance for contemporary ecologists and land over 2000 kilometres of waterless desert and Horrocks being shot by managers, for they provide a window onto pre-pastoral Australia; his camel. The torturous deaths of Burke and Wills on the Cooper a land before sheep and cattle, fences and bores, foxes and cats. have become enshrined in folklore, and the final resting place of The challenge is how to accurately interpret the often fragmentary Leichhardt’s party, ‘out where the dead men lie’, has been a source and ambiguous record of those travellers in a strange land. of national intrigue for 160 years. wildlife-australia.org | Wildlife Australia | 9 Major Thomas Mitchell was charmed by the streams ‘Travelling along the bank of this stream, and hills of this part of the country, now in the we found it flowing, and full of sparkling Salvator Rosa section of Carnarvon National Park. water…The hills overhanging it surpassed Photo: Robert Ashdown any I had ever seen in picturesque outline.’ Major Thomas Mitchell, naming Salvator Rosa, July 1846 Travels with explorers as I tucked into a camp-oven stew, I would reflect on the often Twelve years after that afternoon in the classroom, I found bizarre, sometimes disgusting, but always bland explorer diets. myself working in the Grey Range of south-west Queensland. Ernest Giles’s party survived on nothing but dried horse meat for At night, lying on a creaky shearer’s stretcher, I worked my weeks on end in Central Australia, while Landsborough gave his way through Charles Sturt’s 1844–5 Narrative of an Expedition into men a ‘treat’ of cold rice with jam on Sundays. Central Australia. He explored the Grey Range further south but At times, especially on long, sun-dazzled trips, I felt like I was many of his descriptions fitted what I saw when I glanced up getting to know these long-dead men. Most were matter-of-fact from my transects: distant blue hills hazy over the mulga scrub, scribes who gave brief descriptions of the country, peppered with solidifying into barren stony slopes as I got closer. I wondered occasional flourishes of emotion. The utilitarian Landsborough how much this country had changed since Sturt saw it. It felt was moved to exclaim with uncharacteristic emotion, ‘I love wild and remote, but was the bare rocky ground beneath my tape these trees!’, when walking through a weeping myall (Acacia measure natural, or a legacy of 150 years of exposure to the hard pendula) woodland. In contrast, Sturt blended long-winded hooves and hungry mouths of sheep and cattle? melodrama with classic British understatement, noting while Sturt’s journal got me hooked and I started to enjoy the lying scurvy-ravaged and vomiting, his thermometer having company of various explorers on my own inland journeys. just cracked in the Simpson Desert heat, that ‘this really was Walking through the Simpson Desert I read William Hodgkinson’s nothing ideal’. And when the twisted trees were illuminated by 1876 journal and Charles Winnecke’s 1884 surveyor’s report, my campfire, it was easy to be beguiled by Mitchell’s romantic while our pack camels munched around my swag. Major Thomas and literary descriptions of the hills, grasslands, waterholes and Mitchell and Edmund Kennedy were my companions on a string people he encountered. of seemingly interminable trips into the brigalow, mulga and Tracking the explorers poplar box forests of southern Queensland. The hundreds of transects and many hours driving between sites – and many But these journals became much more than campfire diversions more hopelessly stuck in gullies or in shearing sheds listening for me. Various researchers had used the explorer record to to drought-breaking rains – gave me plenty of time to reflect on examine changes in vegetation structure and fire regimes, and their observations. And on a verandah in Longreach, overlooking to reconstruct the historical distributions of animals. Martin the line of trees that mark the Thomson River, I read the Denny, a venerable elder of the rangelands, consulted the New descriptions of William Landsborough, who trekked the same South Wales explorer record in detail to investigate changes in floodplain 150 years ago. flora and fauna. But few had studied the rich exploration history of western Queensland. In 2009 Rod Fensham, a botanist at It wasn’t just the observations of country that interested me. the Queensland Herbarium and long-time explorer enthusiast, I derived a certain smug comfort from the tribulations of these received funding from the South Australian Arid Lands Natural men. Thirsty and tired on a spinifex plain, I knew that the car Resource Management Board to collate historical information was nearby and the chances of being forced to drink my own about the Lake Eyre Basin. Toby Piddocke and I traced the routes urine, like Kennedy’s hapless second-in-charge Turner in 1848, of 14 explorers from 12 expeditions, spanning the period 1844 to were slim. And while it wasn’t exactly pleasant digging a car from 1919. We used a combination of Google Earth imagery, modern the top of a fiery sand dune at midday, I had the words of Sturt topographic maps, directions, bearings and landmarks noted to remind me that others had survived far worse. Sometimes 10 | Wildlife Australia | SUMMER 2014 ‘The country we saw on this journey was so bad that I did not wonder at its not being stocked … where it is not thickly wooded with thick mulga scrub, which chiefly prevails, it is grassed with Triodia.’ William Landsborough, southeast of Charleville, 1862 Much of the description in explorers’ journals is focused on the country’s potential for pastoralism. The open and thinly wooded downs of central Queensland (around Blackall and Longreach) Photo: Denis Binnion greatly impressed them. Photo: Jen Silcock by the explorers, and maps prepared by cartographers or the signs of the ‘numerous rock wallabies’ Hodgkinson saw in a explorers themselves. ‘picturesque sandstone gorge’ west of Boulia a few days later. We assigned geographic coordinates as accurately as possible This record is outside the known range of the three inland to all explorer observations relevant to five main themes: people, species of rock wallaby, but is most likely to refer to the purple- fire, vegetation, fauna and water. Our final spreadsheet contained necked rock wallaby. These records are significant extensions 4200 observations made over almost 20,000 km travelled by of the former known range of both species. Sturt also recorded the explorers, spanning the seven critical decades from 1840 to numerous species now rare or extinct in the region, including 1910, when pastoral settlement of the inland closely followed yellow-footed rock wallabies, stick-nest rats and greater bilbies. exploration. This was a far cry from my grade four scribblings, The journals contain some of the only observations of medium- and allowed us to compare the explorers’ observations with the sized mammals prior to the wave of catastrophic extinctions that current landscape. swept across inland Australia shortly after pastoral settlement.