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Alice and The Weather Man
Alice and The Weather Man
By John Larkins
Introduction:
THIS book is about our Weather (her name is Alice, we've heard),
and she's controlled everything, laughing wickedly, sometimes
guiltily (but rarely, if ever, we suspect), since white men blundered
ashore in 1788 into a shrieking thunderstorm ... and now it's more
than 220 years later, and no one can tell us what will happen next
week, or even if Alice has decided it's time for us to pack up and
leave.
The first British settlers were often perplexed and awed by
the extremities of the Australian climate; they adapted, more or less:
it could not adapt to them. Eventually, Europeans coped largely
because of haphazard technological and social advances
elsewhere in the world by Isambard Kingdom Brunel, in Britain,
Samuel Morse and the conquest of the American Wild West, and
others, including daring invaders of the stratosphere in 19th century
balloons: they went up, up and away a mile or more to meet the
weather in tweed suits and goggles.
One such man (though he never dared venture into space
in a wicker basket) came to join us and help our forebears
understand the vagaries of our climates. His name was Charles
Todd, an astronomer and meteorologist. As every schoolchild used
to know, he came to Australia in 1855 and built the Overland
Telegraph which linked the island continent to the world. But what
every kid didn't know was that he became Australia's first everyday
Weather Man, using his far-flung network of telegraph stations to
predict rain, hail or shine as the weather moved from west to east.
His forecasts were published daily in the newspapers. Charles Todd
finally made sense of our continental weather ... but we've still got a
lot to learn and it's becoming more urgent by the day as our Planet
Earth confronts climate change.
Charles had a wife, too, much younger, tall and elegant as
he was short and comical ... her name was Alice, same as the
Weather, of course. When she died, he was awfully saddened; but
his work was done. She was a charming companion, but a non-
conformist religious zealot who solved her problems with the dust
storms of 19th century South Australia by not venturing outside the
Adelaide CBD for 40 years, except to go Home to England once.
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Well, the race was won ... they were going out to collect the bodies
of the losers ...
* Alice would have been far too discreet to mention that the first
European officially killed by the Australian weather was a seaman
named John Fisher who died on 25th March, 1788, from exposure
after romancing a convict girl, Ann Morton, all night on the wet grass
at Sydney Cove.
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The eleven ships of the First Fleet sailed into Port Jackson, better
known today as Sydney Harbour, early in the high summer's
afternoon, 26th January, 1788, to begin the first European
settlement in Australia. The male convicts had scarcely begun
unpacking, ready for the embarkation of the ladies, when Mother
Nature gave them a bloody good Aussie climatic lashing.
On 1st February, navy surgeon John White recorded: 'We
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and the monarchy did not collapse until August, 1792. The genially-
despotic Louis was executed the following 21st January, 1793; his
misunderstood Queen Marie Antoinette, who never did say, 'Let
them eat cake', went the same way in October.
Bruny, blessedly, knew none of this. He died of natural
causes on 20th July, 1793, while his ship, La Recherche, was off
the coast of New Guinea, still engaged in his fruitless search for La
Perouse; his deputy, Huon de Kermadec, captain of L'Esperance,
had already died. With the grand expedition in tatters, the third-in-
command, d'Auribeau, a royalist, handed over his ships to the
Dutch at Surabaya when he learned from them of the French
revolution.
It was not only the expedition that was in tatters; the whole
French system of recording the heat of the day was to be discarded.
On Ist April, 1794, the revolutionary government replaced the
Reaumur scale, so beloved by Bruny, with centigrade as part of the
new decimal metric system. It was part of the new official ideology
of 'pure reason', but had, in fact, been discussed by European
scientists for 150 years. The decimal metric system, known now as
the Systeme International, was adopted quickly by the rest of
Europe, leaving isolated Britain and, of course, the brand-new
United States, which remains intransigent in the 21st century, along
with Myanmar (Burma).
The British had sound ideological reasons of their own to
stay with the Fahrenheit scale at a time when Napoleon was pacing
out the yards to Waterloo in metres. The Fahrenheit system was
named for its inventor in 1724, the German physicist Daniel Gabriel
Fahrenheit (1686-1736). Centigrade was pioneered by the Swedish
astronomer, Anders Celsius (1701-1744) in 1742. A third method,
the Kelvin scale, was introduced by the Scottish physicist, Lord
William Kelvin (1824-1907) in 1854.
Kelvin was an almost exact contemporary of Charles Todd
(1826-1910). But Todd, the first 'man of the people' weather man
stuck with Fahrenheit, even though, as a scientist, he would have
seen the value of the Kelvin scale in measuring very low
temperatures for scientific research (Todd probably would have
appreciated the 'Henry Lawson Scale', expressed in a letter from
Lawson from Leeton, NSW, in 1916: 'It's so hot here in February
that you can wash out your, pants, hang them on the line, run
around the house and take them off dry.')
But we are getting ahead of ourselves ... Before he
returned to England with the rest of the Marines on the Gorgon in
December, 1792, Tench recorded his thoughts on the sudden
unpredictability of the weather (with the deftness of a modern
politician) ...'My other remarks on the climate will be short; it is
changeable beyond any other I ever heard of; but no phenomena,
sufficiently accurate to reckon upon, are found to indicate the
approach of alteration. Indeed, for the first eighteen months that we
lived in the country, changes were supposed to take place, more
commonly at the quartering of the moon than at other times. But
lunar empire afterwards lost its credit; for the last two-and-a-half of
our residing at Port Jackson, its influence was unperceived. Three
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The Tank Stream, Watkin Tench's 'drain of a morass', was the very
reason for the existence of Sydney. And its importance increased
when the settlers recognised the unpredictability of the Australian
sub-tropical rainfall in the drought which followed so soon after their
arrival. Marine officer David Collins, the settlement's chief legal
officer, wrote of Governor Arthur Phillip's decision to select Sydney
Cove: 'The site chosen for the settlement was at the head of the
cove, near the run of fresh water which stole silently along through
a very thick wood, the stillness of which had then, for the first time
since the Creation, been interrupted by the rude sound of the
labourer's axe.'
Collins saw the stream in its last moments of bucolic
simplicity. Some of the older London East Enders among the
convicts might have seen nostalgic similarities between it and the
River Fleet, which rose in springs on Hampstead Heath and flowed,
pleasantly enough, until it fell into the Thames near the present site
of Blackfriars Bridge. Arthur Phillip, born in the London parish of All
Hallows in 1738, would almost certainly have seen the River Fleet
when they were building Blackfriars Bridge in the 1760s ... and
covering up the Fleet and the city's shame. It had turned from broad
river, to stream, to creek ... and, finally, to foul drain. The writer
Jonathan Swift (1667-1745), who wrote Gulliver's Travels, penned
these words about the Fleet after a deluge:
Sweepings from Butchers Stalls, Dung, Guts and Blood.
Drown'd puppies, stinking Sprats, all drench'd in Mud,
Dead Cats and Turnip-Tops come tumbling down the
Flood.
And that is what the Tank Stream would become. A
miniature Fleet. It burbled from springs west of (Sydney's) Hyde
Park and flowed north towards the Harbour through water 'tanks'
hewn from the sandstone near the present Hunter Street during the
1790-91 drought. The stream entered the Cove at the westerly end
of Circular Quay ... eventually, to be hidden as a stormwater drain
beneath the modern city. As early as 14th October, 1802, a General
Order, said:
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was accompanied with very vivid lightning, the effects of which were
sensibly felt by many, some of whom have had as sensibly to feel
their obligation to the Divine Providence.
'The Gazette office was struck in several places at
different intervals. Many of the printing materials being formed of
iron, the cause of attraction were no doubt the stronger, and the
effects were truly awful. In the two lower rooms were eleven
persons, six of whom were children, and all were affected in a
greater or less degree, but none seriously injured. By the first
shock, a young man, an assistant, felt a violent concussion on the
head, which bowed him to the ground, but which he at the moment
attributed to the fall of some weighty substance overhead. He
immediately left the place on which he stood, however, and in
retreating into the adjoining room was opposed in his passage by a
crash occasioned by the bursting in of the back door, the whole
wood and brick work connected with which was rent to atoms, some
of the shattered materials being driven inwards, and others
outwards, to the distance of thirty feet from the door.
'The publisher (the same George Howe) happening to be
at the time revising a proof impression of this paper, was thrown
backwards with his seat, unconscious as to what cause to attribute
the disaster, so instantaneously impaired was his recollection. On
rising, he felt himself enveloped in smoke as he then imagined, but
more probably in the dust of lime and mortar scattered from the
brickwork. Those who were less affected than himself declare that
the electric material had the appearance of a ball, which rebounded
to and fro with a velocity peculiar to itself. On subsequent
examination, it appears to have entered the house at different parts,
the inner brick work of the chimneys being in many places fractured,
one of the rafters of the roof and a board in the upper floor
splintered, and the brick work of many parts both within and without
the house visibly impaired by the same awful and terrific cause.'
Many thought this was Divine Retribution aimed directly at
the journalist George Howe because, having arrived in New South
Wales under the embarrassing burden of a sentence for failed
highway robbery, he was now living sinfully with a wealthy widow.
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you'd plonked the entire British Isles in the middle of Australia when
the First Fleet arrived in 1788, it would have taken more than 70
years to find them again (and then by a Scot, for goodness sake).
The future city of Brisbane was settled by convicts in 1824, the
same year that Hume and Hovell pioneered (but didn't settle) the
Port Phillip District near Melbourne. The southern island of Van
Diemens Land (later Tasmania) had been settled as a penal colony
in 1803.
Brisbane had the choice of two residences in NSW: the
'metropolitan' Government House in the Domain, begun by
Governor Arthur Phillip in 1788 (and demolished in 1846 to be
replaced by the present Gothic Revival pile) and the 'rural'
Government House, 24km west at Parramatta, begun by Governor
John Hunter in the late-1790s and completed with a splendid
Palladian flourish in 1818 by Governor Lachlan Macquarie's aide,
Lieutenant John Watts under the tasteful guidance of Elizabeth
Macquarie, the Governor's spouse.
The mortar used in the Parramatta extensions was
strengthened with shells from aboriginal middens, the eating places
of the dispossessed Burramatta people who didn't even have words
for 'greed' until the white folks came along and educated them. In
later years, such middens have proved invaluable archeological
sites in the study of aboriginal culture. But, easy come, easy go,
eh? What's yours is mine, so buzz off, Jacky. Brisbane recognised
that Parramatta's rural surrounds provided an ideal spot for an
astronomical observatory during the four years of his governorship.
So it was here that he unpacked his telescopes and ordered his
underlings to find accommodation in the cottages in the
Government House grounds and build an observatory.
In the earliest times, man discovered that observation of
the moon, stars and sun provided the basis for navigation and time-
keeping. It was an easy step to the realisation that these
observations could assist in the surveying of land. This early global
positioning could be very useful, considering the land division
perplexities facing the European invaders.
Assuming that Britain would claim the whole of the
continent, as it did, Brisbane technically had 1900 million acres, or
760 million hectares, to distribute, taking into account the existence
or otherwise, of a fabled inland sea, fringed with palms, white sands
and dusky drinks waitresses. Fortunately, the Imperial Government
in London didn't expect Brisbane to distribute the land immediately;
but he was expected to follow a new scheme of parcelling out
smallish lots of selected land at five shillings an acre, thus freeing
the land from Crown control. The aborigines, from whom the whole
place had been snatched, were not consulted in these matters. The
new land arrangements came into effect in 1824, the year after
Brisbane oversaw the granting of limited self-government through
the creation of an Exclusive-controlled Legislative Council in 1824.
Thomas Brisbane was born at Largs, Ayrshire, in 1773
into a landed family, who bought him a commission in the 38th
Regiment at the age of sixteen. The 38th was sent to Ireland where
he became friends with another junior officer, Arthur Wellesley, who
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sensational discovery that the comet sighted every ten years was
one they saw on 26th November, 1818!
With mathematical aplomb, Encke quickly calculated that
it appeared in three or so year cycles. He also worked out it would
next enter into perihelion, its closest point to the Sun, on 24th May,
1822. And furthermore, he and his clever young friends figured that
if perihelion falls in November, December or January, it is best
viewed in the Northern Hemisphere; but if it occurs in May, June or
July, it can only be seen it in the Southern Hemisphere. So the race
was on between Team Sir Thomas Brisbane, in Sydney, and Team
Fearon Fallows, in Capetown, that southern winter of 1822!
Well, history shows that Brisbane won this riveting contest
easily; poor Fallows was a no-show, but he explained that, despite
clear Admiralty instructions, he failed to see the comet because he
was seriously ill from night-long exposure in his crummy temporary
observatory in his garden in Kloof Street. In fact, as a later apologist
observed: 'Two observers were often necessary to get results with
the instruments of Fallows' day, but he had great difficulty getting
even one reliable assistant. As a result, he often observed with his
wife, Mary Ann. He was relieved from this difficulty by the affection
and intelligence of Mrs Fallows ... the Cape astronomer had, like
Hevelius, the pleasure of finding his best assistant in the partner of
his affections' (the reference is to Johan Hevelius, the wealthy 17th
century Gdansk brewer and astronomer; today, he is remembered
in Gdansk's annual Hevelius Beer Festival but, alas, there is no
memorial to his selfless helpmate and second wife, Elizabeth
Margarethe).
Brisbane would have commiserated with Fallows in
Capetown on his way home in 1825. Nothing had gone to perfection
for Fallows. For a start, he was born in Cockermouth, in the English
Lakes District, in 1789, the same year another local lad, Fletcher
Christian, put the village on the world map forever when he seized
HMS Bounty from William Bligh, a mutiny in the Pacific which
enraged the British Admiralty into a fearsome quest for revenge.
The rage must have even permeated the placid gloom of the
Fallows' weaver's cottage.
Young Fearon escaped from the loom and found himself,
at thirty-one, a Cambridge academic success and, worryingly, a
favoured astronomer to the extravagant George IV. It was the new
king's idea to send him to the Cape Colony. Unfortunately, the
British authorities at the Cape had not been advised of Fallows'
arrival and refused to pay his expenses and store his instruments.
Finally, a sympathetic politician intervened and he was given a new
settlers' prefabricated hut and he was allowed sleeping quarters in
the town's granary.
It would be unkind to compare his miserable situation with
Brisbane's more favoured one. He and Mary Ann laboured until
1829 until they got their observatory into proper working order, after
which he succumbed to overwork and scarlet fever and died on died
on 25th July, 1831. He was buried in front of his observatory, twelve
feet down to deter grave robbers. (Even in Sydney, he would have
been safe six feet under).
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second lieutenant on the warship Sirius and, as was the style in the
jolly old free-for-all in the early colony, sired two fine sons by a
buxom convict wench, Ann Inett, while he was commandant at
Norfolk Island; he called them Norfolk and Sydney and got them
commissions in the navy, while Ann took voluntary redundancy as a
mistress and, by way of compensation, scored a tavern in Sydney
and a cheery husband called Mr Robinson.
King, the elder, returned to England, married an
understanding lass named Anna Josepha Coombe and returned to
Norfolk Island where she gave birth, in 1791, to a son he could
safely name Phillip (after his old colonial mentor) and Parker (the
bungling admiral mentioned in chapter two).
The young Phillip Parker King returned to England with his
parents in 1796 and remained in 1799, when they came to Sydney
to take up the vice-regal role. Like his half-brothers (and childhood
friends), Norfolk and Sydney, he became a navy midshipman. He
sailed to Sydney in 1817 with Admiralty orders to begin a detailed
survey of parts of the northern coast of Australia not covered by
Matthew Flinders in 1801-1803. One specific task was to find the
waterway to the inland sea cherished by mythographers and real
estate agents. Surely, they conjectured, the heart of Australia could
not be as fierce and forbidding as the coast? In 1822, King
completed his survey without finding any proof of such a
waterway ... but the notion of an inland sea persisted. Twenty-five
years later, when James Dunlop handed in his resignation, King
was living in semi-retirement in Sydney, having joined the
Exclusives Set, managed the London-based Australian Agricultural
Company, Australia's first multinational, and seen his widowed
mother, the beloved Anna Josepha, die in comfortable old age on
the family's lands west of Sydney.
King had a reputation as the colony's leading man of
technology and was often pleased to bolster this by publicising
various scientific feats in the Sydney Morning Herald, the Bunyip
Aristocracy's favoured news sheet. On 6th July, 1847, the
newspaper published the following letter, passed to them by King,
telling of Australia's probable first use of ether anaesthetic. It was
written by a Dr C. Buchanan at the Australian Agricultural
Company's hospital at Port Stephens, 180km north of Sydney ... 'I
wrote to you on 21st about a man named Hickey , who was brought
into the Company's hospital with a popliteal aneurysm, and
requesting you to make an inquiry about his being admitted to the
General Hospital in Sydney: or should there be any difficulty about
that, to send me up an aneurysmal needle, etc, and I would operate
here. Finding that the aneurysmal tumour continued to increase
very rapidly, and the man suffering a great deal of pain, I thought it
would be better to operate at all hazards, as the conveying him to
Sydney might be attended with risk. I got Fletcher to make me an
aneurysmal needle and a pair of retractors, which answered the
purpose very well. I performed the operation, and not being aware
of the kinds of apparatus used for the inhalation of ether, I tried the
simple bladder with mouthpiece, similar to what is used in the
inhalation of nitrous oxide, or laughing gas, which answered in
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markets of Adelaide; later that year, he repeated the feat with 1000
sheep and 600 cattle, after which he built a house in Adelaide with
some of the handsome profits. In 1840, having heard of the
staggering incompetence of the colony in the West, he and two
companions took a shipload of sheep and cattle to the southwest
port at Albany and drove them overland to the bare butchers' shops
of Perth. Thus, the dispirited folk got to know Edward John Eyre for
the first time.
Returning by ship to Adelaide in the autumn of 1840, he
won the support of South Australia's Governor George Gawler to
lead an expedition to penetrate the desert Dead Heart of Australia.
They would not succeed, of course; that would not be accomplished
for another twenty years; but their brave attempt, along with those
of Ludwig Leichhardt and Charles Sturt later, would define the
unforgiving brutality of this parched, flinty landscape of red and
purple hills, dry, stony watercourses, mysterious dark people,
sometimes painted, whose hostility or friendliness they could not
assume. They yearned to know what was concealed behind the
heat haze of those ghostly, blood-red northern ramparts, rising from
shimmering billabong mirages? God willing, it was a deep, cool,
freshwater inland sea!
On 18th June, 1840, the 24-year-old Eyre struck north
from Adelaide at the head of a Government-sponsored party of six
white men, including John Baxter, two aboriginals, thirteen horses
and forty fat sheep to eat on the way. The Government schooner,
Waterwitch, was sent to establish an advanced stores depot at the
head of Spencer Gulf, 300km northwest. Five years after the arrival
of the first settlers, the new South Australians were taking the first
steps on a track that would be followed by John McDouall Stuart
and Charles Todd.
In mid-winter, 8th July, 1840, the party reached Lake
Torrens, fifty kilometres north of the head of Spencer Gulf, having
rounded the seductive pastels of the Flinders Ranges to the east, a
modern water colourist's delight, framed by white-barked gum trees
with pale green leaves. Their hopes of making an early splash in the
fabled inland sea were dashed ... Eyre wrote:
'I found Lake Torrens completely girded by a steep sandy
ridge, exactly like the sandy ridges bounding the sea shore, no
rocks or stones were visible anywhere, but many saline coasts
peeped out in the outer ridge, and upon descending westerly to its
basin, I found the dry bed of the lake coated completely over with a
crust of salt, forming one unbroken sheet of pure white, and
glittering brilliantly in the sun. On stepping upon this, I found it
yielded to the foot, and that below the surface, the bed of the lake
consisted of a soft mud, and the further we advanced to the
westward the more boggy it got, so that at last it became quite
impossible to proceed, and I was obliged to return to the outer
margin of the lake without ascertaining whether there was water on
the surface of its bed further west or not.' Lake Torrens is a banana
shape, running from north to south about 200km and east to west
an average of 50km. Recently, if Eyre had managed to cross the
lake, he would have reached the barbed wire of the Howard Federal
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blankets and the things we stood in, and which consisted only of
trowsers, shirt and shoes. Most of our packsaddles, all our
horseshoes, most of our kegs for holding water, all of our buckets
bar one, our medicines, some of our firearms, a quantity of
ammunition, and a variety of other things, were here abandoned.
Among the many things we were compelled to leave behind there
was none that I regretted parting with more than a copy of Captain
Sturt's Expeditions, which had been sent to me by the author to
Fowler's Bay to amuse and cheer me on the solitary task I had
engaged in; it was the last kind offering of friendship from a highly
esteemed friend, and nothing but necessity would have induced me
to part with it. Could the donor, however, have seen the miserable
plight we were reduced to, he would have pitied and forgiven an act
that circumstances alone compelled me to.'
And so they struggled on through the tearing scrub,
occasionally, when the terrain allowed, clambering down to the
beach to walk for kilometres in the hard sand at the ocean's edge,
then, when the beach disappeared, crashing onwards through the
coastal bush. Then, on 29th April, 1841, occurred an event that has
become part of the European Australian narrative of privation,
loneliness and fellowship.
In his journal, Eyre carefully related the events of that long
night towards the end of his evening watch on the horses ... 'The
night was cold, and the wind blowing hard from the southwest,
whilst scud and nimbus were passing very rapidly by the moon. The
horses fed tolerably well, but rambled a good deal, threading in and
out among the many belts of scrub which intersected the grassy
openings, until at last I hardly knew exactly where our camp was,
the fires having apparently expired some time ago. It was now half
past ten and I headed the horses back, in the direction in which I
thought the camp lay, that I might be ready to call the overseer
(Baxter) to relieve me at eleven.
'Whilst thus engaged, and looking steadfastly among the
scrub, to see if I could anywhere detect the embers of our fires, I
was startled by a sudden flash, followed by the report of a gun, not
a quarter of a mile away from me. Imagining that the overseer had
mistaken the hour of the night, and not being able to find me or the
horses, had taken that method to attract my attention, I immediately
called out, but as no answer was returned, I got alarmed, and
leaving the horses, hurried up towards the camp as rapidly as I
could.
'About a hundred yards from it, I met the King George's
Sound native (Wylie, who Eyre had recruited on his earlier trip to
WA), running towards me, and in great alarm, crying out, "Oh,
Massa, oh, Massa, come here,' - but could gain no information from
him, as to what had occurred. Upon reaching the encampment,
which I did in about five minutes after the shot was fired, I was
horror-struck to find my poor overseer lying on the ground, weltering
in his blood, and in the last agonies of death.'
Eyre saw the camp site was in disarray; their two other
aboriginal companions had plundered their belongings and fled into
the bush. He was left alone with Wylie. He lifted Baxter's body and
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saw he had been shot through the heart with a musket ball. His
journal then contained one of the most evocative passages from
Australian exploration ...
'The frightful, appalling truth now burst upon me that I was
alone in the desert. He who had faithfully served me for many
years, who had followed my fortunes in adversity and in prosperity,
who had accompanied me in all my wanderings, and whose
attachment to me had been his sole inducement to remain with me
in this last, and to him alas, fatal journey was no more. For an
instant, I was almost tempted to wish that it was my own fate
instead of his. The horrors of my own situation glared upon me in
such startling reality, as for an instant almost to paralyse the mind.
At the dead hour of night, in the most inhospitable wastes of
Australia, with the fierce wind raging in unison with the scene of
violence before me, I was left with a single native, whose fidelity I
could not rely upon, and who for aught I knew might be in league
with the other two, who perhaps were even now, lurking with a view
to taking away my life as they had done that of the overseer. Three
days had passed since we left the last drop of water, and it was very
doubtful when we might find more. Six hundred miles of country had
to be traversed before I could hope find the slightest aid or
assistance of any kind.'
Eyre and Wylie pressed on through increasing cold and
heavy rain until, on 2nd June, 1841, they came upon the French
whaler, Mississippi, sheltering in Thistle Cove, near the present
town of Esperance. The name itself spoke of exploring tragedy:
John Thistle was the Master of the Investigator who drowned with
six other seamen on 21st February, 1802 at the mouth of Spencer
Gulf (Catastrophe Bay), after Matthew Flinders' charting of Thistle
Bay. Thistle, like John Baxter, was one of the strong, silent figures
of history: he'd accompanied Flinders and George Bass on their
1798 circumnavigation of Van Diemans Land, but because he
wasn't a 'gentleman', didn't feature strongly in accounts of the
voyage.
The Mississippi had an English captain, Rossiter, who
welcomed them aboard and provided Eyre with a comfortable berth
There is no record of the faithful Wylie's accommodation; Eyre had
taken to calling him 'my attendant' and was pleased that Wylie
entertained the French crew with his capacity for eating biscuits.
The crew were mainly young men: they explained that war was
expected to break out at any time between France and England and
all experienced seaman were ordered to stay at home! Eyre went
ashore with the captain and was shown the vegetable garden the
crew had planted and the odd-looking sheep they had grazing on
the foreshore.
A regular little French colonial outpost, it seemed, though
securely claimed for Britain. He and Wylie reluctantly farewelled the
Mississippi on 15th June; the kindly captain pressed six bottles of
wine and a tin of sardines on him. On 7th July, 1841, he stood on a
hill overlooking the town of Albany ... 'that goal I had so long looked
forward to, had so laboriously toiled to attain, was at last before me.'
Reaching the town, he was greeted joyously by the white residents
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and, on 13th July, boarded the vessel, Truelove, for Adelaide which
he reached on 26th July, an absence of a year and twenty-six days.
One young Englishman and an aboriginal teenager had made the
first east-west crossing of the Australian continent. Goodness, the
first covered wagon hadn't yet reached California (November, 1841)
- and the Americans had nearly 200 years start! Eyre wanted to go
exploring again ... but the South Australians had some urgent work
for him ...
In the West, having been reassured by Edward John Eyre that they
had not been forgotten by the rest of Australia, the settlers had
awesome astronomical moments which indicated they had not been
abandoned altogether by the Almighty.
'One evening in March, 1844,' recounted a pioneer, the
30-year-old Edward Willson Landor, 'whilst standing at my gate (he
was a solicitor in Perth) enjoying the pleasant balmy air and the
conversation of a friend, our attention was attracted to a luminous
appearance in the sky immediately above the horizon. We fancied
that a great ship must be on fire not a great distance from the coast.
The next evening, happening to leave the house at an early hour,
my eye was immediately caught by a great novelty in the heavens.
A magnificent comet extended itself over an entire fifth of the
firmament. Its tail reached to the belt of Orion, whilst its nucleus, a
ball of fire resembling a star of the fourth magnitude, was scarcely a
degree above the horizon. It looked like a fiery messenger rushing
headlong down from the very presence of GOD, bound with dread
tidings for some distant world. Beautiful, though terrible messenger,
it seemed to leave its long, fiery trace behind it in its passage
through the heavens. The soul of the spectator was filled with the
sense of its beauty, whilst admiration was sublimed into awe.
Speaking to us strange and wonderful things of the Holy of Holies
which it seemed to have left, it passed on its journey of billions and
trillions of miles with the glad speed of a love-inspired emanation
from the Most High. It left us to wonder at its transient visit, and to
wish for its return.'
Landor was jolly lucky to see this love-inspired emanation
several times that week: it was probably the Great Comet of 1844
which only turns up every 102,050 years. There was considerable
comet activity in Australia's portion of the heavens in the
early-1840s. The pioneer Melbourne journalist, Edmund Finn
(Garryowen) recalled the period in his Chronicles of Early
Melbourne (1888):
'Comets were but little known of, and whenever one was
seen it was terribly alarming to the sable race. The first recorded
visit of a comet to Melbourne was on the 3rd March, 1843, when
great consternation was caused by the appearance in the heavens
of an object resembling a giant moonbeam. When first observed it
was shaped like a dart; then its extremity curved, and gradually
turned into a sword blade. On the third night, it was ascertained to
be a comet of first-class magnitude, the denser part of the tail being
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explorer, Charles Sturt, before the older man set forth in the
wilderness on a mission as perilous as his own excursion to
Western Australia. Eyre and Sturt, at forty-nine his mentor and
friend, might have puffed at chill evening cigars with the Murray
rolling south at seven kilometres an hour at their feet (when the
placed was named Blanchetown in 1855, it was relocated to a
clifftop because of constant flooding) and reminisced; Sturt had
passed this very place in a whaleboat when he sailed down the
Murray in 1830 and named its estuary Lake Alexandrina after the
princess who would become Queen Victoria.
Sturt was born in India, son of a judge in Bengal, but he
was an underprivileged child of the Raj; his father missed out on
much of the loot usually available to astute Britons. Wealthier
relatives sent him to Harrow and a kindly aunt, who seemed to have
struck up some form of friendship with the fun-loving Prince Regent
in her salad days, secured him a commission in the 39th Regiment;
he fought against the French on the Peninsula, the Americans in
Canada, did occupation duties in France and Ireland, and, in
December, 1826, sailed with his regiment to NSW where a family
friend, Sir Ralph Darling, had recently replaced the star-gazing Sir
Thomas Brisbane as Governor.
Sturt immediately declared his interest in examining the
interior and thus avoided the squalid political/money-oriented
squabbles of the post-Rum Corps disciples and their Emancipist
adversaries in the convict colony. After several explorations,
including his famous voyage from the Murrumbidgee River to the
Murray's mouth in 1829-30, Sturt became a grazier in NSW but, on
falling deeply into debt, gladly accepted a position with the South
Australian public service. On 15th August, 1844, he left Adelaide
with 15 men, including John McDouall Stuart, six drays, a boat and
a walking larder of 200 sheep. Their objective was to penetrate
1300km to the Centre and bathe joyously in the Legendary Inland
Sea.
Two days earlier, on the evening of 13th August, 1844, the
German naturalist Ludwig Leichhardt left Sydney with five
volunteers on the steamer Sovereign for Brisbane. From there, they
would ride at least 5000km north then northwest overland to Port
Essington, a temporary British military foothold on the Coburg
(named, as Ludwig would have known, in honour of Her Majesty's
German cousins) Peninsula, 300 km northeast of the present
Darwin. Both exploration leaders would survive these terrible
expeditions, but fine young members of their teams would not. John
McDouall Stuart was one of the survivors; he was able pass on
invaluable information to the novice bushman Charles Todd fifteen
years later, particularly about the inadvisability of dragging wheeled
vehicles through the wilderness. Everyone knows (or doesn't know)
what happened to Leichhardt in his later expedition in 1848. The
merciless Outback swallowed him and his men (or, most likely,
carried them away in the sudden-flowing streams of the monsoonal
western Queensland Overflow).
Leichhardt, born on 23rd November, 1813, was the
Anglophile son of a Prussian landowner, who was studying
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roughly fenced and the land ploughed and sewed between the
trees. The wheat is very late and the huts over a long continuous
space. The only one I could understand was the schoolmaster who
was surrounded by thirty lads and lasses.'
Accompanied by nine servants, stockmen and bullock
drivers they trundled north upstream along the Murray Bank,
following when it swung eastward towards its junction with the
Darling River. Extreme care had been given to loading a very critical
cargo on to the expedition's spring cart.
Sturt wrote: 'The box of instruments sent from England for
the use of the expedition had been received and opened in
Adelaide. The most important of them were two sextants, three
prismatic compasses, two false horizons, and a barometer. One of
the sextants was a very good instrument, but the glasses of the
other were not clear, and unfortunately the barometer was broken
and useless, since it had the siphon tube, which could not be
replaced in the colony. I exceedingly regretted this accident, for I
had been particularly anxious to carry on a series of observations to
determine the level of the interior. I manufactured a barometer, for
the tube of which I was indebted to Captain (Edward) Frome, the
Surveyor-General, and I took with me an excellent house
barometer, together with two brewer's thermometers for
ascertaining the boiling point of water on Sykes' principle. The first
of the barometers was unfortunately broken on the way up to
Moorundie so I was a second time disappointed.'
Another great disappointment was in the English-
manufactured thermometers: they couldn't take the South
Australian heat without exploding! Sturt wrote, sadly: 'The
thermometers sent from England, graduated to 127 degrees only,
were too low for the temperature into which I went, and
consequently useless at times, when the temperature in the shade
exceeded that number of degrees. One of them was found broken
in its case, the other burst when set to try the temperature, by the
over expansion of mercury in its bulb.'
Of course, the shivering English craftsmen making those
sensitive thermometers might have been excused for
underestimating the potential of colonial heat: Britain and, indeed,
the whole of Europe was just recovering from a mini-Ice Age
(1650-1860) when people skated on the Thames, Piet 'Hell' Breugel
the Younger painted Flemish rural backgrounds as if they were
frozen Siberia, Samuel Pepys reported in his diary of 25th March,
1662, of 1000 oaks blown down in the Forest of Dean; the period is
called the 'Maunder Minimum' when sunspots were hardly ever
seen ... but that was hardly an excuse for Sturt's thermometers
cutting out at 127F (52.7C) when they should have allowed a
generous 150F (65.5C)!
Eyre accompanied Sturt's expedition from Murrundie until
they had safely negotiated the scene of the conflicts with the tribes
at the junction of the Rufus and the Murray (west of the present city
of Mildura). He turned back on 10th September, 1844, after
distributing some blankets among the battered tribespeople. Sturt
wrote that the aborigines did not seem to hanker for revenge; they
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was her right to stop donkeys passing her house. And Broadstairs,
of course, was just up a rutted road from Dover from where
Crampton's submarine copper cable, insulated with the miraculous
natural southeast Asian fibre gutta percha and protected with iron
wire crossed the English Channel to emerge at a beach near Calais
that 25th September, 1851.
We cannot be certain how many times Charles Todd, aged
twenty-five, attended the Great Exhibition, but he would have had
the indulgence and encouragement of an occasionally benevolent
employer, George Airy (1801-92), the Astronomer Royal from 1835
to 1881. Of course, Airy was normally a stickler for keeping time in
the workplace or, indeed, in all Mankind's workplaces. He
introduced the clock-in-clock-out procedure for his staff, a practice
that was becoming commonplace in factories as William Blake's
'dark satanic mills' modernised under the pressure of new
technology.
Airy, after all, was in charge of the Greenwich Time Balls
and, as such, was the Chief Time Keeper for the British Empire,
nay, the whole civilised world, of which that Empire contained a
goodly portion.
Earlier in that glorious year, 1851 (4th January, to be
precise), his sensational Airy Transit Circle' was unveiled at the
Royal Observatory after an annoying delay because the London
early winter fogs made it impossible to view any celestial body more
than fifty metres away. The Airy Transit Circle, a super-telescope,
sits on the north-south line which marks the Longitude 'O'.
In 1884, a conference in Washington DC agreed that this
Prime Meridian would signal the start of the Universal Day for the
entire world. Airy's enthusiasm for the highest order in all things
would have rubbed off on Todd, one of his most enthusiastic
disciples. (Many years later, Todd's keenness for commonsense
was tested keenly in 1877 at the opening of the Eucla telegraph
station, on the shifting sands of the South Australia-Western
Australia border. Starch-collared operators on the Western
Australian side received messages in American Morse code from
their South Australian colleagues which had to be converted to
Universal Morse for the westerly transmission. This was
intercolonial bloody-mindedness, equalled only by the change of rail
gauges in 1883 at the NSW-Victoria colonial border crossing of
Albury.)
Todd, the young meteorologist, might have found
diversion in one of the Great Exhibition's more bizarre displays. This
was Dr George Merryweather's 'Tempest Prognosticator', very
popular among the oohing-aahing hoi polloi, who surged around
this marvel of weather forecasting amid the soaring glass walls of
the Crystal Palace.
Merryweather (again, not a nom de plume) said, modestly,
it was 'one of the grandest ideas that ever emanated from the mind
of man'. It resembled a Victorian folly, a crazed merry-go-round
consisting of twelve bottles of white glass, around the base of a
circular stand, atop which was a tinkling bell surrounded by twelve
hammers. Each bottle was connected to one hammer through a
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something ... but he would be advised to take his dreamy eyes off
his work bench because a smooth-talking Yankee artist/
entrepreneur was lurking in the wings.
Samuel Finley Breese Morse, aged thirty-eight, widowed
father of three, sailed from New York to Europe in November, 1829,
leaving his children in the care of relatives. He was a moderately
successful painter, but a brilliant absorber of the inventiveness of
others. Morse was on a belated Grand Tour of Europe, visiting the
Vatican Galleries, studying the Old Masters, meeting an old portrait
subject, the heroic Marquis de Lafayette, who outwitted the British
force at Yorktown in the Revolutionary War and, generally, picking
up good ideas. But it was not until his return voyage from Le Havre
to New York in the 436-tonne packet vessel Sully in the autumn of
1832 that Morse cottoned on to the best idea of all: the electric
telegraph.
Morse was chatting over cigars in the ship's library with
another passenger, Dr Charles T. Jackson, from Boston (not far
from Morse's birthplace, Charlestown, where his father, Jedidiah
and mother, Elizabeth, were buried) when the subject of the latest
European discoveries in the field of electromagnetism came up, as
it does. Morse claimed later he was seized immediately with notions
of an electromagnetic recording telegraph and a dot-dash code
system, not unlike the smoke signals of the Red Indians.
This version of a sudden, inspirational rush of blood to
head was challenged five years later when Dr Charles T. Jackson
claimed in a court of law that he, in fact, was the true American
inventor of the telegraph. Morse won the case, but Dr Jackson soon
became distracted in the 1840s with another claim against Dr
William Morton that he was the true discoverer of the anaesthetic
uses of ether. Perhaps Jackson was the actual intellectual father of
both, but he most certainly didn't have the brains to keep his mouth
shut, particularly in the presence of Morse and Morton.
In 1835, Morse was appointed Professor of Literature, Arts
and Design at the forerunner of New York University and soon
became acquainted with Dr Leonard Gale, a science lecturer with
access to a sophisticated engineering laboratory where they could
develop their telegraph designs. Gale became part-owner of the
future telegraph profits, and was joined by Alfred Vail, whose family
happened to own an ironworks. In September, 1837, Morse
patented the telegraph in the U.S., coincidentally, the same month
that Charles Wheatstone and his partner, William Fothergill Cooke
patented their five-needle system in Britain. The following January,
1838, Morse introduced his 'Morse Code' and the stage was set for
a world revolution in communications. In Britain, the first working
telegraph, from Paddington to Slough, was licensed as a 'marvel of
science' to a businessman, Thomas Horne.
The new colony in the Great Australian Bight was just a beachhead
in the wilderness in the late-1830s when all this razzle-dazzle
technology was being unveiled in Britain and the United States.
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much to the delight of the patriotic pub clients. Charles also had a
reputation for an extraordinary memory, too, something which would
evoke admiration from Airy who had once recited 2394 lines of Latin
verse in an examination at Colchester Grammar School (1814-19)
(such feats were widely publicised in the early part of the 19th
century: on 19 July, 1807, the Sydney Gazette reported the case of
a convict named Henry Abbott who, attempting to shoot a crow, had
his musket backfire into his brain, whereupon, 'He spoke several
times with much precision; then rapidly recited the greater part of
the multiplication table; and at the expiration of four hours expired.')
On 16th December, 1841, Airy offered Charles an
immediate start as an 'astronomical computer' (he was one of six
appointed) at the nearby Royal Observatory where he had been
Astronomer Royal since 1835. Airy was a complex man, at times
mean-spirited and sarcastic towards his staff, trusting none of his
subordinates to carry out their allotted tasks to his satisfaction; at
other times he was generous and loyal to his inferiors, allowing
them to share in his many interests. Charles was invited to join one
these hobbies: The scientific exploration of the precise location of
Julius Caesar's successful landing in Britain in May, 54 BC. It was
generally accepted that Caesar made an unsuccessful attempt to
land two legions on the Kent coast on 26th August, 55 BC, but was
defeated by the weather and hostile natives. Airy (possibly with
Charles' help) calculated that the successful landing was made the
following May on the stony beach at Deal, near the present site of
Walmer Castle. Otherwise, Charles Todd was engaged fifteen hours
a day, six days a week, doing the sums to help astronomers track
the heavenly bodies and thus increase man's knowledge of
navigation and time-keeping.
Then, in 1847, Airy recommended him for the assistant
astronomer's position at his old university, Cambridge. Charles Todd
at last had the opportunity to work with the famous 'Northumberland
telescope' which had been presented by the Duke of
Northumberland to the newly-opened Observatory in 1833. The
Cambridge University Astronomy Society says the telescope, which
has been preserved and is still used by the Society, was one of the
world's largest refracting telescopes 'with an accurate clock-driven
equatorial mounting to follow a star in its diurnal (daily) motion
across the sky.' Airy was still Cambridge Astronomer when the
telescope was presented so he was able to make some 'English'
changes from its French origins. For the technically-savvy, 'the lens
was an achromatic doublet of 11.6in clear aperture and focal length
19ft 6in, made by Cauchoix of Paris'. Sadly, all good things must
end and Charles Todd, then aged twenty-three, was rudely
awakened from his telescopic reverie in the early summer of 1849
by a surprise invitation to afternoon tea from a very distant cousin,
Mrs Charlotte Bell, at her residence at 3 Free School Lane, near the
town centre of Cambridge.
According to family legend, it was Alice who saw him first.
She was peeping from a window in the upstairs schoolroom of the
Bell family's four-storey, late-17th century gabled house. He walked
around a slight bend in the ancient lane, eyes fixed on the
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the eastern tip of Malaya, was a small fishing village when Thomas
Stamford Raffles, an agent for the Company arrived on 29th
January, 1819, and decided it should be developed as the new
trading hub of southeast Asia.
Montgomerie watched the Malays making the handles for
their parangs, or machetes, used for cutting through the woody,
dense jungle. He saw that the gum employed was a kind of latex
which could have applications in the manufacture of surgical
instruments. He sent samples to the Royal Society of Arts ... and
British industry had a new plastic-like material. It was known as
gutta-percha, derived from the evergreen east Asian trees of genus
Palaquium, collected by bleeding and moulded into bricks to be
carried to Europe by ship.
When Montgomerie's gutta-percha arrived in England in
1843, it proved to be the ideal insulator for copper submarine
telegraph cables. It was far superior to india rubber which was used
in earlier trials, because it hardened without becoming brittle. Most
importantly, the cold and pressure of the ocean depths improved its
insulating qualities.
The first trial submarine cable was laid in 1845 using india
rubber insulation between the warships Blake and Pique, a
measured mile apart in Portsmouth Harbour, southern England. In
1850, Charles West, employed by an English firm, S.W. Silver and
Co. laid a cable using gutta-percha, 25 nautical miles between
Dover and Calais. This line was cut, accidentally, by a French
fisherman after three days. Finally, British ships successfully played
out a cable for the Submarine Telegraph Co. between St Margaret's
Bay, Dover (where, much later, Ian Fleming bought Noel Coward's
seaside house), and Sangatte (where the Cross Channel tunnel
now emerges beside a refugee camp of aspirational Britons), south
of Calais, in 1851. Thomas Crampton had begun to wire Britain, the
world's industrial leader, to just about everyone.
In 1852-53, the cable companies, mostly private
entrepreneurs using venture capital, cast their eyes upon the North
Sea and the Irish Sea. Crampton's Submarine Telegraph Co. linked
Dover with the Belgian port of Ostend, 115km northeast, giving
Queen Victoria and her adored consort Prince Albert a direct link,
albeit a coded one, with their beloved mentor and shared uncle,
King Leopold 1 of Belgium. He was a Saxe-Coburg who made
clever marital connections with the royal families of Europe and was
able to guide them in turbulent times, particularly the discomforting
revolutionary year of 1848.
Another nervous north European monarch, Frederick VII,
of Denmark, quickly took advantage of the early warning
advantages of the telegraph. In 1853, the same year that Leopold
went online, he had an undersea cable connect Copenhagen's
island of Zealand (Sjaelland), with island of Fyn (Funen) and the
Danish mainland beyond, using British-supplied gutta-percha.
Frederick VII's problems were with Denmark's bossy ethnic German
minority, but the waving of no end of telegraph wires could help in
1864 when Chancellor Otto Bismarck decided to intervene and
smash the Danish army with Prussian arms. Countless shiny new
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horse and telegraph to ten days. The service lasted less than two
years, the riders covered a million kilometres (only one was killed by
Indians) until they were, in the local lingo, dry gulched by modern
technology. And an Australian came to leave his heart in San
Francisco: the retired NSW bushranger Frank Christie Gardiner
arrived in exile in 1875 to become publican of the Twilight Saloon, a
quiet drinking haunt for old gun-slingers in the even-tide of their
lives. Gollee!
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Street, Cambridge, the previous 5th April, but Alice still addressed
him as 'Mr Todd'. The more familiar 'Oh, Charlie!' entered her
lexicon, according to the same intimate family anecdote, during a
close encounter in a storm in the Bay of Biscay some days after
they sailed. That's a pleasant tale, of course, but the birth of their
first child, Charlotte Elizabeth in Adelaide on 12th March, 1856,
indicates that they were exchanging more than pleasantries
between their wedding and the Irene's departure from England
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astonished to see the gold escort rumble up to the door of the inn.
Tolmer dismounted, marched into the bar and said: 'Well, lads.
When are you going to shoot us?' The bushrangers hurriedly
decamped and peace came to the wide brown land. So the legend
of Alexander Tolmer goes.
But there was a far greater threat from Victoria to South
Australia's interests than a handful of ex-Vandemonian lags (who
might have been startled wheat farmers enjoying a quiet drink). This
was the Victorians' superior grasp of the new technology in
communications. The gold rushes had drawn all manner of
enlightened people, not just gold-seekers, from all corners of the
globe to Victoria and its metropolis. They came from continental
Europe, leftovers from the revolutionary turmoil of 1848, or those
looking for healthier, drier climes, such as the botanist Ferdinand
von Mueller, who established Melbourne's renowned Botanic
Gardens, or Georg Neumayer, who founded an observatory in 1857
and taught the young William John Wills the arts of astronomy;
there were entrepreneurial folk from North America, Freeman Cobb,
with his American-style lightweight stage coaches and Francis
Boardman Clapp, who eventually established the city's famed cable
tram system (and whose son, Harold, unwittingly gave the
expression 'clapped out' to the national lexicon when he supervised
a future generation of worn-out rattlers). And there was Samuel
Walker McGowan, aged just twenty-four when he landed in
Melbourne from the Glance early in 1853.
McGowan was born in Londonderry, Ireland, and migrated
to Kingston, Canada, on the shores of Lake Ontario, with his
parents as a child. He studied law at university in Toronto until his
father's early death in 1847 liberated him from paternal ambition; he
turned to telegraphy, his great love, and escaped to New York City
in his teens to study under that renowned inventor, Professor
Samuel Morse. He met Ezra Cornell, a creator of telegraph
insulators and managed the New York-Buffalo telegraph line ... then
word of the Victorian gold discoveries reached him, those days, of
course, by sea and surface mail. He returned to Canada, bade his
widowed mother, Eliza, and his childhood sweetheart, Annie
Benton, farewell and boarded ship for the New Gold Mountain (to
ease the concerns of the concerned sentimentalist, he did marry
Annie at St James Old Anglican Cathedral, Melbourne, on 30th
June, 1857, they had four children and lived in St Kilda, a genteel
bayside suburb of Melbourne).
The entrepreneurial Mr McGowan landed in Melbourne
with several Morse instruments and accompanied by a 'first rate
electrician'. His intention was to create a free enterprise telegraph
monopoly to link the Sydney, Melbourne and Adelaide triangle,
much like those favoured in the United States where a bevy of
would-be capitalists touted for shareholders. The telegraph could be
a splendid little earner, too; the briefest desperate message ('Send
money') could cost the equivalent of next week's wages in the early
days of international telegraph. But McGowan hadn't reckoned on
the benevolent socialist attitudes of Australia's British-directed
colonial governments.
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explained, colourfully.
But many of the ladies of the Nashwauk (no lives were
lost) and other immigrant spinsters found sunnier futures in South
Australia, particularly in the boundless horizons of the Irish Catholic
communities in the wheat and wine-growing district around Clare,
100km north of Adelaide, where Charles Todd would establish one
of his most important telegraph and weather stations. Most of the
female immigrants were taken by bullock dray along the track
leading from the port into town to the Female Immigration Depot in
North Terrace. Katherine Hennessy, aged twenty, was one of these
girls, squeezed on the dray with her mattress, blanket, cup, plate
and cutlery. She might have been crammed into a ward with ninety
others; according to the Adelaide Times 'many was the girl who
burst into a flood of tears' when she saw the quarters; they were
awfully reminiscent of the Female Factories of convict NSW earlier
in the century; men came to the Female Factory to choose fine
specimens to be their assigned servants/slaves (with certain legal
limitations). In Adelaide, the girls were free - but no one came to
choose them as servants in the depressed year of 1855.
The Colonial Surgeon, Dr Gosse, came to the Depot daily,
occasionally accompanied by the Governor. Gosse treated burns
from the sun, lamps or stoves. There were cases of consumption,
diarrhoea. He was on constant watch for typhoid. There was a
'disorder of the nervous system' which he attributed to 'social
disorientation consequent on immigration'.
Governor MacDonnell eventually objected to the expense
of maintaining the women ... so Matron Margaret Keenan decided to
go bush with her charges, reviving a tradition begun by the social
reformer, Caroline Chisholm, in NSW in the early 1840s. Mrs
Chisholm rescued free, single immigrants from the clutches of
Sydney's vice vendors, loaded them on the drays and took them to
the back blocks where she contracted them as servants at £9/16 a
year, plus rations.
Alice and Charles might have watched from an upstairs
window of their temporary residence as Matron Keenan's drays
lurched through North Adelaide to the open spaces beyond. The
Adelaide they were leaving, the future home for Alice and Charles
for the rest of their lives, was not all dens of vice and disease. It had
fine Supreme Court House; a Treasury Building; the Botanic
Gardens on North Terrace whose Versailles-inspired design was
being supervised by the botanist, George Francis, who had
squeezed the first olives in South Australia four years earlier; a
saddlery called J.A. Holden and Company, forerunner of General
Motors Holden; a Post Office which would one day be the fiefdom
of Charles Todd; and the splendid Royal Victoria Theatre, owned by
the Mayor, John Lazar, who was accused by the silvertail wowser
set of putting on 'racy entertainment'. Alice would never go there.
On Hindley and Rundle streets, there were busy shops. A favourite
of Alice and Poor Eliza's was Sparks which had shawls, ribbons and
laces from Home so far away ... so very far away ...
In the spring, Matron Keenan and her girls, including
Katherine Hennessy, made for the northern servants' depot at
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Clare, named after his home county in Ireland by the pioneer settler,
Edward Gleeson, in 1840. Governor MacDonnell had ordered the
establishment of these depots at Gawler, Robe, Willunga,
Encounter Bay and Mount Barker as well as Clare, and 450 of the
girls found employment (and husbands) through them. In Clare,
Katherine Hennessy was the quickest bride of them all; in the
nearby hamlet of Sevenhill, named by the pioneering priests after
the Seven Hills in Rome, she married a farmer, Charles Crew, who
had recently returned from the Victorian gold diggings where he'd
made his pile. Young Katherine, like Alice (as it subsequently
proved) made an excellent career move when she left the Old
World in 1855!
Charles Todd was very astute and observed the new
colony's religious diversity and maturity that would inform his
judgement for the rest of his life. There was soon an example of the
damage caused by an autocratic religious bigot. Charles was a
detached observer of the affair. It involved the Governor, Sir Richard
MacDonnell, the Anglican Bishop of Adelaide, Augustus Short, and
the visiting Congregationalist theologian, Rev. Thomas Binney
(known 'the Archbishop of Nonconformity'), who was based in
England. Binney visited the Australian colonies in 1857-59, and
when he arrived in Adelaide, Sir Richard MacDonnell saw the
opportunity to celebrate the colony's religious tolerance. He asked
Short to invite Binney to preach in an Anglican church.
Short refused. He was aged in his early fifties, a privileged
product of minor county aristocracy, raised in a manor house near
Exeter, in Devon, and educated at Westminster School and Christ
Church, Oxford. The Governor was both bewildered and miffed;
Binney maintained friendly relations in Britain with many dignitaries
of the Established Church. MacDonnell had a furious exchange of
letters with Short, but the bishop was unmoved. The liberal-minded
citizens of Adelaide regarded Short's actions, one historian wrote,
'as repugnant to the foundation principles of the colony'. The
community was divided. Charles Todd relied on Alice to keep him
abreast of developments in this unwelcome, weary Old World
intrusion into the eagerness of the New.
He was very busy. So was Alice: their second child,
Charles Edward was born on 7th April, 1858, their third, Hedley
Lawrence on 27th June, 1860. Two years apart each time, as far as
practicable; he was a sticker for punctuality, was Charles, although
Alice must have helped. Meanwhile, soon after arriving, he
established the government telegraph from Adelaide to the port to
accompany the first steam train service; he then set about
supervising a 40km line northwest to Gawler, South Australia's
second town, laid out in 1839 on Colonel William Light's plans.
Charles, a former keeper of the Queen's Time Balls in Greenwich,
would not have been amused when, on a visit in 1866, he saw that
the manufacturer had made an error on the eastern face of the new
post office clock: the letters IV should have read VI. Can no one be
trusted! Fuming, he stormed off, but the local staff just shrugged
their shoulders ... the error is still visible today! The explorer, John
McDouall Stuart, dispatched in December, 1861, by the South
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crew of 46, struck a reef on the west side of King Island. Nine
people survived. People who knew these things said McGowan was
tempting fate by running a cable through this stormy graveyard. And
they were right. The line was properly insulated with gutta-percha
but it worked only intermittently for three years until it was
abandoned. It was not until the 1870s that McGowan tried again.
Charles Todd had another maritime tragedy on his mind in
the winter of 1859. In the early hours of 6th August, the coastal
steamship, Admella, hit rocks off Cape Northumberland near the
Victoria-South Australia border, 60km northwest of the grimly-
named Ship Wreck Coast. She carried 84 passengers, a crew of 27
and a cargo consisting mainly of ninety tonnes of copper and flour
for the swelling population of Melbourne. She was an Adelaide
favourite: her normal run linked Adelaide, Melbourne and the
northern Tasmanian port of Launceston (hence her name: Ad-Mel-
La). In those horrifying pre-dawn minutes, Admella broke in three;
her funnel crashed down on to the deck and her falling rigging
swept passengers and crew into a turbulent sea, never to be seen
again. On board were several prized racehorses being taken to
Melbourne for the spring racing season, and they were carried away
with their handlers. Distress rockets were fired to alert the Cape
Northumberland lighthouse (about 20 kilometres), but these were
wet and failed to ignite.
Dawn revealed a deserted coastline only three kilometres
north! Most passengers and crew had survived the night and clung
to the remains of Admella. Three brave crew members volunteered
to swim for help, but all were lost. The day passed, ships went by in
the distance. Next day, they built a raft and fifteen men made the
beach, but three men and two children (there were fifteen aboard)
were lost; five of the men, valuing their persons rather highly,
offered £100 each for a place on the raft. The remaining three parts
of the Admella began to break up in the relentless pounding of the
surf. They built another raft from bits and pieces. A meat chopper
was their only tool. Several seamen made shore and set off through
the dunes and coastal swamps for the Cape Northumberland
lighthouse.
They reached it thirty hours after the ship foundered. The
shocked head keeper, Captain Ben Germein, set out on horseback
for the nearest telegraph station at Mount Gambier, twenty-five
kilometres north, to raise help from lifeboat crews from as far away
as Portland, in Victoria. But Germein was thrown from his horse and
concussed; a local squatter, Peter Black, completed his desperate
dash. The lifeboats came and struggled heroically in the boiling sea.
The final count was twenty-four survivors; eighty-seven, including
nineteen women and fifteen children, had perished. But how many
might they have saved if summoned earlier?
Charles was called to a meeting with the Governor, Sir
Richard MacDonnell (who had recently bestowed his name on the
port nearest the tragedy) and other colonial bigwigs. They were
taking the loss of the Admella personally, as were most of the
people of the colony and neighbouring Victoria; one of the dead was
George Fisher, son James Hurtle Fisher (soon to be knighted), one
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It was all about the climate and other unstoppable forces of nature,
Charles might have said to himself, as he set out to bring some
order to Australia's weather reporting and forecasting in the second
half on the 1850s. He began publishing his weather reports in the
Advertiser in December, 1858, following the example of the
Melbourne Argus which began publishing barometer and
thermometer readings and reports on wind and rain from the
Victorian Surveyor-General's Department in 1856.
As his network of weather stations/telegraph stations in
South Australia expanded, his reports in the Advertiser became
daily and took on a snappy, futuristic tone, ('Wind NE, weather fine,
hot'). He saw his Adelaide meteorological service as providing
advance warnings to the more easterly colonies: 'If a peculiar state
of the weather revealed itself at Adelaide, notice might be
transmitted at once to Melbourne and thence to Sydney. The
intervening stations might be warned of the change, and thus all
would be prepared to provide against the consequences of a storm'
(much as today's Test cricket enthusiasts in Melbourne get a good
idea of the next day's weather by studying the sky during live
television broadcasts from Adelaide).
When Charles Todd was employed at the Royal
Observatory in the early-1850s, he came under the influence of the
leading meteorologist, James Glaisher. They became keenly
interested in the work of their French contemporaries, Barral and
Bixio, who made their first hydrogen balloon ascent from the garden
of the Paris Observatory on 29th June, 1850. The writer F. Marion
explained their objectives in his book, The Conquest of the Skies
(Paris, 1870):
'These gentlemen had conceived the project of rising by
means of a balloon to a great height, in order to study, with the
assistance of the very best instruments in use in their day, a
multitude of phenomena then imperfectly known, the subject to
which they specially direct their attention were the law on the
decrease of temperature in progress upwards, the discovery of
whether the chemical composition of the atmosphere is the same
throughout all it parts, the comparison of the strength of the solar
rays in the higher regions of the atmosphere and on the surface of
the earth, the ascertaining whether the light reflected and
transmitted by the clouds is or is not polarised etc.'
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was lost. Next day, 11th July, back at Tomkinson Creek, he decided
to surrender, temporarily, in the face of adversity, and return to
Adelaide.
That night, by campfire light, he wrote: 'We are all nearly
naked, the scrub has been so severe on our clothes, one can
scarcely tell the original colour of a single garment they are so
patched. Our boots are also gone ... I have tried to make the Gulf
and river both before rain fell and immediately after it had fallen; but
the results were the same, unsuccessful. Even after the rain. I could
not get a step further than before it. I shall commence my
homeward journey tomorrow morning. Wind S. The horses have
had a severe trial from the long journeys they have made, and the
great hardships and privations they have undergone. On my last
journey, they were 106 hours without water.'
So for the next two months, they walked their horses back
to Port Augusta, at the head of Spencer Gulf; Burke and Wills were
dead; John King took refuge with the Yantruwanta people (and
fathered a daughter with a woman of the clan, so some of the
Yantruwanta descendants say) while he waited for rescue. King's
rescue came from Melbourne in the shape of Alfred Howitt and his
men in September, as Stuart was preparing to board a steamer in
Port Augusta for Adelaide (without his men who continued the
journey overland).
The colonial capital of South Australia welcomed him as a
hero when his ship docked in Adelaide on 22nd September;
Governor Sir Richard MacDonnell presented him with the 1861
medal of the Royal Geographical Society. Stuart proclaimed himself
as fit as a flea: donations poured in and he announced he would
leave on his next assault on the northern desert scrub almost
immediately. In Melbourne, the neighbouring capital, they had
nothing to celebrate; they had to wait a year before the boxes
containing the remains and Burke and Wills came home. And then it
was by ship via Adelaide. The Great Outback was still ahead on
points.
In May, 1861, that year of unhappiness for many and good
fortune for some, another young man, George Woodroffe Goyder,
aged thirty-four, was summoned from survey duties 600km
northwest of Adelaide to be appointed the colony's Surveyor-
General. His appointment confirmed that size didn't matter in the
annals of South Australian conquest of the Red Centre.
Predictability, South Australians had bestowed the name of 'the
Wee Scot' on John McDouall Stuart because he was just 168cm (5ft
6in), tall; George Goyder, who only reached the Wee Scot's chin,
was soon to be known as 'Little Energy', and Charles Todd, who
came between, was known as, well, 'Mr Todd'. Alice, who knew
them all, was much taller and considered them a manageable
package. Of course, Little Energy tested her Victorian sense of
charity on 20th November, 1871, when he married his recently-
deceased wife's sister and lived up to his nickname by fathering
three children by her in addition to the nine he'd sired by his wife.
The circumstances, for the gossip-minded who are looking
for relief from all this stuff about the weather, were that Goyder had
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In the early afternoon of 17th October, 1861, eight days before John
McDouall Stuart's party left Adelaide on its final assault on Central
Australia, a ghastly series of events began 1500km northeast in
Queensland. The squatter Horatio Wills had just settled down for his
post-luncheon siesta at his new land-holding on the Nogoa River
when a woman's anguished cry pierced the inland tropic quiet. It
was the prelude to the worst massacre of Europeans by aborigines
in Australian history. Nineteen whites died, men, women and
children. The Europeans exacted an awful revenge: scores of
blacks were hunted into every rocky crevice and slaughtered.
The liberal Brisbane Courier reported on 23rd November,:
'A great massacre has been made among the blacks of the Nogoa.'
In Adelaide, Stuart's people knew nothing of this: the killing of Wills'
party happened just seventeen days before Queensland came
online on the east coast telegraph network. Whether the gruesome
events would have caused Stuart to pause in his planning is a
matter of conjecture. He was a cautious explorer who never lost a
man, but he had expressed his determination to break through to
the north coast whether it killed him or not. And it came ever so
close to doing just that! But on the 25th October, when his men set
out, they were in blissful ignorance of the happenings in
Queensland.
Some celebrity connections of the late lamented Horatio
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them, I proceeded over the plain, keeping a sharp look out - should
they threaten again, I shall allow them to come close and make an
example of them. Before entering the scrub, we could see no sign
of them following. About sundown arrived at Mount Harris without
further annoyance. No water for the horses - short hobbled and
watched them during the night. Cloudy; wind southeast.' They were
just fifty kilometres north of Brinkley's Bluff, where they had
penetrated the MacDonnell Range.
In mid-March, the expedition passed Central Mount
Stuart, which Stuart had discovered in 1860 and named Sturt (only
to have to it changed with the suspected connivance of Governor
Sir Richard McDonnell, no admirer of Stuart's near-namesake and
exploring mentor). They marched north without fuss, through boney
country, boring to the uncultivated eye, keeping as much as
possible to Stuart's 1860-61 tracks. There was still no rain, but
water became more abundant in pools and creeks as they pushed
well into the tropics. On Saturday, 5th April, 1862, they reached the
outlying pools of Newcastle Waters, Stuart's northernmost point in
1861 (and named after the Secretary for Colonies, the Duke of
Newcastle). Stuart was pleased to discover it had lost nothing of its
oasis ambience. He wrote: 'I found all the ponds full of water, and
running one into another. Wind southeast. Latitude 17º36'29.' They
were nearly 2000km NNW of Adelaide.
Next day was the Sabbath and the party rested, apart
from William Kekwick, the deputy leader, who received his leader's
blessing to take to shotgun and attempt a brace of ducks, which
were plentiful on the treed billabongs of Newcastle Waters.
Kekwick's path took him towards the smoke of two native fires and
he came upon two aborigines, who ran away ...'In an hour
afterwards,' Stuart wrote, 'five natives came within 100 yards of the
camp, and seemed anxious to come up to it, but were not permitted.
Two hours afterwards we were again visited by fifteen more, to
some of whom a present was made of some looking-glasses and
handkerchiefs; at the same time, they were given to understand that
they must not approach nearer the camp, and signs were made for
them to return to their own camp, which they shortly did.
'In the afternoon, we were again visited by nineteen of
them, who approached within a hundred yards of the camp, when
they all sat down and had a good stare at us, remaining a long time
without showing any inclination to go; at length, some of them
startled the horses, which were feeding near the water, which made
them gallop towards the camp, so frightened the natives that they
all ran away, and we were not again troubled with them for the rest
of the evening. A few clouds; wind southwest.'
On Monday, 7th April, 1862, they moved from the east end
of Newcastle Waters to Stuart's old campsite at the northern end,
followed by a crowd of aborigines who gave them a noisy and
heartfelt farewell. At the northern end, they rested and repaired their
equipment. A week later, leaving Kekwick in charge of the camp,
Stuart set out with Thring and Frew to find a way through the
hitherto impassable Sturt's Plain. They were unable to find water on
the planned route and returned to the camp at Newcastle Waters on
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18th April ... 'On my arrival, I found the party all right, but very
anxious about me (us) because I had been absent longer than
expected. No natives had been near them during my absence at
this time; smokes were seen all around. Weather hot during the day,
but cold at night and in the morning. Wind southeast.'
The whole expedition, harassed by mosquitoes and flies,
rode from Newcastle Waters on 21st April through scrub and open
plain and camped at Howell's Ponds, 30km north. They established
a base camp there, and Stuart and Thring scouted the way ahead in
a fruitless search for water. They retreated to Howell's Ponds ...
'Wednesday, 30th April. - Howell's Ponds. I feel so unwell today that
I am unable to go out, besides I shall require my compass case and
other things mended, which got torn to pieces in the last journey by
the forest and the scrub. Yesterday's clouds are all gone, and have
left us no rain; another hot day, wind east.' Stuart was beginning to
suffer from scurvy, which had caused such consternation during his
explorations with Charles Sturt in 1844. They battled on, finding
occasional water ... King's Chain of Ponds, McGorrerey's Ponds,
Auld's Ponds, named for his young team members' loyalty in such
trying times.
Having dodged repeated aboriginal winter growth-
promoting bushfires ('controlled burns', we call them today'), on
Sunday, 31st May, they came to a splendidly grassed plain and
found a beautiful oasis. Stuart named this place Daly Waters, after
the newly-appointed Governor of South Australia, Sir Dominick
Daly. They were 450km in a straight line south of their destination at
Van Diemens Gulf. Their latitude was 16º24'47 and their longitude
133º3'. According to records kept since 1873, when Charles Todd's
first telegraph operators/weather recorders were stationed there,
the May/June average hottest temperatures have been 31.4ºC/
28.8ºC and the minimum 15.9ºC/14.IºC. Stuart doesn't say what the
temperature was that day, other than 'it was hot as if it were the
middle of summer'.
Here, the expedition remained until 10th June while Stuart
and the younger members of the party carried out their surveys of
the way ahead. Late on Sunday evening, 8th June, the middle-aged
naturalist Frederick Waterhouse suddenly suffered a racking
stomach pain followed by a night of illness. Next day, he was a little
better ... Stuart reported: 'I think it was from eating some boiled gum
which had been obtained from the nut tree Mr Kekwick discovered
last year. When boiled, it much resembles tapioca and has much
the same taste; I also ate some of it yesterday, which occasioned a
severe pain in the stomach but soon went off ...' On 10th June, with
Waterhouse much recovered, they moved north once more,
reaching the River Strangways (which Stuart named after Templar
Strangways, the South Australia Commissioner for Lands) on 14th
June. Stuart finally found a crossing point in a gorge about fifty
kilometres southeast of the present Mataranka on 20th June.
That evening, Stuart took time to record his impressions of
the vegetation of the gorge, growing subtly more tropical as they
moved north ... 'We have passed a few stringybark trees; in the bed
of the river there is growing some very large and tall timber, having
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a dark-coloured bark, the leaf jointed the same as the she-oak, but
has not the acid taste; the horses eat it. There are also some very
fine melaleuca trees, which here seem to displace the gums in the
river. We have also passed some trees and shrubs; Frew, in looking
about the banks, found a large creeper with a yellow blossom, and
having a large bean pod growing upon it. I shall endeavour to get
some of the seed as we go on tomorrow.
'I shall now move with the whole party, and trust to find
water in the river as long as I follow it - its banks are getting deeper
and broader and more likely to retain water - for it is dreadfully slow
work to keep going on in search of water. Before this, I could not do
so otherwise, in consequence of the season being so very dry.
Since the commencement of the journey, the only rain we have had
to any effect upon the creeks was Mr Levi's station, Mount
Margaret; (1300km south); since then, we have had only two or
three light showers, which have had no effect on the creeks. Light
winds, southeast. Latitude 15º15'23.'
Stuart was becoming more relaxed, too, in his reactions to
the sighting of aborigines. On 25th June, following running water
channels he came upon a large number of families disporting on a
large sheet of water ... 'they set up a fearful yelling and squalling
and ran off as fast as they could' ... A kilometre or so later, they
observed three aboriginal men following them ... 'Halted the party
and went up to them. One was a very old man, one middle-aged,
the third a young, stout well-made fellow; they seemed to be
friendly. Tried to make them understand by signs that I wished to
get across the river; they made signs, by pointing down the river, by
placing both hands together, having the fingers closed - which led
me to think I could get across further down. They made signs for us
to be off, and that they were going back again. I complied with their
request, and we bade each other a friendly goodbye. We followed
the banks of the river, which I now find is the Roper. At seven miles,
tried to cross it, but found it impossible; it is now divided into a
number of channels, very deep and full of running water ...'
The Roper River was named by Ludwig Leichhardt in
1844 after a member of his party, John Roper, who was recovering
from injuries sustained in the aboriginal attack which killed John
Gilbert. The Roper flows into the Gulf of Carpentaria 250km east of
Stuart's present location and was used by Charles Todd as an
advance supply depot, as far as navigable, for steamers servicing
the Overland Telegraph a decade later.
On 30th June, Stuart, who had just enjoyed the cooked
flesh of a drowned horse, crossed the Roper and came upon a
jovial aboriginal family ... 'There were three men, four lubras and a
number of children. One, an old man presented a very singular
appearance - his legs about four feet long, and his body in all seven
feet high, and so remarkably thin he appeared to be a perfect
shadow. Mr Kekwick having a fish hook stuck in his hat, which
immediately caught the tall old fellow's eye, he made signs of its
use, and that he would like to possess it. I told Mr Kekwick to give it
to him, which seemed to please him very much. After examining it,
he handed it over to a young man, seemingly his son, who was a
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stout, fat fellow, and who was laughing nearly all the time. The other
was a middle-aged man of the ordinary height. The women were
small and very ugly. Wind southeast. Latitude14º47'24.'
(No interpreter was available to convey the women's thoughts about
the Wee Scot).
These folk, the Mangarayi people, would have been the
immediate forebears of the people of the so-called 'Never-Never
Land', an early-20th century creation of Jeannie Gunn, newly-
minted memsahib wife of Aeneas Gunn, manager of Elsey Station,
near Mataranka. The Gunns married in Melbourne on 31st
December, 1901 and came soon afterwards by ship to Darwin, rail
to Pine Creek and horseback to Elsey. They were there a little more
than a year when Aeneas died of Blackwater fever (a form of
malaria) on 16th March, 1903.
Jeannie returned to Melbourne where she wrote two
books based on her brief experiences as a station manager's wife,
The Little Black Princess (1905) and We of the Never Never (1906);
the books sold half a million copies in the English-speaking world;
white Australians in the coastal cities consumed them deliriously;
the books reinforced their beliefs that the childlike station blacks
were being cushioned against their inevitable dying out by the
patronage and indulgence of kind people like Aeneas and Jeannie;
'wild blacks' were another matter, but Mrs Gunn's casual references
to Aeneas' armed 'nigger hunts' were excised for suburban
sensitivities when the books became beloved set texts for
schoolchildren up until the 1950s.
Her tales of the Mangarayi people, combined with Stuart's
journal remarks about the apparent family of aboriginal freaks on
30th June, 1862, portrayed as lunatic itinerant strolling players,
assisted a closed-mindset in urban Australia that seriously hindered
rehabilitation and reconciliation. ('Haven't they all died out yet?')
Today, the 5000 square kilometres of Elsey Station has been
handed back to the descendants of Jeannie Gunn's Never Never
and is undergoing extensive re-vegetation by the Northern Land
Council to become an aboriginal-operated pastoral enterprise ...
But, hey, we're not here to worry about the still desperate
circumstances of many Northern Territory aborigines! We're with
John McDouall Stuart as the expedition heads northwest on
Tuesday, 1st July, 1862, leaving, as Stuart tells us, the simple
savages staring in amazement at the horses eating grass.
A week later, proceeding northwest, crossing some granite
and sandstone rises, with intermittent small creeks, they came upon
a broad, flowing one with a very interesting animal bone nearby ...
'Tuesday, 8th July. - This I have named the Fanny, in honour of
Miss Fanny Chambers, eldest daughter of John Chambers, Esq. In
a small tree on this creek, the skull of a small alligator was found by
Mr Auld ...' (about 30km further northwest) ...' ... came upon another
large creek having a running stream to the south of west, and
coming from north of east. Timber, melaleuca, palm, and gum with
some of other description. This I have named the Katherine, in
honour of the second daughter of James Chambers Esq. The
country gone over today, although there is a mile or two of light
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and gratify themselves by a sight of the sea, while the other half
remained to watch the horses until their return. I dipped my feet,
and washed my hands and face in the sea, as I promised the late
Governor Sir Richard MacDonnell I would do if I reached it.'
They were on a long (60km) narrow, curving beach in Van
Diemens Gulf, just west of a small knob known today as Stuart's
Point; Stuart named the sweeping inlet Chambers Bay, and the
smaller one beyond Stuart's Point, Finke Bay. To the west,
Chambers Bay was defined by the jutting peninsula of Cape
Hotham; this little cape's name was not up for grabs in 1862: and it
was not named after Sir Charles Hotham, who had presided, at a
distance, over the bloody Eureka Stockade fiasco at Ballarat in
1854, but an older relative, Admiral Sir Henry Hotham, an old
Napoleonic Wars sea dog whose admiring protege, Phillip Parker
King marked it on the charts in 1818. Immediately west of Cape
Hotham was the mouth of the Adelaide River. And 45km southwest
of that was the future city of Darwin.
'Friday, 25th July - Charles Creek. (named after John
Chambers' eldest son) ...had an open place cleared, selected one
of the tallest trees, stripped it of its lower branches, and on its
highest branch fixed my flag, the Union Jack, with my name sewn in
the centre of it; when this was completed, the party gave three
cheers, and Mr Kekwick then addressed me, congratulating me on
having completed this great and important undertaking, to which I
replied. Mr Waterhouse also spoke a few words on the same
subject, and concluded with three cheers for the Queen and three
for the Prince of Wales.
'At one foot south of the foot of the tree is buried, about
eight inches below the ground, an air-tight tin case in which is a
paper with the following notice: South Australia Great Northern
Exploring Expedition. The exploring party, under the command of
John McDouall Stuart, arrived at this spot on the 25th day of July,
1862, having crossed the entire continent of Australia from the
Southern to the Indian Ocean, passing through the centre. They left
the City of Adelaide on the 26th day of October, 1861, and the most
northern station of the colony on the 21st day of January, 1862. To
commemorate this happy event, they have raised this flag bearing
his name. All well! God Save The Queen!' Then they turned their
horses for home. South Australia could now write to the British
Government asking for (and receiving in 1863) a mandate over
Northern Australia. The race to secure the route of the Overland
Telegraph had been won, without any real challenge from the
Queenslanders.
You'd think Stuart and his loyal men would be well-
satisfied, wouldn't you? Three thousand kilometres from home, but
assured of the concentrated adulation of the Empire when they
reached civilisation and could advise a breathless world of their
magnificent feat ... well, at that very moment, a sturdy British chap
named John Speke, a Devon lad from Bideford, across the county
from the sadly-lamented William Wills' hometown of Totnes was
pushing aside the jungle fronds in Darkest Africa, the favoured
destination of England's armchair explorers, safe in their velvet
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Alice and the Weather Man 20/10/09 1:51 PM
drawing-rooms.
We can compare their relative impressions of 28th July,
1862. Stuart, south of Van Diemens Gulf: 'We all passed a
miserable night with the mosquitoes - my hands, wrists and neck,
were all blistered over with their bites, and are most painful.' Speke,
10,000km northwest in Uganda: 'Most beautiful was the scene. It
was the very perfection of the kind aimed at in a highly kept park;
with a magnificent stream 600-700 yards wide dotted with islets and
rocks, the former occupied by fishermen's huts, the latter by terns
and crocodiles basking in the sun.' Speke, the rotter, had had just
discovered the source of the White Nile in the Victoria Nyanza at
Jinja, 30km east of Kampala! Stuart had cunningly followed Sturt's
lead of banning members of his party from keeping travel diaries.
But he'd just been scooped by the Source of the Nile!
when they saw what was intended, they gave back the spear and
retained the hooks; they offered another with a stone head upon the
same terms, which was accepted. Mr Kekwick had a deal of trouble
with them before he could get then to move off, when they were
joined by another and then went off in twos. In a short time, they set
fire to the grass all around us to try to burn us out ... ' The
aborigines continued to shadow them for days, but a feared attack
did not come.
By 11th September, having had several mystifying
encounters with curious, painted black men, they had passed
Newcastle Waters but were still 400km north of the present Alice
Springs. Stuart was increasingly ill. He wrote in his journal: 'I am
very doubtful of being able to reach the settled districts. Should
anything happen to me, I keep everything ready for the worst - my
plan is finished and my journal brought up to every night, so no
doubt whatever can be thrown on what I have done. All the difficult
country is now passed and that still to go over is well known to
those who have been out with me before; so there is no danger of
the party not finding its way back should I be taken away. The only
difficulty they will have to encounter is the scarcity of water, caused
by the extreme dryness of the season.'
With great tenderness, the others brought him home
safely, sometimes in a stretcher between two horses; one of the
younger men would take Stuart on ahead of the main party and
hide him under bushes to rest him while the others caught up. For a
few nights, near the MacDonnell Range, he kept Nash and King by
his side in case he died ... 'as it would be lonely for one young man
to be there by himself.' On 3rd November, they passed through
Brinkley's Bluff, in the MacDonnell Range ... and Stuart was feeling
better.
They crossed into South Australia in late-November and
met their first friendly white faces on 4th December at Mount
Margaret Station, one of the furthermost manned outstations.
Boundary riders were sent south to spread the news. John
Chambers, another of his sponsors and brother of the recently-dead
James, happened to be in the area. He recalled the events in an
interview with the Adelaide Observer in January, 1888: 'At Leigh's
Creek, I met him and his party and brought them through to
Adelaide, about the last 400 miles of their journey. They were all
emaciated when I saw them. Stuart would never have got through
but for Auld and others of the party. Coming down, I had the great
pleasure of witnessing the receptions of the party at Burra, Kapunda
and Gawler, and the enthusiastic terminations of the journeyings in
Adelaide.'
When Stuart and his companions reached the copper
town of Burra, 150km north of Adelaide on 16 December, 1862, the
explorer took advantage of the newly-installed telegraph technology
to send an official message ahead to the waiting city. Great was the
jubilation when word spread; Mrs Caroline Carleton, recent widow
of a country doctor, burst into verse which was published widely:
Full many a weary league
Of hunger, thirst and pain
Todd, a teenager but, oh, so polite and helpful! Alice, Elizabeth and
Fanny, as she was fondly known, had arrived back on the Irene
from England in mid-October. It was a splendid voyage under the
command of Captain David Bruce. Alice had taken out a personal
notice in the Advertiser (with the other First Class gentlefolk, do you
mind!) to thank the ubiquitous Captain Bruce for his consideration
and to wish him 'a pleasant and prosperous voyage home, and that
we may meet again in Adelaide in health and happiness ... '
But that day marked the beginning of a slow descent for
Stuart: his greatest sponsor and admirer, James Chambers had
died prematurely in August, 1862, his various ailments made
surveying work impossible, and he lapsed into a pleasurable
alcoholic state. He went to live at the Seaside Family Hotel at the
quaintly-named resort of Brighton (also dubbed the 'Riviera of the
South') on Holdfast Bay. John and Mary Chambers had him stay at
their house in Adelaide, but he felt ill at ease in the new Adelaide
society; the new Governor, Sir Dominick Daly, a Irish Roman
Catholic, no less, had said some kind words on Stuart's arrival; Daly
was reckoned to be a congenial companion, but an old, old gent at
64, just the same (and suffering, obviously but silently, from
debilitating anaemia). Stuart packed his trunk and sailed for London
to his widowed sister on 23rd April, 1864, in an updated version of
the Indus that had brought him from Dundee in 1838, all those dusty
years ago.
Across Europe, the Middle East and Asia, the telegraph was
popping up on beaches everywhere, terrifying women hiding in
bathing boxes or risking a dip in the ravishing neck-to-knee
costumes of the era. In 1862, a cable 200km under the North Sea
connected the fishing port of Lowestoft, 170km northeast of London
to Zandvoort, Amsterdam's favoured beach of the middle classes;
at the same time, the cable steamer Berwick was unrolling a line
from the broad shingle beach at Abermawr, Pembrokeshire, Wales,
across 100km of the Irish Sea to Wexford, another move in the
ultimate all-out telegraphic assault on the Atlantic and North
America. In Abermawr, the telegraph operators worked at long
wooden benches retransmitting messages to or from London, while
the relief shift snored in triple bunks at the rear of the corrugated
cable shed. The tiny cable station's status improved during World
War One when it was given soldiers to guard the important link with
America.
In 1863, as John McDouall Stuart prepared to come Home
to London, six British ships were gathering in the Thames at North
Woolwich to become the 'Great Cable Armada': they were to sail on
a technological invasion of the Persian Gulf. The Imperial
Government had become impatient with the frequent failures of a
'free enterprise' cable to India via the Red Sea and had resolved to
install its own through the friendly Ottoman Empire: Turkey, its three
vassal states known collectively as Mesopotamia (Iraq), the Persian
Gulf, then coast-hugging the Arabian Sea to Karachi, the main port
Trans-Atlantic cable.
The rich spices of the Far East notwithstanding, America
was where the real idle money lay, bloating the Yankee foreign
investment houses, tied up on the blockaded wharves of the
Confederate cotton producers. Pender and his friends in the
Manchester cotton trade invested heavily in Egyptian growers
during the Civil War and abandoned them ruthlessly when the Civil
War ended, causing Egypt to go bankrupt in 1876 and thousands of
people to the edge of starvation. By this time, Manchester was in
daily, if not hourly, telegraphic contact with the good ol' boys at
mighty New Orleans Cotton Exchange, established in 1871. Sorry,
Egyptians, hell, them's the breaks, folks!
In 1864, while waiting for the Civil War to conclude and
the Atlantic telegraph to come online, John Pender had become a
patron of the arts, a suitable charity for a mid-Victorian industrial
baron. His particular interest was in the renowned painter, John
Millais, in his early-thirties, who declared his intention of abandoning
the arty-farty pretensions of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, of
which he was a foundation member, and go for the quid. It worked;
he finished up averaging £30,000 a year and living in a mansion at
2 Palace Gate, Kensington.
His sentiments resounded through the cigar-stained
boardrooms of the Money Men; some likened it, favourably, to, say,
an earlier William Wordsworth offering shares in, say, The Lakes
Daffodil Franchise. John Pender approved Millais' decision to sell
out to populism and the 'tastes of the day' and commissioned him,
probably by electric telegraph (the email of the period), to come to
Manchester and render the pre-pubescent daughters of his second
marriage, Anne and Marian (named after his deceased first wife) to
canvas in oils.
The children's mother, the former Emma Denison,
probably chatted to him as he worked; he was much better escapist
value than an Emily Bronte novel: as a youth he had a torrid affair
with Euphemia Ruskin, wife of the critic John Ruskin who, it
emerged in the subsequent divorce trial, had failed, out of
politeness, to consummate the marriage, and she, poor thing, knew
it was lacking something but, as a well-raised Victorian girl, couldn't
quite pinpoint it. Euphemia married Millais and Ruskin, being jolly
sporting, continued to provide critical support for the artist.
'How is your wife's health, Mr Millais?' Mrs Pender might
have asked.
'Pregnant again, ma'am,' he would have replied.
'The eighth child, I believe?'
'Yes, ma'am.'
John Millais' lavish oil of Anne and Marian, Leisure Hours, was
received with much admiration when exhibited at the Manchester
Academy of Arts showing in autumn. It was, the critics noted,
'replete with sumptuous Venetian richness' and would 'steal back
the territory encroached on by the hostile medium of photography'.
Emma Pender found these remarks very satisfying, particularly the
comment about photography: she had heard gossip that a
clergyman named the Rev. Charles Dodson, while work-shopping
ships, until she made her way east across the Indian Ocean. Her
appearance in Australian waters was first noted on 27th January,
1865, by the lighthouse keepers at Cape Otway, Victoria's second
southernmost point, who telegraphed ahead routinely to Melbourne,
believing she was a friendly immigrant vessel, the Royal Standard,
a regular visitor to Port Phillip.
When her true identity became known, there was great
consternation in the liberal-minded metropolis, where most of the
citizens had an abhorrence of slavery. Her captain, James Waddell,
demanded dry dock facilities, and when these were not forthcoming,
made thinly-veiled threats to turn his powerful guns on the city; the
colony could do nothing: it had loaned its only warship to New
Zealand the fight the Maoris! The Shenandoah was allowed into dry
dock, while Southern sympathisers among the local business
classes feted them shamelessly. A fiercely independent Victorian
goldfields newspaper, the Creswick and Clunes Advertiser reported
on 2nd February:
'The officers are fine, strapping, gentlemanly young
fellows, clothed in a most abominably ugly uniform. They are at
present sincerely to be pitied, for they never have an hour to
themselves. They are besieged day and night on board their vessel,
and are mercilessly lionised ashore. I do not believe if a couple of
tame tigers were to walk up Bourke Street in the middle of the day
that they would be followed by so many ragged youngsters as these
Southerners are by a lot of well-dressed snobs, who seem to have
the worst of all country vices, the vice of flunkeyism.'
Later in February, the Shernandoah set course for the
northern Pacific and the easy pickings of the Northern whaling fleet,
where she brought her tally of victims to thirty-seven. She kept
plundering her Union foes well into June, 1865, even though
Waddell was advised by a passing neutral captain that the Civil War
had ended in April. Finally, he ran up the Atlantic and surrendered
the ship at Liverpool after a quixotic adventure covering 100,000
kilometres.
Apart from all the unfortunate Northern skippers, a big
loser in the affair was the British Government which had to pay the
United States $US15.6 million in reparations for damage caused by
the Shenandoah and other English-based raiders, notably the
Alabama. Another big loser was the hapless Governor of Victoria at
the time of the Shenandoah's uninvited sojourn, Sir Charles Darling,
whose blunders in other colonial affairs, compounded by the
Shenandoah, made him the Imperial Government's prime
scapegoat; he resigned, a failure, and died in England in 1870. But
not even a telegraph line could have saved Charles Darling.
In 1864-65, while the Shenandoah was carrying out her
crazed last activities, John Pender renewed business ties with
Cyrus Field, a never-say-die New York entrepreneur who would be
known, eventually, as the American 'Father of the Atlantic
Telegraph'. Field was a millionaire paper merchant, one of ten
children of a preacher, who rose from shop assistant to owning a
mansion in the hyper-exclusive Manhattan enclave of Gramercy
Park by the age of thirty-five.
Mary Turnbull, and visited old friends in Glasgow next year where
'his eyesight and memory were so far gone that he was unable to
compose a speech, or indeed, to recollect many of the incidents
that happened throughout the course of his explorations,' said a
report. He died of a stroke, aged fifty, and Mary paid for him to be
interred among the horse-chestnuts, squirrels and foxes in Britain's
most fashionable cemetery, Kensal Green, in West London.
Only seven people attended the burial, none of them of
great consequence, compared with the 7000 who had turned out
when they buried the popular novelist, William Makepeace
Thackeray, in 1863. In fact, Stuart was trumped again in 1866 when
George Everest, the government colonial surveyor who had named
that mountain died later that year, aged 76, in Greenwich, no less!
The Germans even bombed Stuart's grave during World War Two,
but it was restored and now he lies, a brave Wee Scot, surrounded
by 500 titled Britons ... and Isambard Kingdom, his dad, Sir Marc,
and assorted Charles Dickens in-laws.
But that's enough soppy sentimentality ... it's summer,
1866, and we're paddling through the lurching Atlantic aboard the
Great Eastern, giddy with seasickness, sending plumes of choking
coal fumes towards the heavens, foulness enough to make the dark
satanic mills of the North of England green with envy ... and leaving
behind in its rattling wake the innocent island of Valentia, one of
Kerry's southwestern tips, a place where the mystical monks of the
Skellig Rocks sought refuge from the barbaric Viking raiders, lest
they be starved to death like their Abbot, Eitgal, in 812AD. Eleven
days later, 27th July, the belching sea monster sighted the fishing
village of Heart's Content, Newfoundland, and the two continents
were linked at eight words a minute for $US100 in gold.
below Fort Hill and quickly allayed the concerns of the absentee
land selectors in London and Adelaide, who had forked out millions
of pounds as early as 1864 for 250,000 acres (100,000ha). The
proceeds had gone straight into the colony's Treasury, instead of
being spent on immigration, which had been the dream of South
Australia's philosophical founder, Edward Gibbon Wakefield, thirty
years before. But this was the New Age capitalist imperialism! That
Wakefieldian Dreaming was sooo 1830s!
Anyway, while George Goyder was carrying out his tasks
in Port Darwin, a swanky event of far greater immediate significance
for Australian communications was occurring in the sand dunes of
Egypt, 12,000km northwest. On 17th November, 1869, on the Suez
Plains, the French Empress Eugenie (1826-1920), a beautiful and
unrepentant autocrat a la pre-guillotine period of the 18th century,
opened the Suez Canal with her only son, the thirteen-year-old
Prince Eugene, dubbed 'Prince Imperial', at her side. Observing
were the amorous British Prince of Wales; he was far too young and
gauche for the occasionally-swinging Empress, the scheming
Prince of Prussia and the stolidly dyke-minded Prince of the
Netherlands, who was fascinated to note that the waters remained
benignly in place when the final barrage in the Canal was breached.
This solved a question that had occupied scientific minds since
1800, when Empress Eugenie's husband's uncle, Napoleon
Bonaparte, had wished to build a canal. His engineers advised him,
quite erroneously, that locks would be required because the Red
Sea was higher than the Mediterranean.
In Australia, the opening of the 160km canal was long-
anticipated and greeted with great joy, although the principal news
in the southeast was that the Irish bushranger, Harry ('Never
Insulted A Woman') Power, was on the loose again in central
Victoria with a fifteen-year-old apprentice named Edward Kelly, or
Ned to his close mates. That aside, it was announced that the new
canal would cut weeks from the journey Home. Letters and loved
ones would arrive sooner. And, of course, written contact would
become even faster with the opening of the international telegraph
in three years. But first, there was a looming problem which could
affect both European access to the Suez Canal and the route of the
electric telegraph ... and it involved the glamorous Empress
Eugenia, her husband, the Emperor Louis Napoleon, the young
Prince Eugene, the scheming Prince of Prussia ... and the
imperialistic Prussian Chancellor Otto von Bismarck.
Bismarck was busily bringing the independent States of
south Germany into his unified Greater Germany, and his plans
involved a war with France so he could incorporate Lorraine and
parts of Alsace into his new Reich; he lured the French into a fight
by having them object to a German takeover of the Spanish throne
and, hey, presto, the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-71. The
Prussians won, Emperor Louis Napoleon and his family fled to
England, where the Empress was good chums with Queen Victoria,
and had, secretly (goodness, yes!), an old flame-in-exile, Princess
Melanie von Metternich, wife of the Great Manipulator.
The young Prince Eugene, unfortunately, craved a
commission into the British Army, but his career ended when he
died, heroically, revolver in hand, under a hail of Zulu spears at
Isandhlwana on 22nd January, 1879, the same day as the more
famous Battle of Rorke's Drift (starring Michael Caine and Stanley
Baker). And so ended the Napoleonic Dynasty.
But did it? Even the romantic among us recognise the
following tale might be a fable, but who can be sure ... ? Charles
Todd, the astronomer, wouldn't have told the yarn to his children
because it wasn't known in the 19th century ... the story goes that
the Mother Empress flew off into the heavens when she died in
1920 and became a huge and bossy asteroid and the young Prince,
who had been drifting wanly through space, patiently waiting for her
since 1879, became her faithful moonlet, whizzing around her every
five days.
Emperor Louis Napoleon was nowhere to be seen,
possibly because was known to enjoy the company of other
heavenly bodies, notably the Russian Princess Dorothea de Lieven
(see also Lord Palmerston). Twentieth century astronomers gazing
at the twenty-five major objects in the crowded 'asteroid belt' circling
the sun between Jupiter and Mars noticed Eugenia's attentive moon
in 1998 from an observatory on Hawaii's highest peak, Mauna Kea
volcano.
Serious star-gazers had known about Asteroid Eugenia
(45) for many years. She had a very unladylike diameter of 214km,
and when they found her little satellite, small and thin like the Prince
himself, they didn't quite know what he was; they dubbed him S/
1998/Eugenia (45)1 and tried to establish more facts. He was only
13km across and kept a cautious 1200km from Mother, but he was
very, very special. He was first asteroidal moon to be discovered by
ground-based telescope; the actual first was Asteroid Ida's little
partner, Dactyl, found by spacecraft Galileo in 1993.
In May, 2000, the Eugenia watchers' leader, William
Merline, wrote to the International Astronomical Union in Paris,
founded in 1919 to safeguard interests of things in space, to
suggests a name for the new moon: 'We, the discoverers of S/1998
(45)1 propose the name "Petit Prince" (unhyphenated and
unconcatenated) for approval by the IAU ... in honour of the Prince
Imperial of France, the only child of Eugenia, Empress of France
during the reign of Napoleon 111, and namesake of Asteroid (45)
Eugenia ... The name itself is derived from the book Le Petit Prince
(Little Prince) by Antoine-Marie-Roger de Saint-Exupery, whose
central character was the famous asteroid-dwelling Little Prince.
The book, Le Petit Prince, is arguably one of the most well-loved
children's books in the world (translated into over 70 languages). It
is also the book from which many young people first learn about
asteroids ... ' The International Astronomical Union, of course, said,
'Yes! Oui! Bravo! A triumph for adaptive optics!'
Back in 1869, there was another hush-hush astronomical
matter which Charles Todd didn't know about ... a meteorite had
struck near the projected track of the Overland Telegraph about
900km northwest of Adelaide, leaving an impact area at least 70km
wide. This event happened 590 million years ago, so Charles
man here; the government issue map had said 'unexplored' this
morning; he would fill in the gaps by the light of his campfire that
night. The date was 11th March, 1871. In his journal, he recorded
'numerous waterholes and springs, the principal of which is the
Alice Spring, which I had the honour of naming after Mrs Todd.'
Alice Springs! There you have it. One day, it would
become, perhaps, the most famous small town in the world. A Town
Like Alice. A hometown to yearn for by folk who'd never been there.
But not yet, alas, because the eyes of the Victorian-era parlour
exploration enthusiasts were fixed firmly on Darkest Africa again!
We had John McDouall Stuart upstaged by the Source of the Nile in
1862, and now the New York Herald's Henry Stanley was about to
make tabloid journalism history, striding towards Lake Tanganyika,
brushing those ubiquitous jungle fronds aside, rehearsing the
famous line he would utter on 10th November ... 'Dr Livingstone, I
presume?' No words that year could match Stanley's, not the cries
from the barricades of the Paris Commune or the shrieks from the
Great Fire of Chicago which began when Mrs O'Leary's cow kicked
over a candle, resulting in 90,000 homeless and $196 million in
damages. William Whitfield Mills' line... 'honour of naming after Mrs
Todd' ... seemed awfully tame by comparison.
Mills had a very busy naming day that 11th March, 1871.
He began with the 'Charles' River which enters the 'Todd' River at
the north end of his line of 'waterholes and springs'. People have
long assumed he was honouring his employer, 'Charles' Todd, but
there are those who suspect he was secretly perpetuating a
favourite village of that name from his boyhood in Devon. He then
bestowed 'Todd' on the broader strip of sand flowing north-south
through the oasis and out through a break in the MacDonnell
Ranges; he called this chasm Heavitree Gap. Once again, a myth
grew that 'Heavitree' was Charles Todd's middle name. In fact, it
was the village near Exeter, also in Devon, where young Mills went
to school; Heavitree was distinguished in 2002 in having a yew tree
in the churchyard named as one of the '50 Great British Trees'. This
tree is unlikely to be associated with its name: the name is thought
to derive from heafod treow, Saxon for 'head tree', where chiefs,
would meet or, alternatively, a handy place for hanging people from
sturdy branches. The new Heavitree Gap became the site of the
first permanent police station in the Territory ... and the place where
the broken tribespeople went to get their government rations.
Mills happened to name 'Alice Spring' that day because
the South Australian Government had signed an agreement with the
newly-formed British Australian Telegraph Company to build a
3200km Overland Telegraph line from Darwin to Port Augusta in
return for a submarine telegraph line from Java. It was all done in
frightful haste considering the slackness shown towards the project
since Stuart's great pioneering expedition eight years earlier. The
South Australians, having been granted virtual sovereignty over the
vast realm of Northern Australia, had done little to explore their
empire. Goodness, they hadn't even found Ayers Rock yet, and that
was a fairly obvious eminence! In the end, four men forced the
pace: John Pender, the industrialist; Sherard Osborn, a gallant,
was the new colony's first land reform and allowed families of
limited means to take up sensibly-sized small farms of 640 acres
(320ha) with a deposit of 25 percent and four years to pay. The
farms were to be in designated areas.
He was hailed in enlightened circles as 'the St George of
Land Reform', but this successful legislation was opposed by the
entrenched larger land owners, who took their revenge later by
blocking much of his other legislation, which led to his defeat as
Premier in 1870. Strangways responded by returning to England
(whence he had come in 1857) to resume legal practice in London.
He was then just thirty-nine, but he had the satisfaction of knowing
he was influential in two colonial initiatives: the Overland Telegraph
and an overhaul of property ownership less than thirty-five years
after the land had been grabbed from its traditional owners! But
what they didn't know wouldn't have hurt them, what!
The South Australian Government promised their British
partners that the landline would be finished by 1st January, 1872 ...
and set about to achieve the impossible. First, they made that task
harder by appointing a new Resident Commissioner, Captain
William Bloomfield Douglas, a congenial, red-nosed member of
Adelaide's B-list social set, who had a wife, Ellen, a brood of seven
children and a flustered, anonymous nanny. History shows that poor
Douglas was an even worse appointment to the Darwin post than
the amiable Boyle Finniss in the early 1864. Douglas was born in
Aberystwyth, Wales, on 25th September, 1822, and happened to
have an uncle (another parson!) who was married, fortuitously, to a
sister of the Rajah James Brooke, the benign plunderer in the
1830-40s of the rainforest, spices and indigenous artifacts of the
gentle folk of Sarawak (apart from the ghastly headhunters).
This distant family influenced young William Bloomfield
Douglas' career, although he had none of the swashbuckling
charisma of the mighty Rajah of Sarawak, an Empire-builder (and a
hero of Flashman's Lady) who had the memsahibs at Queen
Victoria's Court all wobbly-kneed when he went back to London to
collect his knighthood in 1847.
Douglas had a brief Royal Navy career as a captain's
servant before joining Brooke to fight pirates in 1843-44, according
to his account. By the next decade, he had become skipper of a
steamship in British waters, then applied successfully for the post of
harbourmaster at Adelaide, a task he performed well. In March,
1870, he was appointed Resident Commissioner at Darwin and left
with his family on the schooner Gulnane next month.
They sailed east around the continent and arrived in
Darwin in June to be welcomed by a crew of surveyors and police
who'd been idling around the place, beachcombing, since George
Goyder sailed south the previous November, having completed his
survey. The men liked Goyder, but it was a relief for some to see
him go: he was in the habit of demoting them temporarily for
swearing. William Whitfield Mills was one of these. And you had to
admit it was bloody hot up there. Oops!
The day Douglas and the Gulnane arrived in Darwin, the
barque Bengal, which had left Adelaide three week later, but sailed
lover, Lady Caroline Lamb: 'I could love her forever if she could
always be eleven years old and whom I shall probably marry when
she is old enough and bad enough to be made into a modern wife.'
When Alice Todd heard Lady Charlotte Bacon's story over an
afternoon tea in Adelaide, she probably thought, 'Well, there are
similarities to my first meeting with Charles, but that's as far as it
goes.'
Lady Charlotte Harley grew up far too fast and, at twenty-
two, married an aristocratic bounder named Anthony Bacon, a
rascally cavalry officer with awesome debts, who was once
outwitted, for goodness sake, by the clown who ordered the Charge
of the Light Brigade, went in and out of prison for fraudulent
activities, and tried to swindle the Imperial Government out of
several colonies, notably Western Australia, South Australia and
Van Diemens Land. When all these ventures failed, he fought as a
mercenary in the wars of the Portuguese succession (on different
sides from that famous South Australian, Alexander Tolmer).
Eventually, he died in 1864 and Lady Charlotte Bacon and her two
adult children sought refuge in Adelaide, probably at the invitation of
the Governor, Sir Dominick Daly.
One of these children, Harley Bacon, who was honoured
with his grandfather's name (a lordly forebear of Harley's created a
fashionable sub-division in the London West End wilds of
Marylebone in the early 18th century and named one avenue
'Harley Street'; that's where all the medical doctors hung out their
shingles). Harley had a contract to supply live sheep to the
Overland Telegraph construction parties. (Ernest Giles, an explorer
who'd believe anything, met Harley Bacon at Charlotte Waters in
late-1872, when the telegraph began operating; Giles made
inquiries of the 'Charlotte aborigines', noted humorists, apparently,
who told him the western tribes were called 'Larapinta' and were
big, fat, covered in hair, killed other people, stole their wives and ate
pickaninnies [Giles' spelling]. So Ernest decided it would not be
prudent to visit there).
However, Charlotte Waters had been named by Richard
Knuckey before Harley Bacon's sheep-droving visit. The
circumstance of the naming was that Knuckey's team had been
given some books before their departure from Adelaide by the
beautiful and gentle Lady Edith, wife of the priggish Lowland Scots
Governor James Fergusson; they included good works, such as
The Bible, and also copies of the poets. Some evening, lying under
the world's brightest Milky Way, Knuckey found the reference to
Ianthe in Childe Harold; he made the connection with Lady
Charlotte ... and the name of a telegraph station (alas, a ruin today)
was born.
In gratitude to Lady Edith, surveyors found another spring
near the Simpson Desert and named it Lady Edith Spring, which
she asked them to re-name Dalhousie Spring (after her family seat).
And then, quite suddenly, Lady Edith died on 28th October, 1871, at
the age of just thirty-two. But her spring gushes forth today, fairly
undrinkable but nice to gaze upon in the evening's pastel light, one
of the greatest, gurgling expressions of the South Australian
Artesian Basin. Luckily, for the romantic reader, the divine Lady
Edith died a week after Daniel Dominick Daly married his faithful
Harriet Douglas in Adelaide, so there wasn't any vice-regal
mourning. And everyone lived happily ever after. More or less.
But, hey, enough of that soppy stuff ... we're building the
Overland Telegraph, an Outback epic of real men (and more
realistic women), of sand and stones, of mud and blood, and the
tears of the tribes ... on the Southern Section, which ran from Port
Augusta almost to the Northern Territory border, the privately-
contracted work was carried out by the forceful, lion-headed Edward
Meade 'Ned' Bagot, wealthy, late-40s pastoralist son of Anglican
Irish pioneers and brother of Charles, the Kapunda copper finder.
Once, it seemed, half the 'christianized' aborigines in the
southern deserts seemed to bear the name 'Bagot', but that wasn't
Ned's doing: it just happened to be the first white man's name they
heard when they were 'found' and 'brought in' to their European
salvationists' idea of civilisation, just as many of their later 'found'
brethren of Central Australia innocently called their new-born boys
'Hitler' or 'Mussolini'.
Meanwhile, in the burgeoning cities of the south, great
progress was made being in the field of democracy and her natural
partner, communications ... with the possible exception of the
reception rooms of Government House, Adelaide, where the newly-
widowed Governor, James Fergusson, announced it was his duty to
'guarantee to those who come on my invitation to Government
House that they shall only meet there persons of respectable
character'.
Well, this insufferable announcement put a few brave
pioneering noses out of joint in a town which prided itself on its
gathering egalitarianism; Alice, it was agreed would qualify on the
grounds of respectability, but not for example, Lady Charlotte
Bacon, oh, goodness, no! ... Meanwhile, across the parched plains
in Melbourne, still Queen Victoria's Jewel of the South, the folk were
displaying their usual independent, buccaneering air ...
On Thursday, 13th April, 1871, the Rainbow Livery Stable
in Little Collins Street ('opposite the Police Courts') began to
advertise itself as 'Under the Distinguished Patronage H.R.H. the
Duke of Edinburgh (who'd last visited the Antipodes two years
before), the Aristocracy and Merchant Princes of Melbourne'. They
didn't mind a bit of Yankee-style self-aggrandisement in their
advertising in Melbourne: way back in the colony's infancy in 1840,
a real estate agent flogging blocks of land around Geelong, wrote:
'Underneath lies the of Bay of Corio, in comparison with which the
Bays of Dublin and Naples fall in to insignificance' and of Melbourne
' ... the pure water of the river (Yarra) cannot be equalled anywhere;
and of the salubrity of the air and the beauty of the situation it would
be plagiarism to speak.' They were writing adroitly about
communications and the climate!
In her parlour at 90 Russell Street, a Miss Needham
assisted communications by offering to teach 'ladies and gentlemen'
improved penmanship in eight lessons and claimed to have advised
privately in the homes of 'His Excellency, Viscount Canterbury,
their solid stone houses, their gardens and places further afield,
such as the bustling town of Port Augusta. The State Library of
South Australia holds nearly 700 of these catalogued images. One
of these shows the excellent organist and music teacher, William
Pybus and his wife soon after their wedding in 1885.
He was a cheery, chubby fellow; she, on the other hand,
was an innocent, oblivious, God-fearing voluptuouso whose figure
and curly locks were coveted by seedy connoisseurs throughout the
colony. That aside, the pleasant Pybus had narrowly avoided
involvement in a small-town religious controversy about 1870, when
Charles Todd and his brave men were battling to save the Overland
Telegraph.
In the early-1870s, the North Adelaide Baptist Church
moved from its chapel on LeFevre Terrace to its church in Tynte
Street. In the pioneer chapel, pious members had been happy with
Mr Furnell's tuning fork accompanying their hymns; in the new
place, they reluctantly accepted the upgrading from tuning fork to a
harmonium, but were aghast at the worldly extravagance of a £350
organ, even if it was locally made.
But Mr Pybus' angelic playing set them at ease and they
felt they had found a Godly musical path. Townsend Duryea
managed to avoid involvement in the Baptist's near-scandal, too.
Duryea came to Melbourne in 1852 from America where he had
trained as a mining engineer and photographer. Instead of taking
his mining expertise to the goldfields, he set up a photographic
studio in Bourke Street, Melbourne, and when the gold hysteria died
down, moved to Adelaide with his brother and partner, Alexander.
The pair became Adelaide's premier society
photographers, invested well in copper mines on the Yorke
Peninsula and built a thirty-foot cutter they used to race for wagers;
in 1863, they ended their partnership and Townsend Duryea
increased his fortune by introducing the personalised photographic
European Cartes de Visite, the very thing to drop in the silver
visiting tray of a society copper matron when you've been out in
your carriage in the heat, and the dust, and the flies, paying your
respects just as you'd do if you were back Home in that Green and
Pleasant Land. Duryea's cartes de visite bore his own coat-of-arms
and, after Prince Alfie visited his studio in 1867, the words, 'By
Appointment to Royalty'.
In 1865, Duryea did a very brave and hairy thing: he
climbed scaffolding around the lofty tower of the Town Hall with his
portable darkroom and photographed a 360deg panorama of the
city (now held by the State Library of South Australia). Everyone
oohed-and-aahed and he became quite famous in international
photographic circles. Panoramic photography had been popular in
the United States since 1851, following the huge success of
panoramic paintings in London since the Napoleonic Wars.
But the 'Duryea Panorama' was considered equal to any in
the world and preceded by years the British photographer
Eadweard Muybridge's panoramas of San Francisco in 1877-78.
But, alas, Duryea's photographic career ended in the early hours of
18th October, 1875, when fire destroyed his Adelaide studio and
religious loonies who tried to capture the restored King Charles ll's
London in the name of 'King Jesus' who was scheduled to appear in
1666. The nervous new king had them hanged, drawn and
quartered for high treason. Life wasn't all jugs of ale and cuddles
wiv' Nell Gwyn!
Charles Todd should have know all about these matters;
after all, he was a meteorologist, a Londoner from Islington where
the Pepys family had country picnics, and a protestant dissenter,
just like the Fifth Monarchists (though considerably more discreet).
Furthermore, Pepys had left his diary to his (Sam's) old college,
Magdalene, at Cambridge, where its ancient shorthand was
deciphered and the diary published in 1825, the year before
Charles' birth. Whether Charles Todd was as vitally interested in
world weather changes in the 19th century as we should be in the
21st is a matter for conjecture. But he certainly detected the El Nino
relationship between failed Indian monsoons and Australian
droughts during Australia's Centennial Year, 1888.
Let's assume he was curious about the possibility of
change in world climate patterns. Did he ever wonder at the effect
of the factories of the Industrial Age retching gases from the
smokestacks of England's grimy cities? They were approaching
Apocalyptic-awfulness as the graceful three-masted Irene carried
him and Alice away from the Grey and Grotty Land in 1855. Did he
even give a passing thought to the belching locomotives rushing in
later years across the plains of South Australia towards the late-
Victorian industrial cess pit Melbourne had become?
Or the first of the steam-powered superliners, SS Great
Britain gushing her coal-fired foulness into the atmosphere as she
carried her immigrants south to the New World? And wheezing and
farting all the way back Home again? Who knows? But what we do
know is that Charles Todd was now in a position to monitor the
weather hourly over a fair slice of the world's surface. 'The
telegraph to the meteorologist is what the telescope is to the
astronomer,' he observed in 1894. By the time of his death in 1910,
there were 510 rainfall reporting stations in South Australia.
If he'd a copy of Pepys' Diary (and he certainly would
have kept it from Alice's innocent eyes), he might have been curious
about the future of that winter's drought in 1661 ... on 15th January,
1662, Pepys recorded: 'Mr Berkenshaw asked me whether we had
not committed a fault in eating today; telling me that it is a fast day
ordered by the Parliament, to pray for more seasonable weather; it
having hitherto been summer weather, that is, both as to warmth
and every other thing, just as if it were the middle of May or June,
which do threaten a plague (as all men think) to follow, for so it was
almost the last winter; and the whole year after hath been a very
sickly time to this day.' Praying for rain. A solution offered in the
Australian State of Queensland in the winter of 2006.
'Did you know,' Charles might have said to Alice one
evening at the Observatory, 'that in the English winter of 1536-37,
the Thames was so frozen that King Henry VIII and his pregnant
wife, Jane Seymour, were able to ride on the river from London to
Greenwich?'
Wentworth, at the junction of the Murray and Darling Rivers for the
1882 Transit.
Early in 1874, a tragic series of incidents began at Barrow
Creek Telegraph Station, north of Alice Springs, where a Mounted
Constable First Class, Samuel Gason, had been posted in 1871
after the white Telegraph employees became anxious about the
local Kaytetye aborigines. On 23rd February, 1874, Gason
telegraphed a message to Adelaide: 'This station has been attacked
by natives at 8. Stapleton has been mortally wounded, one of the
men, named John Frank, just died from wounds. Civilised native
boy has had three spear wounds. Mr Flint, assistant operator, one
spear wound in leg, not serious. Full particulars in morning. Second
attack expected.'
No second attack came and it was established later that
the whites had fenced off Barrow Creek's precious spring, the
tribespeople's only source of water for millennia. A year later, Gason
organised a punitive expedition of armed whites who drove all
aborigines before them; it is said they took not a single prisoner and
the place where they finally halted 160kms west of Barrow Creek
bears the name 'Blackfellows Bones', or 'Skull Creek'.
Further south, at Alice Springs, government officials were
beginning to implement the policy of forcibly removing the children
of relationships between full-blood aboriginal women and white men
who were coming to the Northern Territory in increasing numbers
since it was opened up by the Overland Telegraph. The confused,
dispossessed tribespeople were now congregating at the Heavitree
Gap police station where a rations depot was established; it was an
easy matter separating the obviously half-caste youngsters from the
rest.
The Europeans thought they were doing the right thing.
The ancient tribes would die out slowly, but those with European
blood would be taken away to be turned into real white people.
There was no particular malice; it seemed to be a perfect, well,
'Final Solution'. In 1914, a woman schoolteacher, Ida Standley, was
employed at Alice Springs (the famed Standley Chasm was named
after her) to ease the hand-over of the children. She even came to
be known as 'Beloved Lady'. In 1934 (the year after 'Stuart' became
'Alice Springs', when the Federal Government had resumed control
of the Northern Territory), it announced: 'It is the policy to collect all
half-castes from the native camps at an early age and transfer them
to the Government Institutions at Darwin and Alice Springs.' It was a
decision of the bureaucracy and took no consideration of breaking a
mother's loving bonds, or the loss of a child's ancient relationship
with his land.
The relentless, inevitable march of progress, they'd call it,
but you'd also wish the shrill 21st century deniers of Australia's past
would have the heart to recognise historic wrongs ... the misery,
murder and heartache ... You wonder at the muddle-headed agenda
at this new industry of historical revisionism. Who are they trying to
fool, and why? Some have even included denial of gradual climate
change on their peculiar agenda, as if there's some sinister link
between truths of the past and urgent speculation about the
future ...
But, goodness, the 'Flat Earthers' of Stolen Children and
Global Warming would even have had their suspicions about the
amiable Charles Todd! He encouraged intercolonial and
international sharing of weather and climate information as early as
1870 when all Australian colonies began to co-ordinate their
temperature data collection. Australia's CSIRO Marine and
Atmospheric Research section has collated this data and the graph
shows a slight fall from 1870 to 1900, then a steady rise to 1940, a
levelling out until 1970, and a sharp climb thereafter. In the summer
of 1908, two years before he died, Charles might have retired to his
beachside house in suburban Semaphore to ride out a heat wave
he knew was coming: Adelaide had four days exceeding 40deg, not
exceeded until mid-January, 2006. Such have been the anomalies
of the Australian weather.
But let's not be distracted by the fascinations of our
weather ... the 1870s were extraordinary years in Australia in
telecommunications, not unlike the recent period, 1995-2005, in the
development of the internet, email and mobile phone telephony. The
1870s began with the seaborne approach of the international
telegraph and ended with the opening in Melbourne in 1880 of the
first telephone exchange. And then they tidied up the decade by
hanging the Last Outlaw, Ned Kelly, on 11th November at the Old
Melbourne Gaol ... and it seemed our rip-roaring colonial days were
over (oddly enough, the wildly improbable shooting death of the
Billy the Kid by the sheriff and media flirt, Pat Garrett, in New
Mexico, coincided with the opening of the telephone exchange in
Christchurch, NZ; New Zealand had been linked to Australia by
submarine telegraph cable in 1876). Before you knew it, Charles
Todd was demonstrating electric lights in the streets of Adelaide in
1881! The Age of Modernity had come and this was no society for
swaggering bushrangers; shuffling, woebegone convict iron gangs
of the eastern colonies seemed ghosts of an embarrassing past that
might never have existed, a part of someone else's ancestry.
In 1875, Alexander Graham Bell and his rival, Elisha Gray,
raced to patent the telephone in the U.S. Bell prevailed and the birth
of the telephone was announced on 10th March, 1876. In England,
on hearing the news (by telegraph), Sir William Preece, chief
engineer of the British Post Office, scoffed: 'The Americans have
need of the telephone, but we do not. We have plenty of messenger
boys.' A ship brought Bell's magic to Melbourne and the Weekly
Times of 5th January, 1878, reported: 'One of the most interesting
scientific experiments which have ever been made in the colony
took place at the Melbourne Observatory on Saturday evening. It
consisted of a trial of that remarkable little instrument, the
telephone, and it is satisfactory to be able to record the fact that the
test resulted in a decided success.'
The newspaper continued: 'Although the telephone is not a
very elaborate piece of mechanism, it would perhaps be unwise to
confuse our readers with the intricacies of its construction; we will
confine our description to what is necessary to give a good general
idea of the principles on which it works, Briefly then, it consists of a
small box, about six inches long by two and a half inches in
diameter, containing several magnets, in front of which is the
diaphragm, a very thin sheet of iron, almost, but not quite, touching
the magnets. The telephone is then connected, with the wires, at
the other end of which a similar instrument is attached. When a
message is to be communicated, the sender puts his mouth to the
instrument and speaks, the diaphragm vibrates in accord with the
sound, and these vibrations are conveyed by electricity to the
diaphragm of the telephone at the other end, where they become
sonorous.'
The Weekly Times added: 'The voice, however, is so
much diminished that the listener, though he hold his ear to the
instrument, occasionally misses words, and sometimes is not sure
of what he does hear, but at other times everything comes out so
distinctly that even the voice may be recognised. On Saturday night,
Mr Ellery, with his staff of assistants and friends, connected the
telephone with about eighty yards of wire, and several messages
were exchanged between the main building and the laboratory. The
time was asked and given, quotations from Shakespeare were
rendered, and songs sung in one place were clearly audible in the
other. Several operatic renditions were next played upon the flute,
and an encore was demanded by the listener at the other end.'
Charles Todd found himself in friendly rivalry with a young
Scots immigrant, Alexander Dobbie, when it came time to introduce
the undoubted wonders of the telephone to Adelaide so soon after
his triumph with the telegraph. Dobbie was one of the most popular
chaps in Adelaide because he had a rare skill: he could hypnotise
people before they went to the dentist so they felt no pain (unless
they were run over by a horse and cart while getting across the road
to the dentist from Dobbie's house in College Park while in a
trance). Dobbie had arrived in Adelaide in 1851, aged eight, with his
parents and brothers, trained as a brass founder and had his own
factory and shops before he was twenty.
After a visit to the International Exhibition in Philadelphia
in 1876, Dobbie returned brimming enthusiasm for the latest in
American know-how: Remington's typewriter, Singer's sewing
machine and Heinz's Tomato Sauce (which he, undoubtedly,
corrected from 'Ketchup', as he would have Hines' Root Beer). He
also took particular notice of Alexander Bell's telephone and brought
home sketches of its innermost workings. He wrote an account of
his world travels that year, Rough Notes of a Traveller (1877) and
established an exhibition of his own at home so the citizens of
Adelaide could share in his discoveries.
An account of his first demonstration of the telephone said
'a conversation took place along a wire about a mile in length'. At
the same time, Charles Todd was making test telephone calls 15km
from his beach house in suburban Semaphore (where he'd installed
the world's most accurate time-ball) to the Adelaide G.P.O. when
'the telephone proved quite as effective in the transmission of vocal
music as in the case of ordinary conversation'. The first telephone
exchange opened in the G.P.O. in a corner of the telegraph room on
14th May, 1883.
All this telephonic progress was well and good, but we still
depended on ships to transport goods and people to and from our
antipodean isolation. And the oily British shipping barons were still
demonstrating the nautical sleights-of-hand complained about by
the Melbourne Herald editorialist in 1865. They were treating the
colonials with contempt ... this little tale begins on Friday evening,
20th September, 1872, as the Royal Mail steamer, Bangalore,
anchored in Hobson's Bay, at the mouth of the Yarra, in Melbourne,
after a fair run from England. She was one of the last ships to bring
first news from Home before the Overland Telegraph took over ... as
usual, a reporter from The Herald boarded the ship and brought the
dispatches back for a special 'Second Edition' of the newspaper ...
'Fullest Latest English News Collected From The Home Papers.'
The lead item was written by 'Anglo Australian', a London
correspondent who entrusted his copy to the Bangalore ship's
doctor. The item was the greatest load of rubbish and brought
'Anglo Australian's' journalistic relationship with the shipping
company's wily public relations fixers into extreme doubt. He
described the trials in the Thames Estuary of the latest purchase of
the large paddle-wheeler Otranto, 3360 tonnes and bigger than SS
Great Britain for the Australia-New Zealand run. The vessel was
converted to screw propulsion which was so quiet that she 'glided
along like a swan ... Indeed, she seemed to move like a thing of life,
and with no more noise than would be created by the velvet tread of
an aborigine'.
The passenger accommodations were all that could be
desired, the correspondent said, 'and abaft the sleeping berth there
is a ladies' boudoir' ... blah, blah. Anyway, the Otranto was, in fact, a
rebirthed 1853 ship which made her maiden voyage to Australia
later that year, went to New Zealand in 1874 with 762 immigrants, of
whom 280 were children; thirty-two of the children died of various
diseases and the 'latest' glamour liner was scrapped the following
year.
Charles had been made a Companion of the Order of St
Michael and St George (CMG) after he conquered the Great
Outback in 1872 and, while all his admiring chums thought that was
excellent ('Call Me God,' they said), they wondered why he was not
raised to the rank of knight (KCMG) ('Kindly Call Me God') until
1893; but it seems to have been just an oversight by successive
colonial governors. Alice, who did not care to be addressed as 'Lady
Todd', according to her English descendant, Alice Thomson (The
Singing Line), told the children: 'Your father should have got it long
ago.' But many of those Adelaide matrons who might have had to
bare their breasts for Prince Alfie back in '67 were green: a
Ladyship was something to be devoutly sought in Adelaide society
of the period, now that the dust had cleared.
In 1884, accompanied by his daughter, Charlotte
Elizabeth ('Lizzie' as she was known so as not to confuse her with
her late grandmother, Charlotte Bell), Charles Todd represented
South Australia at the International Telegraphic Conference in
Berlin, one of several world summits held in the 1880s to redefine
the rules of Planet Earth in view of the rapid advances in
'The demise of Sir Charles Todd has called forth a universal tribute
of respect, not the least hearty from the old officers who
remembered the trying times of 40 years ago, when, shortly after
taking up the heavy duties at the Post Office Department in addition
to his astronomical work and the Superintendence of the Telegraph
Department, he was called away to the Northern Territory, and
carried to a successful issue the overland telegraph, which at that
time was held up by apparently insurmountable difficulties. Sir
Charles was the most distinguished figure among the King's
servants in the State, and his good-humoured, friendly personality is
a loss to very many friends.' - The Public Service Review, Adelaide,
February, 1910.
The world went about its business for a century, in peace and war,
feast and famine ... in Australia, hardly anyone noticed the
imperceptible increase in temperatures, hastened by increased
Greenhouse Gases after the 1950s (but they were suspicious about
changing rainfall patterns) ... then, on 16th April, 2008, Peter
Garrett, Minister for Climate, Heritage and the Arts, armed with the
management systems that provide us with the weather data and the
long-term climate record are a critical part of the nation’s
infrastructure. Without them we would be ill-equipped to cope with
the challenges that nature deals us day after day and also the
dangers of climate change too.
'The Rudd Government’s climate change policy is built on
three pillars: reducing Australia’s greenhouse gas emissions;
adapting to climate change that we can’t avoid; and helping to
shape a global solution. In developing a strategy to achieve deep
reductions in emissions that are needed, the Government will be
mindful of the economic challenges we face. It is critical to settle on
measures which aim to be delivered at least cost, and with
greatest potential to drive new growth, create jobs and develop new
industries. Emissions will be reduced by the development and
implementation of an emissions trading scheme. This will enable a
greater reduction of emissions as a carbon price is established for
carbon in the system.
'There are also many opportunities for us all to reduce our
own climate footprint: driving less, installing energy rated
appliances, and turning them off at the switch. Bearing in mind the
strong desire Australians have shown to take action at home.
When we went to the election in 2007, we promised a number of
measures like providing low interest loans for people to make their
homes more energy and water efficient. Over the coming months, I
want to progress not only that initiative but a number of
others. The provision of energy efficient insulation and rebates to
achieve that, particularly in rental properties. Cost saving new
standards for household appliances. I will broaden and extend the
Solar Cities concept and make every school in Australia a solar
school.
'The success of these measures will inevitably require the
support of the Bureau of Meteorology at many levels and on many
timescales. For example, information from the Bureau will help to
identify where solar panels and solar hot water may be most
successful, or the optimum size of rainwater tanks.
The second pillar of the Government’s approach is adapting to the
climate change that we cannot avoid. We know now that climate
change resulting from human influences is already underway, so we
must prepare ourselves for the inevitable changes already built into
the climate system. The Bureau’s role is critical and it has been
expanded recently to allow it to provide the same information and
support on the water challenge as it has on weather
reporting generally, and it is critical to the climate challenge.
In future decades, as the climate scenarios unfold, we will need to
keep pace with new, more efficient ways of monitoring not only the
climate but consequent environmental impacts such as water
availability. So the linkage from understanding what the weather
will be to understanding where the climate has been and where it is
going, to understand the impacts of changes in the climate on
Australia, its people and its environment, will underscore the work of
the Bureau.
'As those of you who work there would know, new
'I feel that I have trespassed too long on your time, but I
have had a considerable stretch of ground to cover. The record I
have placed before you—very imperfectly, I fear—is one of which
we have no need to be ashamed. That meteorology should have
been taken up so energetically and been so liberally supported by
the several Colonial Governments, on whose purse, in building up a
new nation, there are so many claims, is not, however, without a
sufficient cause. To successfully occupy and establish industries in
new countries, a knowledge of climate and the meteorological
conditions under which we are to labour is essential to success, as
teaching us what we can best and most profitably produce. Situated
within and without the tropics, with such a range of climate, from the
snows of Kosciusko to the burning plains of the interior and the
humid heat of Port Darwin, we can obtain nearly all that man
requires.
'Our marvellous growth in the past is only a foretaste of
the future, and under such sunny skies we should be, as I trust we
are, in spite of the clouds of depression which occasionally hand
over us—with, however, silver linings not far away—a happy and
contented people. The lines have fallen to us in pleasant places,
and truly we have a goodly heritage.' A splendid Biblical reference
from Psalm 16, verse 6!
Alice would have approved.
END
Our index of names ... (use your 'find' function to locate them
in the book).