“Good country” (Stuart): hunting for the Australian wilderness

The earliest inland expeditions follow a distinct evolution. During the first decades after the establishment of settlements in New South Wales, colonists struggled to get over the Blue Mountains and head west. With a route over the Great Dividing Range well established by 1820, a hunt for the mirage of an inland sea began in earnest. While Charles Sturt’s explorations of 1829-1830 put paid to such a notion, it was a myth that persisted well into the 1850s, and inspired, at least in part, the great expeditions of John MacDouall Stuart, that attempted to traverse and tame the vast interior.

These expeditions were mostly funded by British government bodies eager to establish and expand settlements near sources of fresh water, find land suitable for grazing, and generally exploit whatever natural resources may be there to be plundered. Any scientific studies conducted along the way were usually a means to these ends.

As a result, the first official records of these expeditions appear as ephemeral government-issued documents, intended to be presented before British Parliament in so-called Parliamentary Papers; also referred to as “Hansard”, after their printer, or “Blue Papers”, after their distinctively coloured covers. The reports are comprehensive compilations, often including the first appearance in print of related correspondence, lists of supplies and their costs, diary entries, and the first detailed maps of the territory explored. Subsequently forgotten, and apparently rarely filed away, surprisingly few comprehensive collections of these papers survive. The current group comes from the archive of the British Foreign Office Library.

These, often overlooked first accounts of European exploration, are a valuable contemporary testament to the trials and tribulations of the intrepid travelers who undertook their commission. Impelled by the romance of first discovery, and the notion of an untouched wilderness, history has often judged these men harshly. The infamous expedition of Burke and Wills appears here as an exhaustive and condemnatory Royal Commission into the tragic circumstances of their disappearance. Their endeavour, unlike the others, was commissioned by wealthy worthies from the state of Victoria in a spirit of a great race, to compete with the officially sanctioned expedition of John McDouall Stuart, to be the first to traverse the Australian continent from South to North, an account of which is also present.

In stark contrast, meanwhile, to the struggles being experienced “back east”, in 1829, Thomas Peel (1793-1865) delighted in referring to the opportunities, apparent at first glance, inherent in the lush Western Australian coastline. More than two thousand miles away, on the other side of the continent, was the “most important possession to the British interest… too numerous for the undersigned here to set forth”.

Fearful of French colonization in the Pacific, in April of 1826, James Stirling (1791-1865) had been given command of the new HMS ‘Success’ to examine the coast with the idea of establishing a defensive garrison or other settlement that might open trade with the East Indies… “a bill would soon be brought before parliament to provide for its government; private capitalists and syndicates would be allotted land in the proposed settlement according to the amount of capital and the money they spent on fares and equipment; priority of choice would be given only to those who arrived before the end of 1830, and no syndicate or company would be the exclusive patron and proprietor of the settlement” (Crowley).