From the Edge Read online

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  The following morning, Monday 27 February, the Sydney Cove survivors gathered on a small beach on the south-western end of Preservation Island, standing among the sculpted granite boulders at the water’s edge. The necessary moment of separation had come, and with it mixed emotions of anticipation and fear. The scene on the beach is not hard to imagine—the raised arms of those on shore as they waved their companions farewell, and their shouts and cries as they wished them a safe voyage; a call and response of defiance and hope from shore to sea. Clark and Thompson knew that their chances of survival now rested on the success of the longboat’s voyage to Sydney. The weight of responsibility was palpable. As the longboat pushed away from the shore, Hamilton knew that he had done all he could. The challenge now was to dig in and survive until help arrived.

  Beach at Preservation Island, Rum Island in the distance, 2013

  Until the longboat’s departure, Hamilton’s command had guided the crew from the moment they left Calcutta. Now, as they sailed the longboat north along the coast of Flinders Island, it was Thompson and Clark who were called upon to make decisions. Much would depend upon their leadership and navigational skills. Hamilton had equipped them with a sextant to enable them to calculate their latitude. Little did they realise that crossing Bass Strait in a longboat would be a voyage that the most experienced of sailors would not wish upon themselves even two centuries later. If there was an advantage to the longboat it was the fact that without a deep keel it would have been able to put in to various stops along the way. Even if the weather were kind, the journey would have taken them nearly two weeks, more than enough time spent in a small boat in the open sea. They had a little rice but needed to replenish their provisions and water as they headed north.14

  The first two days of their journey went largely to plan. Leaving behind the northern tip of Flinders Island, they managed to cross the strait and by the morning of 1 March had sighted the mainland. Heading north along the Victorian coastline that same evening, the wind picked up from the south-east and within a few hours it had reached gale proportions. In a matter of minutes the storm became so intense that the longboat was in ‘great danger of foundering’. As they were not far from shore, Thompson and Clark immediately looked to put in but they could see the surf breaking ‘with such violence’ they decided that it wasn’t worth the risk. At that moment, as the heavy seas filled their boat with water, they might well have thought that it was their destiny to die at sea. Unable to land, and with the waves crashing over the boat, they ‘came to with both anchors’—‘the only chance of preservation’. If they could sit out the storm, perhaps by daylight they could manage to put in, then recover and sail on the following day. But all through the night the sea continued to break over them and the longboat filled with water again and again. It was back to bailing. At daybreak, ‘they cut both cables and set the foresail’ and decided to head for shore. But as the longboat crashed through the surf, the boat was totally flooded. Somehow they managed to get close enough in to allow the crew to reach the shore before the boat went down. All seventeen men swam or floundered their way through the last few waves to the beach. They’d had little time to think of gathering their belongings. Standing on the sand only minutes afterwards, they looked out to sea and watched as their longboat ‘went to pieces’ in the surf.

  They were wrecked on the middle of Ninety Mile Beach in northeast Victoria. The longboat was irreparably damaged. Their possessions were either lost at the bottom of the sea or, for the lucky ones, washed up on shore. The shock and despair they felt was exacerbated by the realisation that Hamilton and thirty or more of their fellow crew were still stranded to the south while the British colony at Sydney was more than seven hundred kilometres to the north. They had survived their latest ordeal, but for how long? From here, there were only two options: build cairns and signal fires in a hope that a passing ship would see them—there were next to none passing in 1797—or set out to walk to Sydney. But in the state they were in that morning, they could think of little beyond the obvious necessities of survival.

  For the next three days they repeated a similar task of retrieval to the one they had performed only weeks earlier off Preservation Island, collecting whatever things they could find from the wreck. Combing the beach, they were fortunate to find a few bags of rice and a handful of other provisions and belongings. They had landed approximately forty to fifty kilometres south-west of Lakes Entrance, in the territory of the Gunai Kurnai. Although there is no evidence that they met the Kurnai during the two weeks they spent recovering here, it is difficult to believe that the Kurnai did not see them. Behind the narrow stretch of beach that faced Bass Strait was a series of marshy lakes protected by steep dunes and coastal heath. The lakes and the eucalypt and banksia woodland beyond them were abundant in wildlife: black swans, pelicans, grebes, ducks and cormorants, dingoes, wombats, eastern grey kangaroos, black wallabies and echidnas. Clark noted that they had in their possession ‘one gun, two pistols, and two small swords’, more than enough weaponry with which to hunt game. Although after total immersion in salt water during the wreck, it’s possible that some of their firearms were useless. When they had collected all that could be found on the beach, they sheltered behind the dunes, took stock of their provisions and regathered their strength as Clark and Thompson slowly came to terms with their situation. Mindful of their companions waiting expectantly on Preservation Island and their own isolation, they decided that they would walk to Sydney.15

  From this point, any semblance of the world they had left behind in Scotland and Calcutta fell away. They had lost the last thread of that connection when their longboat broke to pieces on the beach. Now they found themselves setting out to walk further than any Europeans had ever walked in Australia, through swathes of coastal country unknown to anyone except its Indigenous owners. Everything would be for the first time. They had no idea of what lay before them, of how they would find their way over headlands, along ridgelines and across major rivers. They knew only that they had to head north until they reached Sydney, never allowing the coast out of sight or earshot lest they be lost in the interior. They knew they would encounter ‘the natives’ but had no prior knowledge of them, nor of the infinite sources of sustenance the environment could provide. As for provisions, they had only a small amount of rice per day to sustain them. They needed to find food and water every day to supplement their supplies. They were drastically unprepared to undertake such a journey with one significant exception: they were tough and hardened by the adversity they had already overcome. In many ways, they were more likely survivors than castaways attempting to undertake a similar journey today.

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  They began their walk with next to nothing. Clark, Thompson, Bennet and their two British companions wore caps or hats that they had salvaged from the longboat, while their shoes were the goatskin ‘straights’ made in India, designed for use on either foot. At best, this sleek, thin-skinned footwear would have lasted little more than a week. A few days’ walking through thick scrub and over rocky headlands would have cut them to shreds.16 The majority of the Lascars were probably barefooted. As well as firearms and swords, Clark and his party carried axes, a handful of knives and tools, cooking pots, water containers and calico, either on their person or in shoulder bags. Although they set out during the first weeks of autumn when the temperatures were mild (most days hovering between 17 and 25 degrees) and the ocean currents relatively warm, on certain days the sun was still hot enough to burn them severely. Exposure to extreme heat, wind and rain, countless bites from sandflies, mosquitoes, ticks and march flies, as well as badly scratched legs, arms and faces from occasional bush bashing were all guaranteed irritants. As for potentially lethal snakes—red-bellied blacks, browns, tigers and death adders—ignorance was bliss. Hamilton had sent only the youngest and fittest of the survivors. Five British men between the ages of twenty and forty, their clothes ragged and torn, their faces bearde
d, their hair long, walking with twelve Lascars in much the same bedraggled state. One Lascar was Clark’s ‘man-servant’ yet he remains a shadowy figure. In fact all the Lascars are unnamed, silent and ghostlike, as almost nothing about them was recorded. Even Hugh Thompson, John Bennet and the mysterious ‘carpenter’ exist as names at best. William Clark’s journal of the walk uses only the first-person plural (‘we’). Walking together with one object in mind, the shipwrecked party merged into one body.

  On Wednesday 15 March 1797, Clark wrote the first words in his journal: ‘We began our journey for Port Jackson’. The first 25 ‘miles’ along the narrow strip of sand that constituted Ninety Mile Beach was relatively easy going. Just before Lakes Entrance, they reached a river ‘so large that [they] were obliged to construct a raft to cross it’. After sailing from the other end of the world, the masters of the world’s oceans were brought to their knees at every river crossing. Every time they reached a large river mouth, they were forced to halt and build a raft, sometimes for up to three days. Not all of them could swim. Ignorant of the density and moisture content of freshly cut Australian hardwoods, their first rafts sank. Leaving the raft behind them once they had crossed the first river, they soon reached yet another river crossing, only to set to work on the next raft. Through ‘miserable experience’ they soon learnt to use dry timber. Although the Kurnai no doubt observed them from the beginning of their trek, it was not until the fourth day, 18 March, that Clark wrote of their first encounter with Aboriginal people. Somewhere between Lakes Entrance and Lake Tyers, fourteen Aboriginal men approached them. Clark vividly described the Kurnai’s amazement at what was clearly their first meeting with Europeans.

  They were struck with astonishment at our appearance, and were very anxious to examine every part of our clothes and body, in which we readily indulged them. They viewed us most attentively. They opened our clothes, examined our feet, hands, nails, etc; frequently expressing their surprise by laughing and loud shoutings. From their gestures during this awkward review it was easy to perceive that they considered our clothes and bodies as inseparably joined.17

  The astonishment was felt on both sides. The Kurnai’s laughter and shouting was accompanied by Clark’s wonder at their appearance: ‘strong and muscular, with heads rather large in proportion to their bodies. The flat nose, the broad thick lips … their hair long and straight … fish-bones or kangaroo-teeth fastened with gum or glue to the hair of the temples and on the forehead. A piece of reed or bone is also worn through the septum, or cartilage of the nose, which is pierced for the admission of this ornament’. The clinical detail of the description belied the drama of the encounter between the two groups as Clark and his party stood like mannequins for inspection. If the Kurnai men were amused, Clark was perplexed, repelled by the ‘rancid’ fish oil that covered their hair and bodies. His initial impression of them was predictable: ‘they present’, he wrote, ‘the most hideous and disgusting figures that savage life can possibly afford’. His views would soon change. Forced to stop at each river crossing for days at a time, fatigued by the daily exertion of the walk and with their rations dwindling, it soon became clear that they could not survive without the assistance of the local Aboriginal people. As each day blurred into the next, they would become more dependent on the ‘savages’ who moved effortlessly through the same country.

  William Clark’s journal was ‘compiled partly from recollection, and partly from the assistance of memoranda written with a pencil’ at the time of the walk. The introductory passage to the journal states baldly that ‘they began their march’ to Port Jackson, as if their bodies were steeled in military-like defence against the environment and they had little interest in the country through which they were moving. Yet as Clark’s later entries would reveal, what was about to unfold was no ‘march’. As they moved north along the coast, they walked not like soldiers but vagrants, lost in a country for which they possessed no deep well of ancestral memory or songlines of their own. North was their only lodestar. And yet despite their forlorn situation, they marvelled at the beauty and wildness of the landscape before them.

  Five days out, after climbing over very ‘high bluffs and sharp rocks’ and finding a ‘few shell fish’ on the way, they made another raft and successfully crossed Wingan Inlet, just south of Mallacoota. As he floated across the river, its ‘delightful’ banks with ‘tall and majestic trees’ overwhelmed Clark. The country had a ‘dignity’ all of its own. Walking on towards Mallacoota, he remarked again on the ‘beautiful scenery’ that ‘opened’ to their ‘view’. Looking inland from the beaches he saw the ‘high hills’ of the Howe Range in the distance, ‘covered to their summit with lofty trees’. Even his apprehension of the Aboriginal people he now knew were watching his party’s every move, and his ever-present fear that they might never reach their destination, could not blind him to the magnificence of the country.

  Coastline near Mallacoota, Victoria, 2013

  Remarkably, much of the coast they traversed from Ninety Mile Beach, through Croajingolong to Mallacoota and on to Cape Howe, looks much the same today—wild and largely unspoilt—except that many of the river mouths have since narrowed considerably due to siltation caused by land-clearing upstream. Some rivers that Clark was forced to cross with a raft can now be waded across at low tide. At Mallacoota, the party moved inland about ‘three or four miles’ to find a narrow stretch of an ‘immense river’ where they spent three long days building a raft before they could walk on towards Cape Howe near today’s New South Wales – Victorian border. Here, the high, windswept, ever-shifting dunes reach right to the water’s edge. ‘Fatigued’ by climbing the ‘hills of sand’, they passed by scores of Aboriginal middens accumulated over thousands of years, evidence of the abundance of seafood potentially available to them. By 29 March, after two weeks’ walking and rafting, they had traversed nearly two hundred kilometres without loss of life. Preoccupied as Clark and Thompson were with their own struggle for survival, they spurred one another on with the thought of Hamilton and the others marooned back on Preservation Island. By late March they had been underway five weeks from Preservation Island, yet Sydney was still more than five hundred kilometres away.

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  Retracing Clark’s steps in 2013, I saw my fellow walkers from a distance as they made their way along the coast: a line of solitary figures on the sand, their presence dwarfed by the vastness of the space surrounding them and the cavernous skies above. When I saw the country with my own eyes, I understood for the first time why Clark had been so moved to describe its ‘delightful verdure’. At certain points where the melaleucas cling to the headlands and hills above the shoreline, their luminous green canopies, constantly flattened by the onshore winds, appear from a distance like the grass fields of Scotland or Wales. Only on close inspection is the illusion broken. The further I walked, the more I could understand their isolation. Clark and his British companions had never experienced an environment like this before. They were accustomed to the closely settled towns and villages of their homeland or the British East Indies, which were always within relatively easy reach. The Lascars too were unfamiliar with such remoteness. A life at sea involved many moments of extreme isolation, but the ship was a tightly enclosed remnant of the world they had left behind, their one floating link to ‘civilisation’. On the beaches of New South Wales in 1797, Bengal and Britain were phantoms of the imagination.

  On the edge of Nadgee Lake, New South Wales, 2013

  From Cape Howe, Clark and Thompson headed north through Nadgee Nature Reserve, an area that contains some of the most untamed coastline in south-east Australia. Along the red-rock shoreline and headlands, white-bellied sea eagles circle constantly above, their massive wingspans visible from far away. After walking along the northern edge of Nadgee Lake, they followed ancient Aboriginal paths through banksia and hakea heathland towards Nadgee River, ground parrots and bristle birds their constant company. The heath seemed to stretch all the way
to the eastern horizon, hiding the stone ceremonial circles that Aboriginal people had built not far away on the Devonian mudstone cliffs that faced the sea. When they reached Nadgee River, approximately forty kilometres south of Eden, they fell in with a group of Aboriginal people who would transform the next stages of their journey.

  Nadgee River, New South Wales, 2013

  As the party attempted to wade across the river, one Aboriginal man ‘threatened to dispute’ their landing. But Clark and Thompson led them across nonetheless and succeeded in establishing ‘reconciliation’ with ‘the natives’ after giving away ‘a few strips of cloth’. They were now in the territory of the Thaua, which stretched northwards beyond Eden and Twofold Bay. Until this point they had seen only Aboriginal men. Standing on the northern bank of the river, Clark watched, surprised, as Thaua women and children came out from ‘behind the rocks’ to ‘show themselves’. ‘They were the first women we had seen’, and ‘from their cries and laughing’, he reflected, ‘it is evident they were greatly astonished at our appearance’. Again, Clark was torn between fascination and disgust, describing the Thaua women in what was probably a journalistic postscript, as ‘the most wretched objects [he] had ever seen—equally filthy as the men … so devoid of delicacy … that they seem to have nothing even human about them but the form’. Little did he realise that the willingness of the Thaua men to allow their women and children to be seen was a sure sign of the friendship to come.