The Explorers Read Online Free

a soak, passed, with variations, as normal practice for many Western Australian explorers.
    The third of November, 1874, arguably marks the apogee of this classic phase of exploration. Beginning about midday, a remarkable parade made its way through the streets of Adelaide. The good citizens of the city had decked the route with flags, flowers and streamers to honour the arrival of John Forrest’s expedition. The four Europeans and two Aborigines had left the Murchison district of Western Australia eight months earlier, and had pushed west towards the Adelaide-Darwin telegraph line, in the process traversing some of the most inhospitable country on the face of the earth. They were accompanied at the head of the procession by the glitterati of the town, while behind came a remarkable miscellany of exploration participants. Members of Stuart’s exploring expeditions bore standards marked with the dates January 1862 and 25 July 1862. Next rode R. E. Warburton (the son of the famous colonel who was absent overseas) and Charley, the Aborigine who performed such remarkable service on Peter Warburton’s expedition. Next came William Gosse, European discoverer and namer of Ayers Rock, and the irascible yet poetic Ernest Giles. Even the equine explorers were well represented, for Mr Waterhouse rode astride the horse which had carried ‘poor Burke on his ill-fated expedition’, and Mr Thring on ‘a horse which had crossed the continent with Stuart’.
    When the Hon. Arthur Blyth rose to speak at the celebratory dinner that night, he compared the occasion to an ‘old Roman Triumph…how the conquerors, when they went forth, and were successful, were granted a triumph, and in this triumph were accompanied by the most beautiful of their captives’. It seems that explorers like John Forrest were Australia’s conquistadors. Most often they returned without riches, but they brought a sense of real ownership of the entire continent to those Europeans that clustered around the edge, and for that they were feted.
    Whatever the intent of the explorers of the classic period, the consequences of their work were clear. They were the vanguard of an army of invaders who, with disease, the rifle and poisoned flour, would utterly sweep away the unique world of which the explorers give us the briefest glimpse. We can see in their writing how little of this complex world the explorers knew, and how few were their opportunities to learn about it before the full-scale European invasion began.
    It is one of the great ironies of the classic age of exploration that, by its end, the sum of human knowledge about Australia had been diminished. In 1817 it was still possible to find somebody, somewhere, who could tell you in detail about their society, the animals, plants and history of their particular part of Australia. The driest desert was as comprehensible to its inhabitants as your street is to you. Then, almost all of the country was lived in and used. But by 1874 vast new wildernesses had been created: areas which had become depopulated, or where people only very occasionally ventured. Moreover, these new ‘nomadic’, mostly European inhabitants knew little about the land they occasionally crossed. Today, there is no-one who can interpret that land for us. It’s true that what knowledge has survived, in writings such as those presented here, is more widely known; but that is the advantage which every literate society has over pre-literate ones.
    As you peruse these accounts, I hope that you discover or rediscover something of Australia yourself. Its history is varied beyond belief. Eora warriors, Polish patriots, French aristocrats, currency lads and lasses, fools and wise men, black and white, have all played their part in shaping what the dying William Wills called ‘this extraordinary continent’. It’s a continent we are just beginning to explore.
    Although the explorers often refer to