Alice And The Weather Man

Alice and the Weather Man

20/10/09 1:50 PM

Alice and the Weather Man: How the electric telegraph civilized Australia

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 nonconformist 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. This book is edited by Patricia Jennings, who is also associated with our project on the convict woman, Ann Inett.

Page 1 of 162

Alice and the Weather Man

20/10/09 1:50 PM

Alice's temper is uncertain, but suspected to be furious enough to have the Australian weather, in all its foot-stamping vagaries, named in her honour.* She had her fondness for her adopted city, did Alice, and the very English River Torrens that flowed though it ... and she did not take kindly to a visiting Melbourne journalist's snide remark ' ... the river is emptied at stated intervals to allow people to search for their friends and relatives ...' Equally, she could agree with a fellow citizen's poetic complaint ... I puff, I blow, to ease my pain, But none of this will do, So long as Fahrenheit remains All day at ninety-two Or the 19th century Adelaide schoolboys' parody of Caroline Carleton's Song of Australia ... There is a land where summer flies Come buzzing in your nose and eyes Blended in witching harmonies Australia! Australia! All Charles would mumble was, 'The telegraph to the meteorologist is what the telescope is to the astronomer,' and wander off upstairs to the Observatory. This book begins in 1861, when the citizens of the Colony of Victoria were marvelling at the construction of a Southern Hemisphere wonder, the breath-taking, Brunel-inspired Malmsbury railway viaduct, and yet, just a day's drive away in 21st century terms, the explorers, Burke and Wills were being poisoned slowly by kindly aborigines (a curious juxtaposition in view of what Europeans were doing to the aboriginal diet elsewhere) at Cooper Creek to the northwest; meanwhile, their celebrity rival, John McDouall Stuart, the 'Wee Scot' (and there was rarely a thirstier one) pressed on gamely to the north coast of Australia, prompting this cry from Melbourne Punch in January, 1860 ... 'A race! A race! So great a one The world ne'er saw before ...' 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. Search the Collections of the State Library of South Australia (http://www.slsa.sa.gov.au) for photographs and drawings of the people and places mentioned here.

Page 2 of 162

Alice and the Weather Man

20/10/09 1:50 PM

1. The world on a summer's day in the winter of 1861 After dawn on Tuesday, 25th June, 1861, in the Australian desert, the dying explorer William John Wills, aged twenty-seven, wrote in his journal of the hours just passed: 'Night calm, clear and intensely cold, especially towards morning. Near daybreak, King reported seeing a moon in the east, with a haze of light stretching up from it; he declared it to be quite as large as the moon, and not dim at the edges. I am so weak that any attempt to get a sight of it was out of the question; but I think it must have been Venus in the Zodiacal Light that he saw, with a corona around her.' At that moment, in the Ottoman Time Zone 13,000km northwest, the gracious reformist Sultan Abdulmecid, aged thirtyeight, was breathing his last in his palace overlooking the aromatic rose gardens of Gulhane Park, Istanbul. He was said to have been an enthusiastic and generous consumer of alcohol but, alas, tuberculosis nailed him first. A further 9000km west, in the U.S. Eastern Time Zone, compositors at the Daily Advocate, in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, placed this gentle exhortation to Confederate womanhood: 'The ladies of the vicinity are respectfully notified that Messrs McHatton, Pike and Co. have deposited at the office of the Penitentiary a bale of spun yarn for socks; all of those whose sons, fathers are in the army are entitled to yarns for two pairs of socks each, for winter use, and are requested to call and get the supply and prepare it for use. A plan will be devised for transmission to each company before winter sets in.' Sadly, we don't know what happened to that devoted knitting. Union troops seized Baton Rouge on its commanding bluff overlooking the Mississipi shortly thereafter, quartered men in the Louisville State Penitentiary, and bloodily repulsed Confederate attempts to take the city back. News of the last two events would not reach Australia for three months, a situation that one young man, Charles Todd, had announced his determination to remedy. It was a day of grim portent for many young men, that 25th June, 1861, but it was a good day for some with assured futures. Charles Todd, who was thirty-four, probably climbed the steps to the stone tower look-out at his new Adelaide Observatory to glimpse the cold pre-dawn phenomenon of Venus in the Zodiacal Light. In all likelihood, he was joined in the tower by his well-rugged wife, Alice, who had been wakened in the residence below by their restless third child, Hedley Lawrence. 'Dear little Hedley must be excited at the prospect of his first birthday in two days time,' Alice might have told Charles. She was only twenty-four, a nonconformist Cambridgeshire flower whose fragrance, good temper, fertility and virtue provoked both admiration and envy in Adelaide's overwhelmingly English provincial society. Charles and Alice weren't aware of the impending fate of their countryman, William John Wills, on that chilly mid-winter's morning; but they were only 900km south of his location on Cooper's Creek in the far northeast corner of the colony of South Australia, a piddling distance in brave colonial terms.

Page 3 of 162

Alice and the Weather Man

20/10/09 1:50 PM

Everyone of European Australia's 1.2 million people over the age of six knew about the lost Burke and Wills Expedition. An indeterminate number of aborigines scattered across the vast island continent did not know; the aborigines were expected to die out and were not included in the Colonial Census, but they would have found the missing explorers with greater ease than most of their bumbling white betters. The headstrong Robert O'Hara Burke, an Irish protestant ex-army officer, and his fatally-deferential deputy, William John Wills, a Devonshire-born surveyor, meteorologist and astronomer, left Melbourne on 21st August, 1860 at the head of a lavish expedition which would make the first crossing of Australia from south to north, a distance of 2600km. The affair was organised by the Royal Society of Victoria and had the blessing of the Victorian Government, which saw great rewards in prestige and the possibility of claiming a great slab of northern Australia for Victoria. A group of four men achieved the objective of reaching the north Gulf, but three of the four, including Burke and Wills, perished on the return journey. The survivor, John King, was saved by a party led by Alfred Howitt, which buried the dead men. William Brahe, a member of the rescue party, rode ahead to the gold city of Bendigo, 160km northwest of Melbourne, and broke the news by telegraph of the expedition's disastrous conclusion on 2nd November, 1861. Charles would have been as shocked as anyone when he heard of the deaths. But his scientific mind surely asked: Why? He was planning the greatest ever venture into Australia's unknown Red Centre and he would have asked: Why did two white men, in previously rude good health, starve to death in the middle of a bounteous winter, on the banks of a creek abounding in fish, fed by people of the Yantruwanta aborigines (who must have been as puzzled as Charles) waste away and die? The answer must be: The kindly aborigines unwittingly poisoned them. The Yantruwanta taught Burke, Wills and King to make cakes from nardoo (Marsilea drummondi), an aquatic fern which grows plentifully on the flood plains of Outback Australia; the Cooper's Creek area is one of these, an overflow from the seasonal inland rivers of western Queensland, whose turbulence turns the barren plains into something akin the Deltas of Bangladesh. According to the Federal Department of Environment and Heritage, the ferns of the nardoo 'form clumps about 8-10cm high at the edge of inland lakes, but [is] more usually a submerged plant with leaves, reminiscent of a four-leafed-clover, floating on the water surface. Nutritious food can be made from the spores of this plant if it is prepared correctly. Spores form as the water dries up. Aboriginal people in arid Australia collected the spore cases, roasted them, discarded the cases then ground the spores to make cakes.' Nutritious, yes, but deadly. Burke, Wills and King first came upon nardoo in abundance on 17th May, 1861, early in their isolation on Cooper's Creek. Wills reported ...'On approaching the foot of the first sandhill, King caught sight in the flat of some nardoo seeds, and we soon found the flat was covered with them. This discovery caused

Page 4 of 162

Alice and the Weather Man

20/10/09 1:50 PM

somewhat of a revolution in our feelings, for we considered that with the knowledge of this plant we were in a position to support ourselves, even if we were destined to remain on the creek and wait for assistance from town.' Nardoo contains thiaminase, an enzyme that destroys thiamine (Vitamin B), which hastens beri-beri. And 'dry' beri-beri, which attacks the heart and nervous system, was a major killer of Burke and Wills. The aborigines probably ate a thiamine supplement as part of their normal daily diet. In his last diary entry, on Thursday, 29th June, 1861, Wills wrote: 'Clear, cold night, slight breeze from the east, day beautifully warm and pleasant. Mr Burke suffers greatly from the cold and is getting extremely weak; he and King start tomorrow up the creek to look for the blacks; it is the only chance we have of being saved from starvation. I am weaker than ever, although I have a good appetite and relish the nardoo much; but it seems to give us no nutriment, and the birds here are so shy as not to be got at. Even if we got a good supply of fish, I doubt whether we could do much work on them and the nardoo alone. 'Nothing now but the greatest good luck can save any of us; and as for myself I may live four or five days if the weather continues warm. My pulse is at forty-eight, and very weak, and my legs and arms are nearly skin and bone. I can only look out, like Mr Micawber, "for something to turn up"; starvation on nardoo is by no means very unpleasant, but for the weakness one feels and the utter inability to move oneself; for as far as appetite is concerned, it gives the greatest satisfaction. Certainly fat and sugar would be more to one's taste; in fact those seem to me to be the great standby for one in this extraordinary continent: not that I mean to depreciate the farinaceous food; but the want of sugar and fat in all substances obtainable here is so great that they become almost valueless to us as articles of food, without the addition of something else.' So he died, meteorologist and nutritionist to the last. His journal was brought back to Melbourne and handed to his father, Dr William Wills, who returned to England and had a book about his son, the expedition and its aftermath published by Richard Bentley, of London, in 1863. And Charles Todd was able to absorb William Wills' intimate experiences - and warnings - in his planning for the survival of his Overland Telegraph construction parties. But that was in the 1870s, the 'modern era' of technology ... let's go back to a simpler age a lifetime earlier when Europeans were beginning their perplexing conquest of Australia ...

2. Unchained melodies as 'thunder shook the ship'! 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

Page 5 of 162

Alice and the Weather Man

20/10/09 1:50 PM

had the most tremendous thunderstorm and lightning, with heavy rain, I ever remember to have seen' ... 2nd February: 'This morning five sheep, belonging to the lieutenant-governor and quarter-master were killed by the lightning under a tree, at the foot of which a shed had been built for them. The branches of the tree were shivered and rent in a very extraordinary manner.' All the men looked anxiously towards the heavens in the ensuing days. They had planned certain al fresco pleasures, and the skies, discreetly, remained clear. On 6th February, Arthur Bowes Smyth, surgeon on the female convict ship, Lady Penrhyn, wrote: 'At five o'clock this morning, all things were got in order for landing the whole of the women and three of the ship's longboats came alongside us to receive them: previous to their quitting the ship, a strict search was made to try to find if any of the many things they had stolen on board could be found, but their artifice eluded the most strict search and about six p.m., we had the long wished for pleasure of seeing the last of them leave the ship. They were dressed in general very clean and some few amongst them could be said to be well dressed. The men convicts got to them very soon after they landed, and it is beyond my abilities to give a just description of the scene of debauchery and riot that ensued during the night.' On the now-empty ship, the sailors averted their eyes from this gross carnal happening and, as Bowes Smyth, said, 'requested some grog to make merry with upon the women quitting the ship. Indeed, the captain himself had no small reason to rejoice upon their all being safely landed and given into the care of the governor, as he was under the penalty of £40 for every one that was missing, for which reason, he complied with the sailors request, and about the time they began to be elevated, the tempest came on. The scene which presented itself at the time and during the greater part of the night, beggars every description; some swearing, others quarrelling, others singing, not the least regarding the tempest, though so violent that the thunder shook the ship exceeded anything I ever before had a conception of. 'I never before experienced so uncomfortable a night, expecting every moment the ship would be struck with the lightning. The sailors almost all drunk and incapable of rendering much assistance had an accident happened and the heat was almost suffocating.' A terrific night was had by all, and everyone finished up quite moist, but happy, with exception of Arthur Bowes Smyth and the parson Richard Johnson (and his wife, Mary, who came from the genteel English town of Lymington and seems to have hidden, trembling, under a blanket for most of her stay in NSW.) The charms of the weather extended to the peculiar qualities of the lightning-struck trees. On 9th March, after a sea excursion to Broken Bay, 40km north of Sydney, White, the settlement's chief doctor, observed, quite puzzled: 'Strange as it may be imagined, no wood in this country, though sawed ever so thin, and dried ever so well, will float. Repeated trials have only served to convince me that, immediately on immersion, it sinks to

Page 6 of 162

Alice and the Weather Man

20/10/09 1:50 PM

the bottom like a stone.' Watkin Tench, a cultivated lieutenant of Marines, spoke optimistically: 'The climate is undoubtedly very desirable to live in. In summer the heats are usually moderated by the sea breeze, which sets in early; and in winter the degree of cold is so slight as to occasion no inconvenience; once or twice we have had hoar frosts and hail, but no appearance of snow. The thermometer has never risen beyond 84, nor fallen below 35, in general it has stood in the beginning of February at between 78 and 74 at noon. Nor is the temperature of the air less healthy than pleasant. Those dreadful fevers by which new countries are so often ravaged, are unknown to us; and excepting a slight diarrhoea, which prevailed so after we landed and was fatal in a very few instances, we are stranger to epidemic diseases.' Tench observed the thunderstorm noted by White on 1st-2nd February, but dismissed such phenomena as regular happenings: 'On the whole (thunderstorms in the hot months excepted), I know not any climate equal to this I write in. Ere we had been a fortnight on shore we experienced some storms of thunder accompanied with rain, than which nothing can be conceived more violent and tremendous, and by their repetition for several days, joined to the damage they did, by killing several of our sheep, led us to draw presages of an unpleasant nature. Happily, however, for many months we have escaped similar visitations.' Arthur Bowes Smyth, who had a very negative attitude towards his lady charges, particularly after a long sea voyage, reported the colony's first death from exposure to the weather on 25th March: 'This evening, abt. 7 o'clock, died John Fisher, seaman on board our ship of dysentery - Several of the men on board had the same disorder and recovered, and I attribute the death of this young man (abt. 20 years old) to his own imprudence in swimming on shore naked in the middle of the night to one of the convict women with whom he had formed a connection and who had a child by him while on board - he wd. lye about with her in the woods all night in the dews and return on board again a little before daylight, whereby he caught a most violent cold and made his disorder infinitely more putrid than it otherwise have been (if he did not wholly occasion it by such improper conduct.') Of course, Bowes' entry about Fisher's tragic romance with Ann Morton, a 20-year-old servant girl transported for shoplifting, should be seen in the context of his contempt on 10th January, when the fleet was running up the Australian east coast in a tremendous gale: 'During the storm the convict women in our ship were so terrified that most of them were down on their knees at prayer, and in less than an hour after it abated, they were uttering the most horrid oaths and imprecations that could proceed out of the mouths of such abandoned prostitutes as they are.'

3. Creeping inland ... and a 'tree in flames'! On 22nd April, 1788, Governor Arthur Phillip took a party in boats

Page 7 of 162

Alice and the Weather Man

20/10/09 1:50 PM

about twelve kilometres west on the harbour until it appeared to have narrowed enough for them to conclude that they were at its head. This may have been between the present suburbs of Ryde and Auburn. Here, they disembarked and plunged into the bush (or woods, as they called it). John White was in the party, along with his good friend, Lieutenant Henry Ball, commander of HMS Supply, who had recently shipped the first convicts to Norfolk Island, and was keen to stretch his land-legs in the NSW hinterland. They thrashed around the forest, feasting at one point on a stew based on two white cockatoos and two crows until, on 25th April, White reported ... '... we saw a tree in flames, without the least appearance of any natives; from which we suspected it had been set on fire by lightning. This circumstance was first suggested by Lieutenant Ball; who had remarked, as well as myself, that every part of the country, though the most inaccessible and rocky, appeared as if, at certain times of the year, it had been all on fire. Indeed, in many parts we met with very large trees, the trunks of which and branches were evidently rent and demolished by lightning.' Robert Ross, the lieutenant-governor who'd earlier had the distinction of having the first sheep in Australia electrocuted by Mother Nature, wrote: 'The face of the country round us produces dreadful proofs of the devastation caused by the frequent lightnings, besides our already having visited by the shock of an earthquake (see below), which happened on the 22nd of June. The fatal effects of the first, Captain Campbell and myself have woefully experienced in having the principal part of our livestock (all our sheep and lambs, with some hogs which we purchased at the Cape of Good Hope) destroyed by it soon after our arrival.' Ross' view may have been coloured by his being the most despised man in Sydney, followed closely by Campbell, his best friend. White and Ball, it must be said, showed their faith in the colony's future climate by fathering two illegitimate children by two convict women. Ball's daughter, Ann Maria, born to Sarah Partridge (August, 1789) chose to remain in Sydney and brave the colonial weather's fickleness (instead, by way of compensation, Ball took the first live kangaroo back to England with him in 1792); White's son, Andrew, born to Rachel Hunter (September, 1793) went home with father to England's miserable winters, served in the army at the Battle of Waterloo, and eventually rejoined mother by Sydney's mostly sun-drenched shores. Meanwhile, White continued his observations, mainly of an ornithological nature, which would be published in his Journal of a Voyage to New South Wales (London, 1790). On 26th June, he wrote: 'About four in the afternoon a slight shock of an earthquake was felt at Sydney Cove, and its environs. This incident had so wonderful effect on William Corbett, a convict, who had eloped about three weeks before, on discovery being made of his having stolen a frock (a labourer's smock), that he returned and gave himself up to justice.' Corbett was the recipient of good news and bad news. The good news was that a decree declaring him an outlaw was revoked; the bad news was that he was hanged. He

Page 8 of 162

Alice and the Weather Man

20/10/09 1:50 PM

was, as it were, caught between The Rocks, where the convicts were confined, and a Harder Place. In those uncertain months of 1788, Tench had became fast friends with a brother Marine, Lieutenant William Dawes, another enlightened late-twenties officer who shared his esoteric pursuits. Dawes had come out on the warship Sirius for a purpose totally unconnected with the guarding of convicts. He was to set up an establishment on the point of land at The Rocks where the Harbour Bridge now departs for the North Shore. The idea of having an official weather station was deemed necessary, particularly after this note from John White on 26th January: 'This day I had the misfortune to break the only thermometer I had left of six, and my barometer, on taking them on shore, to determine the difference between it and the air on board a ship (convict transport Charlotte).' Watkin Tench explained Dawe's role: 'In enumerating the public buildings, I find I have been so remiss as to omit an observatory, which is erected at a small distance from the encampments. It is nearly completed, and when fitted up with telescopes, and other astronomical sent out by the Board of Longitude, will afford a desirable retreat from the listlessness of a camp evening at Port Jackson. 'One of the principal reasons which induced the Board to grant this apparatus was, for the purpose of enabling Lieut Dawes, of the Marines (to whose care it is entrusted) to make observations on a comet (Halley's) which is shortly expected to appear in the southern hemisphere. That latitude of the observatory, from the result of more than three hundred observations, is fixed at 33º52'30S, and the longitude at 15º16'30E of Greenwich. The latitude of the South Head which forms the entrance to the harbour, 33º51 and that of the North Head opposite to it at 33º49'45S.' Dawes had been recommended for the task by the Astronomer Royal, Rev. Dr. Nevil Maskelyne, who wanted him to watch for Halley's Comet, last sighted in 1682. On arrival in Sydney, he dutifully named his observatory point Maskelyne Point, but Dawes' nearest neighbours were ignorant convict oafs who called it 'Dawes' Point'. And that's the name it bears today. To add to the insult, Maskelyne's comet failed to materialise over Sydney, so Dawes to turned other activities, including the construction of defensive batteries at the entrance to Sydney Cove. In 1792, Dawes returned to England, became a mathematics teacher and, eventually, a Church of England minister. He retained his scientific interests, however, and was pleased to show his son, William Rutter Dawes (b. London, 1799) his prized copy of the first Astronomer Royal John Flamsteed's (1646-1719) atlas of the stars. William Rutter Dawes, was captivated and, after a brief foray into medicine, became an astronomer and codiscoverer of Saturn's crepe ring. In his later years, he retired to Cambridgeshire and there seems little doubt he would have moved in the same circles as Charles Todd. It's a small world, as astronomers might (or might not) say. But we are still in the convict encampment of Sydney ... as the summer of 1788-89 approached, the fearful thunder and lightning

Page 9 of 162

Alice and the Weather Man

20/10/09 1:50 PM

returned. On 31st October, White reported: 'In the evening of this day, we had very loud thunder, and a shower of hail; many of the hailstones were measured and found to be five-eights of an inch' ... 2nd November: 'This day more hail; the weather dark and gloomy, with dreadful lightning. The mercury during the whole of the day stood between 66 and 68' ... and, as an afterthought related to hot weather and cleanliness ...'A criminal court sentenced a convict to five hundred lashes for stealing soap, the property of another convict, value eightpence.' As they moved into their second year in the colony, they still clung to the coast; the settlement's administrators were nautical men with a hankering for the sea and no wish to flirt with the sensual folds of misty blue mountains beyond the bounds of their salty comfort zone. They stared out to the Pacific Ocean for the sail that never appeared. Surely, they had been forgotten. Hadn't they? Had something happened in Europe? Well, they weren't to know that the first stirrings of the French Revolution at the Bastille on 14th July, 1789 had concentrated the attention of King George III and other British Higher-Ups, fearful that the disease of peasants' rebellion might spread across the Channel.

4. Icebergs threaten Sydney! Early in 1790, Watkin Tench was stationed at South Head, at the entrance to Sydney Harbour: 'Here, on the summit of the hill, every morning from daylight until sun sunk, did we sweep the horizon, in the hope of seeing a sail. At every fleeting speck, which arose from the bosom of the sea, the heart pounded, and the telescope was lifted to the eye. 'If a ship appeared here, we know she must be bound for us; for on the shores of this vast ocean (the largest in the world) we were the only community which possessed the art of navigation, and languished for intercourse with civilised society.' They were hungering for European fare, too; like Burke and Wills seventy years later, their British-trained bellies were not accustomed to the local bush tucker, witchetty grubs and the like (and, fortunately, unlike Burke and Wills, they didn't feast on inland nardoo). What they did not know was that their lifeline to the world had become entangled with that most unAustralian and oldfashioned climatic phenomenon, an iceberg, southwest of Cape Town on the previous Christmas Eve, 1789. The vessel was HMS Guardian, a seven-year-old London-built warship, stripped of her 44-cannon, and converted into a large storeship. She was nominally part of the First Fleet and carried nearly 1000-tonnes of stores for Sydney Cove. Her commander was the dashing 26-year-old Lieutenant Edward Riou, who was to die such a gallant death (with the appropriate famous last words) at the Battle of Copenhagen in 1801. But on that fateful Christmas Eve, 1789, Edward Riou was having no such heroic luck. Riou had sailed as a 14-year-old midshipman on the Resolution, accompanying the great mariner,

Page 10 of 162

Alice and the Weather Man

20/10/09 1:50 PM

James Cook's Discovery on his third (and fatal) voyage to the Pacific in 1776-79. They encountered no southern ice on this voyage, but Riou would have experienced its treacherous immovability near Alaska. Surely Riou had read Cook's words about the Antarctic during his earlier, second expedition in 1772-74? On 17th January, 1773, aboard the Resolution, 4000km south of the Cape of Good Hope, Cook had written ... 'As the wind remained invariably fixed at E. and E by S., I continued to stand to the south, and on the 17th, between eleven and twelve o'clock we crossed the Antarctic Circle (the first to do so), in the longitude of 39º35'E for at noon we were by observation in the latitude of 66º36"30'S. The weather was now becoming tolerably clear so that we could see several leagues around us and yet we had only seen one island of ice since the morning. But about 4pm, as we were steering to the south, we observed the sea in a manner covered with ice, from the direction of SE, round by the south to east. In this space, thirty-eight ice islands great and small were seen, besides loose ice in abundance, so that we were obliged to luff for one piece and bear up for another and, as we continued to advance to the south, it increased in such a manner that at three-quarters past six, being then in a latitude of 67º15'S. we could proceed no further, the ice being entirely closed in the south.' When the Guardian met the iceberg that Christmas Eve, 1789, it was 2000km SE of Cape of Good Hope, and northwest of Prince Edward Island in the south Indian Ocean. This was 11,000 kilometres southwest of Sydney. Riou had placed his ship in a straight easterly line to round Tasmania, believed to be 'the southern cape of Australia' until George Bass and Matthew Flinders established the existence of the sea route through Bass Strait in 1798. So Riou had done nothing unseamanlike on that foggy afternoon when he spotted an iceberg about five kilometres distance. He had taken on a small herd of cattle at Cape Town, and saw it as a splendid opportunity for the crew to gather some large lumps of ice for the animals' drinking water. This task completed, he was about to take the ship's boats back on board when the Guardian struck an underwater ice ledge. She swung round on impact, knocking her rudder off and allowing icy water to begin an increasing trickle into her hold. A gale blew up, the sails were shredded, the crew began to throw the colony's precious foodstuff overboard, some sailors drank themselves senseless (a wise precaution for those who didn't fancy their chances of swimming 2000km to safety) and some chose to take to the ship's boats which they had lately been loading, cheerfully, with ice blocks. Riou got the Guardian back to Cape Town on 21st February, with the assistance of towing whale boats from another British ship. She moored in False Bay, but a gale drove her on to the beach on 12th April. Eventually, twenty-one specialist tradesmen convicts who survived the disaster were pardoned in Sydney for their exemplary behaviour. Riou returned to England, where he was greeted,

Page 11 of 162

Alice and the Weather Man

20/10/09 1:50 PM

embarrassingly, as a hero and had his portrait executed by Samuel Shelley (no relation) who had lately been honoured with commission to paint the portrait of Princess Sophie Matilda (aged about six), daughter of the Duke of Gloucester and niece of George III, patron of the starving, whingeing, lightning-plagued colony of New South Wales. And Riou's subsequent career? He became a captain and commanded a squadron of six frigates in the first Battle of Copenhagen on 2 April, 1801. When signalled to withdraw by his elderly Admiral Sir Hyde Parker (not a nom-de-plume), Riou cried (despite having an artillery splinter in his eye): 'What will Nelson think of us?' and was promptly bisected by a cannon ball. Nelson, the disgraced Parker's deputy at the battle, said later: 'In poor Riou, the country had sustained an irreparable loss.' But, returning to the high drama at besieged Sydney on 3rd June, 1790 ... Tench was at South Head look out, vainly awaiting the arrival of the Guardian, when, at last ... 'My next door neighbour, a brother officer, was with me. But we could not speak; we wrung each other by the hand, with eyes and hearts overflowing.' The Lady Juliana, a giant East Indiaman of 400 tonnes, normally employed in the tea trade, was ploughing towards the Heads, stuffed to the gunwales with the colony's real or imagined needs ... and 221 of the most delectable lady convicts, girls of 'daring habits', one contemporary said, who'd ever set sail, or that's how they'd look to some conversation-starved males in Sydney. But they almost struck disaster as they entered the Heads! A wicked southerly suddenly blew up and threatened to cast the women to their deaths on the rocks at North Head! The blessed Sydney weather again! But muscled, sun-bronzed rowers (we suppose they must have appeared) came to their rescue and towed the vessel and its precious cargo for three exhausting days the eight kilometres southwest to Sydney Cove. And everything ended happily under the Sydney winter sun. In mid-July, 1791, Watkin Tench, his good friend, William Dawes and others left Sydney Cove and ventured west from Sydney to Rose Hill (Parramatta), 30km away, in search of a 'large river, which was said to exist a few miles southward of Rose Hill.' Some historians have suggested they found Prospect Creek, near the present site of Prospect Reservoir, an important part of the Sydney water supply system. But it was more likely a headwater of the Georges River, a kilometres or so south. Whatever, Tench was not impressed: 'We went to the place described, and found this second Nile, or Ganges, to be nothing but a salt water creek, communicating with Botany Bay, on whose banks we passed a miserable night, from want of a drop of water to quench our thirst; for as we believed we were going to a river, we thought it needless to march with full canteens.' But they were about to begin a tradition which is a common part of Sydney weather reports today: taking the Battling Western Suburbs temperatures to be compared with those of the Silvertail city harbourside. Tench reported (A Complete Account of

Page 12 of 162

Alice and the Weather Man

20/10/09 1:50 PM

the Settlement at Port Jackson, London, 1793): 'On this expedition we carried with us a thermometer which (in unison with our feelings) showed so extraordinary degree of cold for the latitude of the place, that I think myself bound to transcribe it.' 'Monday, July 18th. The sun arose in unclouded splendour, and presented to our sight a novel and picturesque view; the contiguous country as white as if covered with snow, contrasted with the foliage of trees, flourishing in the verdure of tropical luxuriancy. Even the exhalation which steamed from the lake beneath, contributed to heighten the beauty of the scene. - Wind SSW. - Thermometer at sunrise 25ºF. - The following night was still colder. At sunset the thermometer stood at 45ºF; at quarter before four in the morning, it was 26F; at quarter before six, at 24ºF; at quarter before seven, at 23ºF; at seven o'clock, 22ºF, at sunrise, 23ºF; after which it continually to mount, and between one and two o'clock, stood at 56ºF in the shade. - Wind, SSW. The horizon perfectly clear all day, not the smallest speck to be seen. - Nothing, but demonstration could have convinced me that so severe a cold ever existed in this low latitude. Drops of water on a tin pot, not altogether out of the influence of the fire, were frozen into solid ice, in less than twelve minutes. Part of a leg of kangaroo, which we had roasted for supper, was frozen quite hard, all the juices of it converted into ice. On those ponds which were near the surface of the earth, the covering of ice was very thick; but on the surface of those which were lower down, it was found to be less so, in proportion to their depression; and wherever the water was twelve feet below the surface (which happened to be the case close to us) it was uncongealed. It remains to be observed that the cold of both these nights, at Rose Hill and Sydney, was judged to be greater than had ever before been felt.' It can be seen that the above expedition does not figure largely on the Richter Scale of icy polar explorations, but the drought conditions in settled NSW, which barely constituted a decent suburb in today's terms, were the subject of everyone's conversation, free, captive and those who hoped to cultivate the Governor's favour and occupy the uneasy middle ground. Tench was pleased to mark the drought's end: 'The extreme dryness of the preceding summer has been noticed. It had operated so far in the beginning of June, that we dreaded a want of water for common consumption, most of the little reservoirs in the neighbourhood of Sydney being dried up. The small stream near to town (Tank Stream) was so nearly exhausted (being the drain of a morass) that a ship could not have watered at it, and the Supply was preparing to sink casks in a swamps, when the rain fell, banishing our apprehensions.'

5. Merde! Scientific Froggies on the horizon While Watkin Tench was taking the temperature in Western Sydney, the French vessels Recherche and Esperance were outfitting in Brest to begin a grand scientific expedition which would also attempt to resolve the mystery of the missing French explorer Jean-

Page 13 of 162

Alice and the Weather Man

20/10/09 1:50 PM

Francois de Galaup, Comte de La Perouse, and his two vessels, Astrolabe and Boussole. They were, in fact, last seen when their expedition coincided with the arrival of the First Fleet in Botany Bay in 1788. In Paris, the National Assembly was unaware of that brief contact and voted money for the search. Everyone was worried, particularly the wives and children of the missing sailors. Even Louis XVI, making his way, graciously, to the guillotine on 21st January, 1793, is said to have enquired: 'What news of La Perouse?' His interest was personal; an oil painting by Nicholas Monsiaux held in the Palais de Versailles depicts him seated, looking intelligent, with a map and a very attentive La Perouse: 'Louis XVI giving final instructions to the Comte de La Perouse, 1785', says the caption This rescue mission was led by the 51-year-old seaman and hydrographer, Rear-Admiral Joseph-Antonie Raymond Bruny D'Entrecasteaux. His two ships, La Recherche (Seek) and L'Esperance (Hope) left Brest on 28 September, 1791. They sailed to Capetown and then east to Storm Bay, on the southeast coast of Van Diemens Land (Tasmania), which they reached on 23rd April, 1793. Bruny D'Entrecasteaux wrote: 'We have found the climate in this part of New Holland very mild; the reading of the Reaumur thermometer was constantly between 9º and 14º; many plants still flower in May, which in relation to the position of the sun corresponds to November in Europe. The trees in the harbour have not yet lost their leaves (he had not been told about the seasonal habits of the Australian eucalypt). It is to be presumed that the summer temperatures are much higher than its latitude indicates. During the hot season, the extreme humidity of the soil of this harbour must produce steamy vapours, the more harmful since the air is as stagnant as the waters. The port is so enclosed, that it cannot be refreshed by those sea breezes, which in the good season, can renew and purify the air on any stretched-out coast.' The most interesting reference in the above paragraph, believe it or not, is to Bruny's thermometer and how, unbeknown to him, it was about to evaporate forever. The Reaumur thermometer was devised by a French scientist, Rene Antoine Ferchault de Reaumur, in 1730. He proposed a scale that depended on only one reference point: the freezing point of water was considered zero. The thermometer was filled with a controlled mix of alcohol and water, so that the boiling point was 80 degrees. But the Reaumur method, in the purest sense, was not decimal, the magic word of the looming Brave New World of France in the 1790s. It was ideological impure and would have to be banished, along with, the fanatics demanded, the 60 second minute, 60 minute hour and seven day week. Bruny, simple sailor, was not aware of the gathering clouds of Revolution when he left Brest with his Reaumur thermometer on 28th September, 1791. Certainly, the Bastille had been stormed on 14th July, 1789. But in 1791, the object of the National Assembly was not to rid itself of the monarchy, but to effect gradual change from absolute to constitutional. Louis was still king,

Page 14 of 162

Alice and the Weather Man

20/10/09 1:50 PM

and the monarchy did not collapse until August, 1792. The geniallydespotic 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-incommand, 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

Page 15 of 162

Alice and the Weather Man

20/10/09 1:50 PM

days together seldom passed without a necessity occurring for lighting a fire in an evening. A habit d'ete, or a habit de demi saison, would be in the highest degree absurd; clouds, storms, and sunshine pass in rapid succession. 'Of rain, we found in general, not a sufficiency but torrents of water sometimes fall. Thunder storms, in summer, are common, and very tremendous, but they have ceased to alarm, from rarely causing mischief; sometimes they happen in winter. I have often seen large hailstones fall. Frequent strong breezes from the westward purge the air; these are almost invariably attended with a hard clear sky. The easterly winds, by setting in from the sea, bring thick weather or rain, except in summer when they become regular sea breezes. The aurora australis is sometimes seen, but is not distinguished by superior brilliancy.'

6. Tank Stream sees the grotty 'Londoning' of Sydney 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:

Page 16 of 162

Alice and the Weather Man

20/10/09 1:50 PM

If any person is detected in throwing any filth into the stream of fresh water, cleaning fish, washing, erecting pig-sties near it, or taking water but at the tanks, on conviction before a magistrate, their houses will be taken down and forfeit £5 for each to the Orphan Fund. The Tank Stream continued to be Sydney's main source until 1826 when it was abandoned in favour of water carted from the 'Lachlan Swamps', now part of Centennial Park, five kilometres in a direct line southeast of Sydney Cove. In that year, a newlyimmigrated Scottish mining engineer, John Busby, began the excavation by convicts of a 3.6km tunnel through sandstone to the Lachlan Swamps, completing the task in 1837. This source of water was known, romantically, as Busby's Bore, by Sydneysiders with the same sentimentally they regarded a monumental obelisk erected as a sewer vent over the dear old Tank Stream in 1857, and modelled, in a splendid example of Empire cultural cringe, on the fair dinkum Cleopatra's Needle, which had been pillaged from Egypt and was about to be erected on the Thames Embankment. It was unveiled by the one-term Mayor, George Thornton, and became known, accurately, as Thornton's Scent Bottle. So the saga of the Tank Stream ended, though it continued to piddle along for decades in varying squalid stinking hues through low, rat-infested residential areas whose residents had glumly accepted their lot from the end of the 18th century. As far back as 8th April, 1804, the Sydney Gazette reported (rather pompously, considering the previous criminal affiliations of the journalistic staff): 'The heavy rains during the week have again furnished a testimony of the inadequacy of the slight mode of building adhered to by the lower order of inhabitants (those others, of course, who may have been convicts), and an incontrovertible argument against the use of thatch. During the night of Tuesday, whole sides of houses were washed down, and covering of the above description could scarcely be denominated a shelter from the inclemency of the season. On Wednesday morning, the lower part of a chimney fell inwards upon a family at breakfast near one of the wharves, but very fortunately and providentially, no personal injury was sustained, though the tea equipage suffered severely by the accident.' Of course, such deluges could also provide providential opportunities to the lower order of inhabitants, as the Gazette reported in the same issue: 'On Tuesday night, during the heavy storm of rain, some person or persons entered the stockyard of Daniel Macoy, near the Hospital Wharf, and stole therefrom seven pigs, none of which have yet been heard of.' (Later, there was some suggestion that the mother pig had, in fact, scoffed her seven children, but that speculation leads us astray from the serious subject of this tome). Sydney's violent weather provided the much-maligned lower orders at The Rocks with some revenge on their tormentors at the Gazette. An anonymous newspaperman (probably George Howe), was forced to report on 7th January, 1810: 'The thunderstorm that set in between four and five yesterday afternoon

Page 17 of 162

Alice and the Weather Man

20/10/09 1:50 PM

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.

7. Sydney, 2nd June, 1822: NSW enters Space Age! When the new Governor, Sir Thomas Brisbane, a devoted Scot, stepped ashore in Sydney Cove on 7th November, 1821, he was followed by the most peculiar entourage. It was led by his good lady, another devoted Scot, Anna Maria, whom he had kindly plucked off the shelf at the age of thirty-one, only two years before: the fact that she was the sole heiress to the vast fortune of Sir Henry Hay Makdougal, laird of Makerstoun, was coincidental. Next in line was Christian Ruemker, also thirty-three, a German astronomer whose rudeness became notorious, even by Sydney standards. Somewhere, hanging back in this throng of retainers was James Dunlop, in his late-twenties, a Scottish weaver's son and aspiring astronomer, an all-round congenial fellow. In the background, smiling slyly, was another Scot,

Page 18 of 162

Alice and the Weather Man

20/10/09 1:50 PM

Alexander Berry, one of the leading money-grubbers of NSW and the charterer of the Royal George that brought them all; he'd had the Governor's captive ear for the past five months. And somewhere in the melee were servants carrying boxes of the most up-to-date astronomical gear in the Southern Hemisphere. It was the private property of Sir Thomas Brisbane. Brisbane, aged fifty-eight, was an astronomy enthusiast first, an army general second, and a colonial administrator a distant third when he succeeded another Scottish soldier, Lachlan Macquarie, as Governor of NSW. Most recently, he had been commander of the southernmost Munster military district in Ireland which encompassed Clare, Cork, Kerry, Limerick, Tipperary and Waterford. But he would not have been familiar with some exneighbours aboard the convict transport, John Barry, which anchored in the Cove within days of the Royal George. It carried 180 Irishmen driven to petty crime in a starving landscape where the population had reached 6.8 million in a world which no longer sought their pitiful farm produce or cottage textiles. They were men who'd never go home, leaving grieving women who, in the words of the ballad ... Her tears might flow in vain, For on that day her husband sailed She ne'er would see again, She pressed her infant to her breast And again at her it smiled 'I live for that dear boy,' she cried; Alas! her convict child. But, excuse me! None of that nostalgic Celtic nonsense! We're here to talk about astronomy and meteorology! In NSW that November day in 1821, Brisbane was confronted by 30,000 white subjects, nearly half prisoners of the Crown and the rest comprising 'Emancipists' (former convicts), 'Exclusives' (free settlers) and sundry younger people, known as 'Currency Lads and Lasses' (convicts' children) or 'Miss This and Master That' , the offspring of Exclusives and who, if they happened to be the children of the highest social order, the 'Pure Merinos', were sent 'Home' to school. The Pure Merino adults aspired to be members of the 'Bunyip Aristocracy', something akin to the Peerage, but not quite (heavens, no!). All of these people were ruled, in fact, by the Sydney-based Colonial Secretary, Frederick Goulburn, a chum of the Exclusives, who couldn't care less what Sir Thomas Brisbane thought. Brisbane's (or Goulburn's) fiefdom comprised the eastern two-thirds of Australia's 7,659, 861 square kilometres; Britain claimed the remaining third, roughly, the present Western Australia, on 2nd May, 1829. The European population was spread loosely in coastal areas north and south of Sydney, with a few hardy souls across the Great Dividing Range around Bathurst and Goulburn. The Blue Mountains, west of Sydney, had been conquered only in 1812. In fact, the whole exploration effort had been pathetic: if

Page 19 of 162

Alice and the Weather Man

20/10/09 1:50 PM

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 timekeeping. 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

Page 20 of 162

Alice and the Weather Man

20/10/09 1:50 PM

would become the Duke of Wellington, the hero of Waterloo, but later a despised arch-conservative politician who served briefly as Prime Minister. In later years, Brisbane was not too averse to using his old friend's influence on his behalf. This friendship was described in splendid terms by Henry Chamberlain Russell (1836-1907), NSW Government Astronomer, in a book about early astronomers and meteorologists in NSW: 'We now come to Sir Thomas Brisbane, a man whose enthusiasm for science, and especially for astronomy, knew no bounds. In the midst of harassing marches in the great Continental war, with the enemies bullets always whistling about him, his sextant was always in his baggage, and came into active service directly its owner was off duty. His appointment as Governor of NSW marks an era in the history of Australian science, and his princely munificence in the erection of the Parramatta Observatory and cost of maintaining it for four years will never be forgotten. 'Sir Thomas Brisbane entered the army in 1790, fought in the first battle of the war, and in 1794 (Flanders campaign of the Napoleonic Wars) had to sleep six nights in the snow with nothing but his cloak and the canopy of heaven over him. Each morning he found himself frozen in the ground, and during one of these nights, 900 soldiers were frozen to death around him. He fought in fourteen general actions, twenty-three great affairs, and assisted at eight sieges. He crossed the equator eight times, yet throughout this busy active life he always found time to cultivate his favourite study, astronomy, and when it was proposed to govern the far off colony of Australia, Lord Bathurst (Secretary of State for Colonies) informed the Duke of Wellington that he "wanted a man to govern, not the heavens, but the earth." 'Sir Thomas appealed to the Duke to say whether science had ever stood in his way as a soldier. "Certainly not," said the Duke, "I shall say you were never in one instance absent or late in the morning, noon, or night, and that in addition, you kept the time for the army".' Despite this half-hearted job reference, which seems to imply that Brisbane's greatest virtue was the ownership of a decent alarm clock, he got the position and brought with him a magical collection of astronomical tools. The great free-to-air laboratory that is the 'canopy of heaven' has two main rooms: one in the Northern Hemisphere and the other in the Southern Hemisphere. And Sir Thomas had the key to the second room. His 'princely munificence' included the astronomical equipment he left behind when he left Australia in 1825. A letter from his successor, Sir Ralph Darling, dated at Government House on 10th September, 1827, indicates the lengths he had to go to get permission to buy Brisbane's collection: 'The Right Honorable the Secretary of State for the Colonies (Henry Bathurst) has communicated in a despatch, No. 96, dated 1st March, 1826, that His Majesty's Government, with the view of promoting the interests of science in this part of the globe, has consented to the purchase from Sir T. Brisbane of certain astronomical instruments, specified in the enclosed list which in

Page 21 of 162

Alice and the Weather Man

20/10/09 1:50 PM

compliance of the Address in Council has been left by him in the Colony for the sum valued by him of £1614/13. 'He has directed that the necessary remittance of this amount should be made to the Colonial Agent (Edward Barnard, in Sydney) to enable him to reimburse Sir Thomas Brisbane for the instruments in question. Let the necessary communication be made to the Auditor and Treasurer as to the remittance of this amount in order that it may be duly provided for the first opportunity, and let Mr Ruemker (soon to be Australia's first government astronomer) be called upon for a list of the articles left by Sir Thomas Brisbane in the Observatory under his charge, that it may be compared with the specifications herewith.' The letter was addressed to the new (but ageing) Colonial Secretary, Alexander McLeay, who had been induced to put off his retirement at the age of 58 to go to NSW to clean up the perceived mess left by Brisbane and Frederick Goulburn; poor Goulburn had fallen victim to an Exclusives coterie centred on the wealthy landholder, John Macarthur, a master of manipulation in high places in London. Ruemker's letter from Parramatta confirmed Brisbane's description: 'Four Astronomical Clocks, best description £490 Mural Circle, by Troughton 200 Transit Instrument, 5-and-a-half feet, ditto 105 Repeating Circles, 16-in, Reichenbach 130 Equatorial Telescope, &c (by Banks) 60 French ditto 42 Declination Instruments, by Holland 30 Inclination, ditto, Gambey, Paris 42 Borda's Pendulum, complete, for determining the figure of the Earth 85 Mountain Barometers, by Troughton 11 Magnet Transit, by Josker, Paris 15 Barometers and four thermometers 10 Kater's Azimuth Compass 10 Pair 18-in globes, London 19 Levelling telescope, complete 12 Astronomical books etc 353 All these totted up to exactly the sum of their worth estimated by Sir Thomas. Colonial Secretary McLeay passed this information on to Colonial Agent Barnard who, in turn, wrote to Governor Darling: 'I have the honour to inform you that I have this day paid to Messrs. Macdonald and Campbell, agents of Sir Thomas Brisbane, the sum of £1614/13, for the purchase of certain Astronomical instruments and books left in the Observatory at Parramatta, and referred in Mr McLeay's letter to me on 27th September last.' Having received this letter, Darling sent the following instruction to McLeay on 21st December: 'Let Mr Ruemker be informed that he will be immediately notified as Government Astronomer of this Colony, and he will be allowed a salary of £300 a year from the time of his taking charge of the Observatory, until His Majesty's Government shall fix the salary

Page 22 of 162

Alice and the Weather Man

20/10/09 1:50 PM

to which he may be considered entitled.' And that should have been that. Except that Ruemker's bellicose manner had put him offside with some influential people ... and that takes us back to the early Sydney summer of 1821-22 ... Brisbane was aware that his London-tolerated astronomical dabblings in Sydney were under sporting competitive pressure from the powerful British Southern Hemisphere base at the Cape of Good Hope, at the southern tip of Africa. In August, 1821, a young Cambridge academic and astronomer, the Rev. Fearon Fallows, arrived in Capetown with his wife, Mary Ann, as its first Astronomer Royal, with instructions to build an observatory. He should have had no problems recruiting labour: the Cape Colony had a stable population of 120,000. Brisbane, on the other hand, did not have such a great pool of labour, but he did have the advantage of his labour being free of charge and captive. Brisbane also had better fixed instruments than Fallows, who had to use temporary portable equipment in a shed in his garden. In Sydney, Brisbane was able to appeal to the goodwill of the recentlyformed Philosophical Society of Australasia, whose members often travelled by boat west along the Parramatta River from Sydney for their meetings at the rural Government House. Brisbane became a patron, but the Society folded in the middle of 1822 in an acrimonious debate about Emancipism v. Exclusionism. Meanwhile, the Observatory was completed on 2nd May, 1822, and a regular series of observations began which resulted in A Catalogue of 7385 Stars published in 1835. Then, on 2nd June, 1822, a discovery was made at Parramatta which, when relayed to Europe, made the Observatory famous in astronomical circles. James Dunlop, sweeping the sky with the an equatorial telescope using calculations by Ruemker, spotted Encke's Comet, described by a more recent astronomer, Joe Rao, as 'the most famous and richest in history of all those mysterious wanderers that wend their way among the stars'. Encke's Comet's own rich history goes back to 17th January, 1786, when it was first recorded by a Parisian, Pierre Mechain; about ten years later, Caroline Lucretia Hershel, the Hanoverian helper to her brother, William, saw it again from Bath, England, on 7th November, 1795; another ten years passed and it was seen by two French and one German observers on 20th October, 1805, the day before the Battle of Trafalgar. What omens! At this stage, the mysterious object had no name, but all the qualifications for a comet were emerging ... a frozen blob of gas, rocks and dust with a regular path through the solar system. But in the European autumn of 1815, when it was scheduled to appear, it failed to show up. Or was not sighted. Perhaps it was a hangover from the Battle of Waterloo on 18th June, involving participants from those keen astronomical nations, France, England and Prussia. The Waterloo participants were militarily and intellectually exhausted (the same thing happened in August, 1944, when explosive incidents in the European skies made astronomy just too hard). Then the French astronomer Jean Louis Pons and the German, Johann Franz Encke, working separately, made the

Page 23 of 162

Alice and the Weather Man

20/10/09 1:50 PM

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).

Page 24 of 162

Alice and the Weather Man

20/10/09 1:50 PM

In Seeberg, near Gotha, in north Germany, where he was director of the observatory, Encke offered to resign when no word came from Capetown of the appearance of his comet, but he was overjoyed when a message finally came from Ruemker. His calculation, and those of Pons were correct. Comet Encke had its aphelion (furthest point from the Sun) within the orbit of Jupiter, compared with Comet Halley, the most famous of all, which appears every seventy-six years and drifts far beyond Uranus. In England, the Astronomical Society of London awarded Encke its gold medal in 1824. Ruemker was honoured with the Society's silver medal and a purse of £100, and he was given the gold medal of the Institut de France. The humble James Dunlop said 'it was just by chance that he replaced the Governor or Mr Ruemker at the telescope when the comet made its appearance.' Governor Brisbane may not have been so charitable, privately, and the seeds might have been sown of a serious deterioration in his relationship with Ruemker. Nevertheless, all the tub-thumping in Europe finally reached the furthest corner of the world and the Sydney Gazette of 22nd January, 1824, reported: 'The return of this star is an astronomical event of the greatest interest. Its faint splendour and crepuscular light did not allow it to be observed in Europe. Nor were they more fortunate at the Observatory at the Cape of Good Hope; but it was described as the region of the earth most remote from Europe - New Holland. The Astronomer of the Observatory of Parramatta, the most recent establishment of such a kind, observed this comet throughout the month of June, 1822, and in positions very near those which had been anticipated. 'The foundation of this Observatory is due to General Brisbane, a Correspondent of the Academy of Science, the Governor of New South Wales, who cultivates astronomy and natural science, and takes a lively interest in their improvement.' In the ensuing three years of Brisbane's governorship, five new comets were identified from Parramatta. A solar eclipse was observed on 16th August, 1822, and a lunar eclipse the following 16th January, 1823. In June, the gathering storm in the Parramatta Observatory between Brisbane and Dunlop, on one hand, and Ruemker, on the other, became a cyclone and Ruemker found himself blown out the door, but living in comfort on a 1000-acre (400ha) land grant Brisbane had given him for doing the sums that led to the sighting of Comet Encke! Letters sailed lazily across the sea and a battle of patronage in London began. Brisbane might have had the great Duke of Wellington in his corner, but Ruemker could call on the notorious Peter Heywood, who'd enjoyed the sumptuous Tahitian delights of the Mutiny on the Bounty, where, as an earlier adventurer, Joseph Banks had written in 1769, 'Love is the Chief Occupation, nay almost the sole luxury of the inhabitants; both the bodies and souls of the women are modelled into the utmost perfection for that soft science, idleness the Father of love reigns here in unmolested ease'. The youthful Heywood enjoyed all the preceding and escaped punishment!

Page 25 of 162

Alice and the Weather Man

20/10/09 1:50 PM

The background was that Ruemker had gone from his home in Berlin to London at the age of twenty in 1809, joined the merchant marine, was press-ganged into the Royal Navy where he eventually found himself an officer on the warship, HMS Montague. And the captain was no other than the same Peter Heywood, a lusty junior midshipman on the Bounty twenty-seven years earlier. His background was that he had joined the Bounty as a midshipman in 1787, sailed to the Pacific with Bligh, took no part in the Mutiny (he said) was refused a place by Bligh on the cutter when the captain and his loyalists were set adrift, and was stuck on Tahiti eighteen months later when the revenge ship HMS Pandora came seeking the mutineers. He survived the journey back to Britain (the state-ofart Pandora sank near Torres Strait) and was pardoned after receiving a death sentence. He resumed his old naval life and, by 1823, had retired and was anxious to assist his old friend, Carl Ruemker in the matter of the Mutiny at Parramatta. Meanwhile, Brisbane set about establishing a pattern of meteorological stations in the civilised parts of his domain. These were manned by educated convicts, who had far more spare time than their less-educated free settlers brethren. One of these was George Edwards Peacock, an English lawyer who had been sentenced to death for forging the power of attorney on £8000 (millions of dollars in today's money) worth of shares belonging to his brother. Peacock, who was of a delicate constitution, took the unsporting option of a life sentence in NSW. He continued his observations at South Head (Sydney Harbour) meteorological station for ten years after he was conditionally pardoned in 1845, even though he lost his allowance of one and sixpence a day. Peacock became one of the most-admired painters of warm landscapes in oils of the 19th century Sydney scene. Another weather post was established at Port Macquarie, on the coast 275km northeast of Sydney, opened as a penal station in 1821 (and closed in 1830); it was designed as a place of incarceration for 'specials', convicts who could do 'bookwork' and who were considered 'not always assignable' (i.e. they were too posh for the usual convict tasks). Posts were established at Newcastle, on the coast, 125km north, and at Bathurst, 150km inland. In Van Diemens Land, Brisbane ordered a meteorological station on Sarah Island, a place of grim repute in Macquarie Harbour on the west coast, opened in 1822 and whose convict guests included men who had been clerks, accountants and skilled draughtsmen in orderly other lives in the British Isles. Hobart had a rudimentary convict-manned establishment until it was replaced in 1840 by a whizz-bang meteorological station built by 200 convicts for the grand British expedition to the Antarctic led by James Clark Ross in the Erebus and Terror. While Brisbane organised his embryonic weather network, Captain Peter Heywood, in London, secretly contacted the soon-to-be Colonial Secretary, Alexander McLeay to plead Ruemker's case. The outcome was that as soon as soon as Brisbane left Sydney at the end of 1825, Ruemker was recalled from his exile at Picton, southwest of Sydney, resumed at the

Page 26 of 162

Alice and the Weather Man

20/10/09 1:50 PM

Observatory in May and promptly discovered a new comet in the constellation Orion. James Dunlop stayed awhile, then returned to Makerstoun, in Roxburghshire, in 1827 to work with Sir Thomas Brisbane in his new private observatory. The new Governor, Sir Ralph Darling, appointed Ruemker government astronomer, granted him a further 1000 acres (400ha) in 1828, and sent him to London in 1830 ... where Sir Thomas Brisbane and the president of the Royal Astronomical Society, James South, engineered his dismissal from British service in the nastiest coup of the London Season! Quickly, James Dunlop returned to Sydney, accepted Ruemker's job at the Observatory, and lived happily until his early death from a urinary disease on his farm by Brisbane Water in 1848. And how did this soap opera of astronomical proportions end for Ruemker? He returned to a glittering career in Hamburg, seduced his voluptuous (one imagines) housekeeper, had an illegitimate son by her named George (who became a famous astronomer), married an English spinster named Mary Ann Crockford in Lisbon at the age of sixty and died there in 1861. Brisbane, who died the year before, had reconciled with Ruemker in the years after the affair with James South in 1830. Brisbane became President of the Royal Society in Edinburgh, but his and Anna Maria's later years were haunted by the loss of all four of their children in childhood or early adulthood: two of them had names which attested to their colonial origins: Thomas Australius (died,1849), and Eleanor Australia (died 1852). It seems the unfortunate Ruemker may have encountered South at a bad cycle in the latter's notorious temper tantrums. Ruemker's visit to London in 1830 coincided with a famous dispute South was having with Edward Troughton, England's venerable and most-admired instrument maker (and creator of some of the instruments Brisbane brought to NSW in 1821.) Troughton, a farmer's son born in Cumberland in 1753, was apprenticed as a mathematical instrument maker to his elder brother, John, in 1770 at his workshop in Fleet Street, near Dr Samuel Johnson's coffee house haunt, the Old Cheshire Cheese, and assumed control when John died in 1788. In 1826, because of ill-health, he took on a partner, William Simms, and the pair faced the wrath of James South together. South, as President of the Royal Astronomical Society, had purchased the second-largest 'object glass' in the world. This is the lens of an optical system which receives the light first and which, when installed in a telescope in the Society's Observatory on Camden Hill, in Kensington, would become the envy of the astronomical world. He commissioned Troughton and Simms with the task of making the sensitive mounting, but after it was delivered, pronounced it a 'national disgrace' and refused to pay the bill. Troughton and Simms waited patiently, but took legal action in 1833 to recover the money. By this time, the enraged South had abandoned the Royal Astronomical Society and had become sworn enemies with some of its associates, including the brilliant young Cambridge

Page 27 of 162

Alice and the Weather Man

20/10/09 1:50 PM

mathematician and astronomer, George Airy, Charles Todd's future patron, and the Society's Cambridge-based Secretary, the Reverend Richard Sheepshanks, who was proving to have the loins of a lion in his leadership of the defence of Troughton and Simm. The court ruled against the recently-knighted Sir James South in December, 1834, so he promptly smashed the disputed instrument to smithereens and advertised the bits for sale in 1836 in a scurrilous poster in which he roundly condemned Airy and Sheepshanks, and entertained his neighbours in the evenings by walking up and down beside his garden wall, ranting and raving against his foes, real or imaginary. Edward Troughton couldn't care less; he died of old age in 1835, knowing that South would be up for £8000 as a result of his folly. Simms, meanwhile, had won the contract from the British Government to supply a 'new generation' of instruments to carry out George Everest's survey of India, during which a prominent feature was named after him. Sir Thomas Brisbane would have followed this affair, aghast; Edward Troughton was an old friend, a chum, and fellow member of the Royal Society in Edinburgh, struck down with arthritis in his later years, but one who could boast that his hereditary colour blindness didn't affect his career as an instrumentmaker. Not even when he was making instruments for James South. James Dunlop tendered his resignation by letter to the Board of Visitors of the Parramatta Observatory on 18th August 1847. The letter said, in part: 'The buildings of this Observatory are in a very sad state of repair. The white ant has been most destructive, and, as the surrounding ground is full of them, it would be fruitless to attempt a repair, which could not last above two or three years at most. The building was originally of a very inferior description, being only intended as a private establishment and not calculated to last beyond a few years ... As the building can no longer protect the instruments in safety, I would recommend their removal to one of Her Majesty's Stores in the Military Barracks ... I think a very desirable and convenient site (for a new Observatory) may be obtained on the high grounds on the North Shore in the vicinity of Sydney, out of the smoke of the city and in view of the harbour and shipping, which would give to the masters of vessels the desirable opportunity of obtaining their time, and ascertaining the rate of their chronometers by signal or ball as practised at Greenwich and other places.' The authorities accepted his recommendation about the storage of the instruments, whose removal, for the bureaucraticallyminded, they charged to 'the Engineer Estimate for Convict Services'. Even though Britain had ended convict transportation to NSW seven years before, it still had a few stray old lags serving time. The question of the location of the new Observatory brought about the forceful intervention of Captain Phillip Parker King, son of a former Governor of NSW (1800-07) Philip Gidley King. The elder King had come to NSW with the First Fleet as

Page 28 of 162

Alice and the Weather Man

20/10/09 1:50 PM

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

Page 29 of 162

Alice and the Weather Man

20/10/09 1:50 PM

purpose admirably (I must tell you that I tried it on myself, which convinced me as to its efficacy).' King rejected Dunlop's suggestion that the new Observatory should be built on the North Shore, a short voyage across the water now spanned by the Harbour Bridge; instead, he plumped for a hill on The Rocks, the city side from which the Bridge departs. The site was originally named Windmill Hill because it was there that the convicts first ground their grain. It was taken over by Phillip Parker King's father, Governor Philip Gidley King, as the site of a defensive fort in 1804 when a brief, but violent Irish convict uprising sent tremors through the hearts of the respectable citizens of Sydney. The 'Castle Hill Uprising' began on 4th March, William Johnston and Philip Cunningham, transported Irish rebels, raised a force of 300 at Castle Hill, in Sydney's west, with the apparent intention of marching on Sydney and seizing a ship. Troops 'cut them to pieces', hanged the ring leaders and seven other men, flogged five and sent thirty-four to the coal mines in Newcastle. King, bleating about the rebels' forgetfulness of 'the real liberty and comfort they enjoy', promptly built his little fortress and named it Fort Phillip. While it was being erected, a procession passed by on 1st June whose members would have had much in common with the rebels. It was the funeral of Sydney's leading brothel proprietor. The Sydney Gazette reported: 'On Thursday departed this life at a very advanced age, Mary Jones, long resident of The Rocks, and one of the first European inhabitants of this colony. The funeral was performed the day following with a splendour suited to her avocation during her latest years. From twelve to fifteen couples of spotless damsels, robed in white, followed in procession, and after depositing the venerable remains, returned to her late apartment where spiritual consolation was duly administered.' It helped to have a sense of humour in Old Sydney Town. Ten years after Philllip Parker King's suggestion, in 1858, the time ball began falling at the new Sydney Observatory and Sir Thomas Brisbane's instruments were transferred there. But there were already excellent weather and astronomical observations being taken in the upstart colonial capitals of Melbourne and Adelaide. The pioneers had begun the mainland thrust away from Sydney thirty years before.

8. '... in the wildest and most inhospitable wastes ...' Charles Howe Fremantle, the sailor who claimed Western Australia for Britain in 1829, came from a family of old sea dogs: his mother, Betsey, cradled Nelson after he lost an arm at Tenerife in 1797, and a Fremantle great-nephew mislaid His Lordship's telescope. Yes, that telescope. The one Nelson held to his blind eye at the Battle of Copenhagen in 1801 so he couldn't see Admiral Hyde Parker's signal to withdraw. The treasured telescope, in the care of the Fighting Fremantles since Trafalgar in 1805, went to the bottom of the Mediterranean, off Malta, when Sydney Fremantle's ship, HMS Russell, sank in 1915 after striking a German mine during the

Page 30 of 162

Alice and the Weather Man

20/10/09 1:50 PM

retreat from the Dardanelles. When Charles Fremantle was born in 1800, his parents gave him the middle name, Howe, after Admiral Lord Howe, victor over the French in the Glorious First of June Battle in 1794. His dad, later Admiral Sir Thomas Fremantle, traded sword thrusts alongside Nelson with the Spaniards at Cadiz; it was only natural that he and Betsey had been married at the voluptuously wicked Lady Emma Hamilton's house in Naples, with the world's most famous mistress and her petit (162cm) admiral as witnesses. Sir Thomas was in command of HMS Neptune at Trafalgar in 1805 when the British sliced through the French/ Spanish lines; he waved his sword and forced the surrender of the Santissima Trinidad, the world's biggest warship. Nelson died that day, but Betsey wasn't there to care for him (she'd been hitching a lift back to England in HMS Seahorse when the Santa Cruz incident happened in 1797). Like all good navy mums, she was at home in Plymouth, dressing five-year-old Charles in sailor suits, preparing him for the real thing at the age of twelve, when he sailed off to fight the Americans in the War of 1812. He probably had a sextant as a teething ring. When Charles Fremantle arrived in the southwest corner of Western Australia on 2nd May, he was aged twenty-nine, a bachelor, and commander of the 26-gun Challenger, vanguard of a three-ship flotilla bringing the first settlers to the vast new colony of free men and women. Fremantle proclaimed ownership in the name of George IV of 'all that part of New Holland that is not included in the Territory of New South Wales'. Having hoisted the flag over a tiny piece of Western Australia's 2.5 million square kilometres, he and his crew waited for the sails on the western horizon of the warship, HMS Sulphur and the chartered merchantman, Parmelia, carrying the English settlers and soldiers to this remotest European corner of the globe, 3000km west of Sydney and 8500km east of Capetown. Perth's nearest British neighbour in the northwest was the naval fortress at Trincomalee, northeast Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), across 5500km of the Indian Ocean. More than forty years later, lonely Perth, a most English town despite its Scots name, still waited to be hooked up to the worldwide electric telegraph grid ... yet it might have been the place where the telegraph crawled from the sea on to the continent's shore as early as 1860. The English submarine cable entrepreneurs, John and Jacob Brett, who had been frustrated in their endeavours to cross the English Channel successfully, were anxious link Australia to the world with an alternative route from that favoured by Charles Todd and the South Australian Government. They wanted to run a cable from Ceylon to the CocosKeeling Islands and then to Perth. This would involve a first leg of 2500km and a second leg a little longer. It meant a further Australian overland stretch of 3000km across the mostly unexplored Nullarbor Plain and deserted regions to reach the eastern telegraph market. The cable was in Ceylon by 1857. But despite the enthusiastic support of the Victorian Superintendent of Telegraphs, Samuel McGowan, Ceylon is where the line ended. In 1860, Perth

Page 31 of 162

Alice and the Weather Man

20/10/09 1:50 PM

was still Struggletown, reduced to reintroducing convict transportation, now an anathema in the east, to complete public projects. The colonisation of the West in the 1820s was prompted, as was Van Diemans Land's settlement more than two decades earlier, by British paranoia over French intentions. In 1826, Captain M.J. Dumont D'Urville's scientific research vessel, L'Astrolabe, spent nearly a month in King George's Sound, at the continent's southwest tip; in response, Major Edmund Lockyer, from Sydney, landed at the present site of Albany in the last days of the year, claimed the district for Britain and established a garrison camp. Next year, Captain James Stirling came from Sydney and examined the Swan River thoroughly; later, in Sydney and London, he pressed the case for a land grab in the West: 'Some foreign power may see the advantage of taking possession, should His Majesty's Government leave it unappropriated.' So Charles Fremantle found himself there in the first week of May, 1829, feeling the afternoon coolness on his cheeks of the ocean breeze that came to be known as 'the Fremantle Doctor'. By 12th August, Sulphur and Parmelia were safely moored off Garden Island. The Sulphur carried a detachment from the 63rd Regiment with several wives and children; they were the colony's garrison. Lieutenant Governor, James Stirling, announced that the 'first stone will be laid of a new town called Perth' (after the London-based Secretary for Colonies, Sir George Murray's Scottish home district). On that great day, Charles Fremantle observed in his journal, 'On the 12th, our party increased and there being no stone contiguous to our purpose, Mrs Dance cut down a tree'. Thus began the West's part in Australia's tradition of clear-felling of the great forests; Mrs Dance, the blushing young wife of the captain of the Sulphur, William Dance, was selected for the role because she was the only woman in the official party not imminently pregnant. Nevertheless, a husky young sailor with axe stood by, comfortingly, in case pretty Mrs Dance had an attack of the vapours; she slew the tree without help. Several more shiploads of immigrants were on the way: the Manchester Guardian reported on the departure of the Gilmore from Liverpool on 8th August, 1829: 'Horses, cattle, sheep, goats, geese and ducks, decently paired and comfortably accommodated ... ' They sailed off to an enterprise which soon had the disastrous elements of the Scottish Company's fatal Darien adventure in the Isthmus of Panama in the late-17th century. Charles Fremantle and HMS Challenger left the new colony soon after the ceremonial wood-chop and sailed for Trincomalee where they were based for three years, venturing forth frequently to examine the neighbourhood, including the waters around Kowloon; his information was invaluable for the British when they took advantage of the Opium Wars to colonise Hong Kong in 1841. Fremantle visited Western Australia briefly in September, 1832 on his way back to England, where he courted and won

Page 32 of 162

Alice and the Weather Man

20/10/09 1:50 PM

Isabella Wedderburn, widow of a much older London lawyer, on 8th October, 1836. Sentimental readers will be pleased to know that they had three daughters, none of whom was tempted to join the navy. Two, Emily and Celia, married Anglican clergymen, which was an approved alternative occupation to the military, and the youngest, Louisa, chose spinsterhood and a life devoted to the care of her father, who eventually became an admiral commanding the steam-powered Channel squadron. The new colony staggered on under the burden of heat, flies and the inability of people accustomed to a gentler landscape and climate to manage their huge land grants. Immigrant ships kept arriving and soon the population was 2000. Land continued to be parcelled out freely: a million acres in the first two years. Thomas Peel, the gentleman London layabout who had conceived of the grand scheme and promised 10,000 settlers on the Swan River, proved to be one of the most hopeless settlers of all. Lieutenant Governor James Stirling wrote to Sir George Murray, Secretary for Colonies on 20th January, 1830: 'Among so many settlers, there could not be a great number suited to encounter the struggle and distress of a new settlement. Many, if not all, have been more or less disappointed on arrival with the state of things here or their own want of power to surmount the difficulties pressing around them ... Among the settlers who arrived, there were many who had been recommended by their employers by parish officers, and whose habits were of the loosest description.' People left their bush blocks and congregated in Perth, drifted back to England, or took their chances in the eastern colonies; these included the wealthy Henty family from Sussex, farming millionaires in 21st century terms, who had their own grand barque, the Frances Henty, named for a beloved deceased daughter. They sailed east to occupy, illegally, the southwest of Victoria, which was still known as the Port Phillip District of NSW. But many poorer settlers clung bravely to the drier West and were rewarded when the Home Government intervened and the private enterprise colony began to crawl from seemingly terminal recession in a decade or so. Then, in 1841, a young man named Edward John Eyre appeared from the east for the second time, having this time pioneered at great personal suffering, an overland path; it seemed they had not been forgotten by their fellow Australian colonists. Eyre was born on 5th August, 1815, in Whipsnade, Bedfordshire, son of one of those ubiquitous gentleman Anglican vicars, and resolved, on his father's suggestion, to migrate to NSW at seventeen to become an early version of a jackeroo (an apprentice rich squatter on Crown lands which were previously the hunting grounds of the dispossessed aborigines) in the Hunter Valley, north of Sydney, already a thriving centre for wealthy, convict-powered, feudal-style land barons. In January, 1838, accompanied by his overseer, John Baxter and several stockmen, he mustered 78 head of cattle and 400 sheep on the Limestone Plains, later the site of Canberra, and drove them southwest via the unexplored Wimmera plains to the

Page 33 of 162

Alice and the Weather Man

20/10/09 1:50 PM

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

Page 34 of 162

Alice and the Weather Man

20/10/09 1:50 PM

Government's refugee detention centre at Woomera. Eyre reported that 'with heavy heart' he headed northeast towards the Flinders Ranges, hoping the hills would come to a more fertile conclusion, but, by 9th July, 1840, his luck was not improving ... 'One of our horses having got loose last night, pulled the cork out of the keg in which was our small stock of the dirty brackish water we had found yesterday, and rolling the keg over, destroyed its contents; we were thus deprived of our breakfasts, and consequently, had but little delay in starting. I intended to push on steadily for the hills, but after travelling six miles, came to a puddle in the plains, with tolerable grass around, and at this I halted for the day, to rest the horses. Our latitude was 31º25'S by an altitude of Arcturus (fourth brightest star in the sky), Mount Eyre then bearing S7ºE.' This placed them 350km north of Adelaide, and just 1100km southeast of the Dead Centre of Australia. After the Outback rebuffed three attempts from Eyre from the south, he steered west to a new depot at Fowler's Bay, 600km west-northwest of Adelaide, near the head of the Great Australian Bight. The place was named after Robert Fowler, First Lieutenant of the Investigator, when Matthew Flinders landed briefly in 1802 during his circumnavigation of Australia. No white man had ventured there by land since. Eyre decided to abandon further efforts to the north (wisely, because he had the Nullarbor Plain to his immediate north, followed by the Great Victoria Desert) to try to find an overland route 1400km to King George's Sound. Eyre sent the rest of the party back to Adelaide and, with John Baxter and three aborigines, headed west from Fowler's Bay on 25th February, 1841. The little party, driving their remaining sheep before them, reached fresh water at Eucla, on the West Australia border, on 12th March; the little settlement became a vital link in the telegraph thirty-five years later, famous for its constant struggle to avoid being swallowed by immense, shifting coastal sand dunes. The Southern Ocean was at Eyre's left, crashing against the rocky feet of dizzying cliffs while mobs of Great White Sharks circled, ceaselessly, beyond the swell. As they do today. Eyre's growing desperation was reflected in his journal entry on 26th March, 1841 ... 'Upon moving on this morning, we passed through the same wretched kind of country for eighteen miles, to an opening in the scrub where there was a little grass, and at which we halted to rest. There was so much scrub, and the sandy ridges were so heavy and harassing to the horses, that I began the doubt almost if we should get them along at all. We were now seventy-two miles from the water, and had, in all probability, as much further to go before we came to any more, and I saw that unless something was done to lighten the load of the pack animals (trifling as were the burdens they carried) we could never hope to get them on. 'Leaving the natives to enjoy a sleep, the overseer (Baxter) and I opened and re-sorted all our baggage, throwing away everything we could at all dispense with: our greatcoats, jackets and other articles of dress were thrown away: a single spare shirt and a pair of boots and socks being all that we kept for each, besides our

Page 35 of 162

Alice and the Weather Man

20/10/09 1:50 PM

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

Page 36 of 162

Alice and the Weather Man

20/10/09 1:50 PM

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

Page 37 of 162

Alice and the Weather Man

20/10/09 1:50 PM

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 ...

9. Astronomical events portend black massacres 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

Page 38 of 162

Alice and the Weather Man

20/10/09 1:50 PM

thirty degrees in extent. It was travelling eastward, and had traversed about thirty degrees since its appearance. It remained until 10.30 and it is declared that "never were the eyes of man in this hemisphere greeted with a more magnificent appearance in the heavens".' Edmund Finn might have been be amused at the fearful reactions of the 'sable race' to these celestial happenings; but his sophisticated contemporary in Perth, Edward Willson Landor, could see the presence of his God in the Great Comet. The aboriginal people of southeast Australia might have far more reason to see messages of doom in all these comets ... in 1840-41, overlanders from NSW, following the pioneering stock route of Joseph Hawdon and Charles Bonney along the Murray Valley, west to South Australia in increasing numbers. They drove herds of up to 6000 head; they were accompanied by twenty or thirty armed stockmen, many of them ticket-of-leave convicts who had scant respect for the aboriginal women they'd meet on the way. Early in April, 1841, near the Rufus River-Murray River junction, a force of aborigines attacked an overland party with traditional weapons, killing two shepherds and dispersing 5000 sheep. The whites took refuge at two cattle stations. A retaliatory party of ten men was sent from Adelaide, 240km northeast to the Rufus where they engaged a force of 200 blacks who, despite losing at least eight men, drove the whites off again. The townsfolk of Adelaide were still angered by the apparent massacre by aborigines of the 23 survivors from the wreck of the brig Maria in June, 1840: their thirst for revenge may have suppressed the purest intentions of the colony's founders. The Maria foundered on rocks near the beach (named the Margaret Brock Reef after a later shipwreck) while on a voyage from Adelaide to Hobart. All on board safely made the beach 250km southeast of Adelaide, but were massacred in the following days as they walked back towards Adelaide with an escort of aborigines. News reached Adelaide on 25th July, 1840, and a punitive expedition under Dr Matthew Moorhouse, Protector of Aborigines, went out and summarily hanged three of the supposed ringleaders. There was talk that some of the aborigine men had coveted the survivors' clothes, and there was further talk that some of the crew had made sexual advances to the aboriginal women. Whatever happened, the dead included five children from one family ... and that wasn't to be forgotten when another opportunity arose to vent outrage against the indigenous population. After the repulse of the punitive expedition in mid-May, 1841, furious settlers demanded that the brand-new Governor, George Grey, take immediate action to crush the scoundrels; Grey was awfully keen to please: his previous curriculum vitae included a ludicrous colonising expedition to northwest Australia in which he was careless enough to be speared. He ordered thirty-seven police, twenty-seven volunteers, two black trackers and the hanging Protector of Aborigines, Dr Matthew Moorhouse, to the sandy northeast. On 22nd June, 1841, they reached the Rufus River and

Page 39 of 162

Alice and the Weather Man

20/10/09 1:50 PM

were shocked to learn that another overlanding party had been waylaid, four men killed and 5000 sheep scattered. Moorhouse's men searched the sandhills, gibber plains and embankment reeds. But the aborigines had vanished. Moorhouse took his force back to Adelaide. In August, refreshed and re-equipped, Moorhouse took his troops back to the contested area. On 27th August, they came upon a party of drovers from Gundagai, in NSW, flushed with the news that they had killed fifteen aborigines the previous day. Surely, they would not dare attack now! But attack they did ... 'We now, greatly to our surprise, discovered a large mob of natives running towards us, each carrying his implements of war. Our drays were drawn up on the banks of the river, and the men were formed into a line two deep to protect the drays. In half-anhour, the natives were seen in the scrub at about half a mile distant, evidently prepared to commence an attack,' Moorhouse reported. 'Robinson's men (the overlanders who fought the aborigines the previous day) on the east side of the Rufus started firing, and Shaw's (the senior policeman) followed suit. The natives immediately broke up, the greater part running into the scrub, surrounded, and a fusillade maintained for a quarter of an hour.' Robinson claimed thirty blacks died in the massacre in the reeds, but later 200 skeletons were said to have been discovered on the sandhills. Many years later in Renmark, an old woman called McKinley claimed to have been the only woman who survived, swimming the Rufus with her baby on her back. The aboriginal resistance was broken. Governor Grey sought the reputation of a humanitarian and, a little more than a month after the massacre at Rufus River, established an aboriginal refuge at Moorundie (now Blanchetown), 135km northeast of Adelaide, downstream on the Murray from the fateful killing grounds of the Rufus River. And the man he appointed first Resident Commissioner and Protector of Aborigines was Edward John Eyre, the celebrated explorer who had returned to Adelaide on 26th August, the day before the last stand of the tribes at Rufus River. Eyre took the £300-a-year position reluctantly (he had further exploring ambitions), but he had great success there. After he resigned from his position in 1844, he reported: 'Moorundie was a district densely populated by natives into which prior to 1841 no settler had ventured to locate and where frightful scenes of bloodshed, rapine and hostility between the natives and parties coming overland with stock had been of very frequent occurrence, but where, from the time of my arrival and up to the date of my leaving not a single case of serious injury or aggression ever took place on the part of the natives against the Europeans, whilst the district became rapidly and extensively occupied by settlers and by stock.' In December, 1844, aged just twenty-nine, he farewelled Australia for good to begin a career of mixed blessings in colonial administration elsewhere in Victoria's Empire. But before he left Moorundie, he had the honour of entertaining the celebrated

Page 40 of 162

Alice and the Weather Man

20/10/09 1:50 PM

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

Page 41 of 162

Alice and the Weather Man

20/10/09 1:50 PM

philosophy and languages without great enthusiasm at Gottingen University when he met an English student, John Nicholson, who turned his interests to natural science. He accompanied Nicholson to England who introduced him to his brother, William, a general practitioner in Bristol. The Nicholsons' home town was Clifton, now a suburb of Bristol, and the three pursued their scientific interests under the very shadows of the towers of Isambard Kingdom Brunel's now-famous suspension bridge over the Avon Gorge. Building had begun in 1836, but financial and political bickering had delayed progress and, in the late 1830s when Leichhardt was there, only the towers had been built; the 213-metre (700ft) span would have to wait until 1864. It is tempting to speculate that the three friends thought, 'Why should we have to wait, like Isambard Kingdom Brunel, when one of the world's greatest virgin natural scientific laboratory lies in the south ... ?' So William found the money and sent Ludwig to Sydney on the Sir Edward Paget in October, 1841. He was a personable young chap, full of enthusiasm, and soon raised enough money for his modest expedition through public subscription. He didn't mind if the Sydney crowd called him 'Dr' out of deference to his obviously superior Central European knowledge, even though he'd never graduated from any university anywhere with anything. After all, they allowed the delightfully bogus geologist Paul Strzelecki to use the fraudulent title of 'Count' about the same time, and then conquer Mount Kosciuszko in 1840, for goodness sake, even though he was probably a suspected Polish embezzler! Sydney was that kind of town (some folks say it still is) ... But it was by pure, honest coincidence that Leichhardt and Charles Sturt set off on their Outback ordeals about the same time in 1844, but 2500km apart. Sturt was greeted by Edward Eyre at Moorundie on 18th August, 1844 and assembled his lavish caravan for the push into the unknown. Apart from John McDouall Stuart, who was engaged as draftsman, the expedition's principal members were Dr John Harris Browne, the medical officer and soon-to-be wool baron, and James Poole, Sturt's deputy. The other 'gentlemen' in the party were Louis Piesse, in charge of stores, who kept exhaustive records but, tragically, as it transpired, did not pack enough vitamin C supplements, and Daniel Brock, engaged as 'collector' but, in fact, a printer/journalist on the Register, the South Australia's sole newspaper. He stood to achieve great fame if he could break to a breathless world the existence of a magic Inland Sea: his notoriety would not quite equal that of the New York Herald's Henry Stanley whose. 'Dr Livingstone, I presume' reverberated around the world in 1871; but it would be satisfactory. Daniel Brock presumably was chosen for the expedition (there were 300 applicants) on the basis of his work for the Register's publication, The South Australian Almanac, when he compiled a 'Domesday Book' of South Australia in 1843 noting, for example, that at the German Silesian peasant community of Bethany, in the Barossa Valley, 'I found a great quantity of land

Page 42 of 162

Alice and the Weather Man

20/10/09 1:50 PM

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 Englishmanufactured 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

Page 43 of 162

Alice and the Weather Man

20/10/09 1:50 PM

even pointed out a mound in which forty or so of their comrades were buried. The expedition continued its stately progress northwards beside the steep banks of the Darling, meeting friendly blacks, crossing fatally-alluring river flats abundant in feed for their stock; the sheep became so docile, they ran after them, bleating plaintively, as if anxious to take their turn at the nice butcher's. Nearing the end of September, Sturt's party was about fifty kilometres north of the Darling-Murray junction when he and the medical officer, Dr John Browne observed an astonishing phenomenon. Sturt reported: 'Some days prior to the 29th (of September), Mr Browne and I, on examining the waters of the river, thought that we observed a more than usual current in it; grass and bark were floating on its surface, and it appeared as if the water was pushed forward by some back impulse. On the 28th it was still as low as ever, but on the morning of the 29th, when we got up, it was wholly changed. In a few hours, it had been converted into a noble river, and had risen more than five feet above its normal level. It was now pouring along its muddy waters with foaming impetuosity, and carrying away everything before it. Whence, it may be asked, come these floods?' Sturt surmised that the river's sudden rising was caused by rainfall on some unknown hills to the near north. But the river was most likely fed, suddenly, by its multitude of tributaries in Outback tropical Queensland whose floodwaters might have taken weeks to flow from pool to pool until they eventually burst into the lower Darling. Did this phenomenon catch Ludwig Leichhardt unawares when he and his men vanished in their attempt to cross Australia from east to west in 1848? John McKinlay, who led the South Australian Government's expedition to find Burke and Wills in 1861-62 thought so; in March, 1862, making his way north through Queensland, McKinlay reported the overnight sensation: 'We are now in the midst of a vast sea, the shallowest part of which I should say could not be less than five feet.' A member of McKinlay's party, John Davis, wrote his journal: 'We had a narrow escape from following in the footsteps of poor Leichhardt and party, who have never been heard of to this day, and it is now some sixteen years since they started. I should not be the least surprised if he and party were carried away in one of these floods, as not the trace of him has ever been seen.' Meanwhile, in those last days of September, 1844, 1200km northeast, the aforementioned Ludwig Leichhardt was at Jimbour Station, 240km northwest of Brisbane, as far north as European man had ventured. He was about to make his first foray into the Outback. His original party from Sydney - James Calvert, John Roper, John Murphy (a 16-year-old), William Phillips ('a prisoner of the Crown') and 'Harry Brown', an aborigine from Newcastle - had increased by three volunteers he chanced to meet in Queensland. They were Pemberton Hodgson, Caleb ('an American negro') and John Gilbert, a 'collector' for the wildlife entrepreneur, John Gould. Gilbert had come to Australia in 1838 in the employ of Gould, a zoologist, ornithologist and businessman. He returned to England in 1841 after the main Gould party, but was

Page 44 of 162

Alice and the Weather Man

20/10/09 1:50 PM

persuaded to return to NSW early in 1844. Leichhardt had never heard of him until their chance meeting on the Darling Downs, west of Brisbane, On 1st October, 1844, as Charles Sturt pottered around on the lower Darling, the party rode northwest from Jimbour into the unknown. Leichhardt recorded: 'Many a man's heart would have thrilled like our own, had he seen us winding our way round the first rise beyond the station, with a full chorus of "God Save The Queen”, which has inspired many a British soldier, aye, and many a Prussian, too.' They struggled across the Condamine River, through thick brigalow scrub; the bullocks tore their loads of flour off, so they called the spot Flourspill Scrub; John Murphy, the boy explorer, and Caleb, the American, were lost for two days, then found again after they were tracked for 100 kilometres by Charley, an aborigine Leichhardt had employed, fortuitously, for they surely would have perished; in gratitude for Charley's skills, Leichhardt named a lake where they camped after John Murphy, the white youth! By 25th October, they had travelled 200km and were somewhere near the present town of Roma, site today of The Big Rig, 'a museum of oil and gas exploration'. In the days around 25th October, Sturt's more lavish expedition was camped near the present city of Broken Hill, 875km west of Sydney, having left the Darling near Lake Cawndilla, 110km southeast. They'd met some armed blacks along the river who'd stacked their spears under a tree to show their good intentions, but made clear they had unpleasant memories of another explorer, Major Thomas Mitchell, who had come this way in July, 1835, and killed several of the tribesmen in an affray; in fact, the aborigines, by way of a menacing joke, pretended to mistake the expedition's deputy leader, James Poole, for the Major; both were short and stout, although Poole was notably less bloodthirsty and paranoid; during a scouting trip, they rested in the open on 'the top of a small eminence' (the Barrier Range, bursting with billions of dollars of silver ore!) where they learned of the bizarre nature of Outback weather: 'We were suddenly aroused from our slumbers a little before daylight by a squall of wind that carried away every light thing about us, hats, caps etc. all went together, and bushes of atriplex (saltbush?) also went bounding along like so many footballs,' Sturt wrote. 'The wind became piercing cold and all comfort was gone. As morning dawned, the wind increased, and as the sun rose it settled into a steady gale. We were here about forty miles from Cawndilla, nor do I remember having suffered so severely from cold, even in Canada (failed American campaign, War of 1812-14). The wind fairly blew through and through us, and Topar (an aboriginal tracker) shivered so under it that Morgan gave him a coat to put on. As we seldom put our horses out of a walk, we did not reach the tents until late in the afternoon, but I was never more rejoiced to creep under shelter than on this occasion.' Next day, Poole told Sturt the temperature that day had varied between 38F and 110F. But, heavens, it was the fickle Australian spring, after all!

Page 45 of 162

Alice and the Weather Man

20/10/09 1:50 PM

Some of us have been forewarned about what happened next in the epic 1844 travels of Sturt and Leichhardt, so we might interrupt this narrative to consider an extraordinary development in the United States at the same time. On 24th May, 1844, an entrepreneurial New York university lecturer in painting and design, Samuel Morse, officially transmitted the first telegraph message from the Old Supreme Court chamber in Washington to his partner, Alfred Vail, in Baltimore. Three days later, the New York Times, uncharacteristically effusive, said: 'The miracle of the annihilation of space is at length performed.' Such were the American origins of the information superhighway, a concept that would be totally alien to Sturt and Leichhardt as they competed to be two of the loneliest Europeans on earth. Twenty thousand kilometres away, Morse asked Annie Ellsworth, eighteen-year-old daughter of an old friend, Henry Ellsworth to come up with that historic first message. She chose a Biblical quotation, 'What hath God wrought?' from Numbers 23:23 (see note at end of chapter). This rather suited the guileful Samuel Morse. Morse liked the idea of giving God the credit. He'd rather not publicly claim it all for himself alone, having borrowed the idea from the British. But he did, with help, devise the code of dots and dashes which became the familiar language of distant communication. Meanwhile, Sturt and Leichhardt were about to find themselves in predicaments which might have called for not only the telegraph, but that other great innovation of the period (1841), Thomas Cook Travel. In the lonely private worlds of the Australian inland explorers, the days became weeks then months. They celebrated Christmas and toiled onwards. In Leichhardt's party, Pemberton Hodgson and Caleb, 'the American negro', who had joined on the Darling Downs, had graciously agreed to withdraw on 3rd November and return to Brisbane when it became apparent there weren't sufficient supplies to feed everyone. They crossed the Tropic of Capricorn and moved north 850km until they were inland from the present Cairns, that 21st century haunt of foreign backpackers; they turned west and made towards the Gulf of Carpentaria. On 27th June, near the river that bears his name today, the hovering black kites were so bold as to steal a freshly-skinned honey-eater from Gilbert's specimen box. They were in good health, but Leichhardt was troubled by a strange mood among the surrounding aborigines. Next evening, the 28th, they camped closer to the waters of the Gulf of Carpentaria. 'After dinner,' Leichhardt wrote, 'Messrs Roper and Calvert retired to their tent, and Mr Gilbert, John (Murphy) and Brown (the Newcastle aborigine) were plaiting palm leaves to make a hat. and I stood musing near their fireplace, looking at their work and occasionally joining in their conversation. Mr Gilbert was congratulating himself in learning to plait; and, when he had nearly completed a yard, he retired with John to their tent; and I stretched myself upon the ground as usual, at a little distance from the fire, and fell into a doze, from which I was suddenly roused by a loud noise, and a call from Calvert and Roper. Leichhardt continued: 'Natives had suddenly attacked us.

Page 46 of 162

Alice and the Weather Man

20/10/09 1:50 PM

They had doubtless watched our movements during the afternoon, and marked the position of the different tents; and, as soon as it was dark, sneaked upon us, and threw a shower of spears at the tents of Calvert, Roper, and Gilbert, a few at that of Phillips (the Sydney convict), and also one or two towards the fire. Charley and Brown called for caps (percussion caps containing gunpowder), which I hastened to find, and, as soon as they were provided, they discharged their guns into the crowd of the natives, who instantly fled, leaving Roper and Calvert pierced with several spears, and severely beaten by their waddies.' Leichhardt's narrative went on: ' Several of these spears were barbed,and could not be extracted without difficulty. I had to force one through the arm of Mr Roper, to break off the barb; and to cut another out of the groin of Mr Calvert. John Murphy had succeeded in getting out of the tent and concealing himself behind a tree, whence he fired at the natives, and severely wounded one of them, before Brown had discharged his gun. Not seeing Mr Gilbert, I asked for him, when Charley told me our unfortunate companion was no more! He had come out of his tent with his gun, shot and powder, and handed them to him, when he instantly dropped down dead. 'Upon receiving this afflicting intelligence, I hastened to the spot, and found Charley's account to be too true. He was lying on the ground at a little distance from our fire, and, upon examining him, I soon found, to my sorrow, that every sign of life had disappeared. The body was, however, still warm, and I opened the arteries of both arms, as well as the temporal artery, but in vain; the stream of life was stopped and he was numbered with the dead.' Several historians have suggested that the attack was revenge for the expedition's aborigines loitering into the bush with maidens of the Carpentaria tribes; but the vehemence of the attack on Roper and Calvert (both of whom had rivers in the Northern Territory named after them) suggests they might have inadvertently camped on a sacred site. John Gilbert was one three Gould collectors to be killed by Australian aborigines: Johnson Drummond died in Western Australia, also in 1845, and Frederick Strange was killed on a beach in Queensland in 1854. Gilbert's last diary entry offers another clue to the black attack of 28th June: '(the aborigines) appear to have been engaged in cooking their food and pieces of bark or boughs showing that it has been a regular camping ground, but what the ring is for would be very interesting to know, perhaps in some way connected to their superstitions.' On 28th June, 1845, as Gilbert died of a spear through his upper chest, Charles Sturt's party was trapped by the most desperate drought in the most God-forsaken landscape they had ever endured. They had been stuck at 'Depot Glen' (near the present former goldmining settlement of Milparinka), just 200km north of Broken Hill since 17th January. It was the only permanent water they could find and they dared not move. Barring their path to the northwest was a stark moonscape the size of Wales, all red sand and hoof-splitting stones, not a blade

Page 47 of 162

Alice and the Weather Man

20/10/09 1:50 PM

of grass or a drop of water; they gave it a suitable name: Sturt's Stony Desert. They found a crawling flower with flowers like red blood drops hanging from a congealed black wound: they called it Sturt's Desert Pea. William Dampier had noted the desperate little plant on the west coast in 1688 when he said this was the most miserable continent inhabited by the most miserable people on earth. Beyond Sturt's Stony Desert were the endless sandhills of the Simpson Desert, high as tall buildings, rolling towards him like the endless, mocking breakers of his mythical inland sea. Sturt longed for rain so he could make a break for the south and Adelaide to his wife, Charlotte. He had signs of scurvy; so, too, did Dr Browne and John McDouall Stuart. His faithful deputy, James Poole, lay paralysed by the cursed lack of Vitamin C, whose limejuice antidote was known to the great Captain James Cook seventy-five years earlier! On 14th June, the drought broke. Sturt sent a stockman, Robert Flood, to muster the horses ... Sturt wrote, 'He said, that in crossing a rocky range he heard a roaring noise, and that on going to the glen, he saw the waters pouring down, foaming and eddying among the rocks, adding that he was sure the floods would drown us ere long' .... And here was a warning that might have been heeded by Leichhardt in the future ...'Such, however, is the uncertain nature of the rivers of those parts of the continent of Australia over which I have wandered, I would not trust the largest past the range of vision; they are deceptive all of them, the offsprings of heavy rains, and dependent entirely on local circumstances for their appearance and existence.' At 7pm on the 16th June, Sturt was told that James Poole had died. In a moment of madness, Sturt talked of making a final dash for the Red Centre with John McDouall Stuart, but the sensible Dr John Browne dissuaded him, and they turned their horses south. It would be left to Stuart in 1861-62 to finally disprove the notion of an inland sea. Sturt arrived in Adelaide on 19th January, 1846, to find that George Grey had been replaced as Governor by Frederick Robe and Sturt himself had been appointed Colonial Treasurer in his absence. Ludwig Leichhardt pushed on around the Gulf of Carpentaria and was finally guided into Port Essington by concerned aborigines on 17th December, 1845 ... 'I was deeply affected in finding myself again in civilised society and could scarcely speak, the words growing big with tears and emotion' he wrote. The schooner Heroine on its way from Singapore and Bali with passengers for Sydney via the Great Barrier Reef took the expedition aboard a month later. Leichhardt and his men were safe at last ... but not the Heroine. On her return voyage, she foundered on a hidden reef off the tip of Cape York Peninsula on 24th April, 1846, with the loss eight of the twenty-six on board. The dead included two Roman Catholic priests who intended to start a mission to the aborigines of Port Essington; the British withdrew from the outpost in 1847, so the

Page 48 of 162

Alice and the Weather Man

20/10/09 1:50 PM

blacks were spared righteous salvation until the temporary founding of Darwin in 1864 as an advance station for the Overland Telegraph. In Sydney, Leichhardt was hailed 'the Prince of Explorers', showered with international awards and pardoned by the King of Prussia for dodging military service. In December, 1846, he set out with seven companions from the Darling Downs to cross Australia from east to west, but was repulsed by the Outback before he'd reached the Queensland border. On 3rd April, 1848 he left the Darling Downs once more and headed west. 'We shall sail down the Condamine ... and follow Mitchell's track to the northern bend of the Victoria; I shall then proceed to the northward until I come upon decided water of the Gulf, and after that resume my original course to the westward,' he told the Sydney Morning Herald. He wasn't seen again. Meanwhile, 20,000 kilometres away, Europe underwent its Revolutionary Year, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels published the Communist Manifesto. And Alice Bell was about to meet Charles Todd. * The complete quotation: 'Surely there is no enchantment against Jacob, neither is there any divination against Israel; according to this time it shall be said of Jacob and Israel, What hath God wrought?' Only the keenest American Biblical scholar could find any reference in quotation to the electric telegraph.

10. 'They have made the ocean a highway of thought' Thomas Crampton was an inventor of the Industrial Age whose candle flickered modestly beside the blazing furnace of Isambard Kingdom Brunel. Oh, but Crampton had his grand moments! A memorable one was when he leapt on the dais at the Great Exhibition beside the youngish Queen Victoria and made the truly electrifying announcement, 'Ma'am, I have linked Britain to the world by an undersea telegraph!' It was the autumn late afternoon of 25th September, 1851, at the Crystal Palace in Hyde Park, London. Nearing dusk, the Queen on whose Empire the Sun Never Dared Set, announced the closing of the international Exhibition that had drawn six million of Our Subjects and sundry foreigners at a shilling a head. Crampton, aged only thirty-five, upstaged Her Majesty with the public relations coup of the season. We cannot be certain of his precise words, drowned as they were, in a delirium of British praise . . . 'Jolly good show', 'splendid chap' etc. One of those who might have a joined the applause was Charles Todd, standing at the back of the audience on tippy-toe (he was just 5ft 5in in the old Imperial measure, but a giant if he ever had the breathless experience of standing next to his Queen who barely made five feet in her flatties). Charles Dickens, a family friend of the Cramptons, might have been there; he had his holidays in their home village of Broadstairs, in Kent, where David Copperfield's kindly aunt, Miss Betsey Trotwood, lived 'in a cottage in a hamlet on the seacoast' in the real-life guise of a Miss Mary Pearson Strong, who believed it

Page 49 of 162

Alice and the Weather Man

20/10/09 1:50 PM

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

Page 50 of 162

Alice and the Weather Man

20/10/09 1:50 PM

metal tube in its neck, containing a piece of whalebone and a wire, to which was attached a small gilt chain. Merryweather described how it worked: 'After having arranged this mouse trap contrivance, into each bottle was poured rain water, to the height of an inch and a half; and a leech placed in every bottle, which was to be its future residence; and when influenced by the electromagnetic state of the atmosphere a number of leeches ascended into the tubes; in doing which they dislodged the whalebone and caused the bell to ring.' He had observed that freshwater leeches became particularly agitated before a storm. Charles Todd would have appreciated instantly that if Dr Merryweather's Tempest Prognosticator were to become a commercial triumph, then the success of an electric telegraph girdling the globe would be an absolute doddle. But in the beginning ... Charles Wheatstone, one of the inventors of the electric telegraph, was an acoustics whiz kid, who first gained public notoriety in 1821 when, at the age of nineteen, he exhibited a musical sleight-of-hand he called the 'Enchanted Lyre' or 'Aconcryptophone' at his father's music shop in Pall Mall, London. This tricky little number involved a lyre suspended by thin wires from the ceiling, surrounded by seated spectators, awestruck by the instrument's apparent ability to play itself. The wires, of course, were attached to the sound boards of a piano, harp and other instruments in a room above, which, when played by a crony of Wheatstone's, sent vibrations down the wires which produced the harp's melodies. Young Wheatstone appeared occasionally to 'wind' the harp and express the view that, one day, 'it would be laid on to one's house, like gas.' Wheatstone inherited the droll humour of many of the fathers of electrical enterprise. As a young man, he would have heard of the theatrical feats of Giovanni Aldini, a skilled scientist whose portraits reveal him to be a slyly-smooth signor. In 1803, Aldini performed the famous 'London experiment' when the body of a freshly-hanged murderer, George Forster, was brought from Newgate gallows to private rooms over a nearby tavern and given to the care of Aldini, whose lavish bow to his audience of gentlemen and ladies promised an excess of their gruesome expectations. A contemporary report said ... 'Galvanism was communicated by means of three troughs combined together, each of which contained forty plates of zinc, and as many of copper. On the first application of the arcs, the jaw began to quiver, the adjoining muscles were horribly contorted, and the left eye actually opened.' And if that was not enough of a crowd pleaser, the recently-deceased Forster's legs started to kick, his clenched fist rose in the air, and his back arched! Many spectators thought he was actually being restored to life. Some serious scholars believe the impressionable young author Mary Shelley (who was not actually present, but read about this feat) may have been inspired by George Forster when she created her tortured monster, Frankenstein, in Byron's morbidlysplendid Villa Diodati by the shore of Lake Geneva in 1816.

Page 51 of 162

Alice and the Weather Man

20/10/09 1:50 PM

Aldini was only creating in a more dramatic form what his uncle, the Bologna-based father of bio-electricity, Luigi Galvani (yes, that's the one) achieved by putting the kick back in to the legs of dead frogs the previous century. Galvani's discovery was quite accidental. He was dissecting a frog on a bench where he had lately been conducting experiments in static electricity. Aldini touched the sciatic nerve of the frog with his metal scalpel, which had become charged with electricity. His colleague and friend, Alessandro Giuseppe Antonio Anastasio Volta generously suggested that the name 'galvanism' be applied to the phenomenon of electrical energy being carried on the nerves to the muscles. Volta (you guessed it) took his friend's experiments further: He questioned whether an electric current present when a muscle was touching two metals came from the tissue or the metals. His conclusion was that the current had nothing to do with tissue. When Volta published his findings, Galvani became his bitter enemy until his death in 1798. Two years later, Volta unveiled a device that would produce a large flow of electricity. This was the battery, an invention which brought him to the forefront of science and a Legion d'Honneur in 1801 from Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte. His fellow scientists named the unit of electromotive force, the driving force that moves the electric current, the 'volt'. Volta had the last word: soaring high voltage cables are rather more romantic than galvanised iron sheds, si? Charles Wheatstone was a babe in arms in Barnwood, near Gloucester, when Signor Aldini performed his ghastly 'London experiment', but he was a precocious lad and knew all about the developments in electricity by the time he was aged fourteen and apprenticed to an uncle, also Charles Wheatstone, at his musical instruments business at 436 The Strand, London. By sixteen, according to family anecdote, Wheatstone had bought a book detailing Volta's discoveries (and a French-English dictionary to help him read it). He and his younger brother, William, made a small battery in the scullery of their father's house and began repeating Volta's experiments. Charles realised that sound was propagated by waves, or oscillations. Water and other solid bodies, such as glass, metal or sonorous wood, conveyed the modulations with high velocity. He had the idea of transmitting sound-signals, music or speech through long distances. In 1823, upon the death of their uncle, Charles and William took over his business and moved to 20 Conduit Street, in the fashionable Hanover Square district of Westminster. But Charles was tiring of the shopkeeping world. He dreamed of sending sound at 300km a second through solid rods. He coined 'telephone' and 'microphone' as part of the instrumentation he imagined would be required to transmit these sounds. In 1827, he unveiled his 'kaleidoscope' which apparently made vibrations visible to the eye; his 'photometer' followed; he found time to adapt a German wind instrument which evolved in to the modern concertina. His busy brain was on the verge of

Page 52 of 162

Alice and the Weather Man

20/10/09 1:50 PM

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.

11. South Australia, free citizens (but unwired) 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.

Page 53 of 162

Alice and the Weather Man

20/10/09 1:50 PM

South Australia, seven months or so away from London by threemasted sailing barque, was opened to free settlers of the South Australia Company with the blessing of the British Government in the 1830s; the founding surveyor, William Light, landed near the site of Adelaide on 3rd October, 1836. This orderly, government-approved invasion was quite unlike that of the future colony of Victoria to the east, which was seized by the land-grabbing buccaneers, Edward Henty at Portland Bay in November, 1834, and John Batman at Port Phillip Bay in May, 1835. There was little the colonial administration in Sydney could do, but sigh, and accept the permanency of these reckless squatters, Henty and Batman. Ah, such pioneering boldness and Imperial hypocrisy. The colonial weather provided one of its malicious little surprises for Surveyor Light, aboard the barque Rapid, on 12th October, 1836: 'Light airs from the east and very fine weather ... and the idea of winter and gales now being over ... At eight, we began sending things on shore; at ten the wind shifted to the NNW and WNW, at noon a sudden change of wind to the NNE with sultry and oppressive air; in a few minutes, thunder cloud appeared very near, from the westward; without any previous indications a sudden breeze from the westward sprang up, and a high sea ... at half past one pm, several severe flashes of lightning with thunder close to us, and the rain fell heavy; about two, this squall passed over but we found ourselves in now another gale ... hard rains and high seas throughout the night' ... and next day ... 'Strong gales and a high sea. All the forenoon the ship pitched very much, but she held on well; at one pm it began to moderate, and by four we had fine weather ... we landed a few more things the same evening.' Earlier in the month, he scouted the country from the sea and was delighted. On 3rd October in Holdfast Bay, site of Adelaide, he wrote: 'Running down the coast, I was enchanted with the extent of the plain to the northward of the Mount Lofty range; and as had had very little wind, our progress was slow, and consequently more time for observation; all the glasses in the ship were in requisition. At length, seeing something like the mouth of a small river, and a country with trees so dispersed as to allow the sight of most luxuriant green underneath, I immediately stood for it, and fifteen minutes past four pm, came to anchor in three and a half fathoms in mud and weeds, about one and a half miles from the mouth of the river.' They were smack in the middle of the beach suburb of Glenelg, 15 minutes drive from the Adelaide CBD. Light landed in the sand dunes ands placed a flagstaff on the highest hill as a bearing marker to make a chart of Gulf St Vincent. The first immigrants landed from the Africaine from 10th November, having been kept on board by fickle weather. On 19 November, the 49-year-old Mary Thomas, a woman of the English middle-classes who was not enjoying her very first summer camping holiday, volunteered to collect letters from the immigrants so they could be conveyed on the homeward-bound Africaine. She would rather have sealed herself in a London-bound

Page 54 of 162

Alice and the Weather Man

20/10/09 1:50 PM

envelope, as her disenchanted early diaries indicate, but she remained steadfast and, as South Australia's first unofficial 'director of communications', became the matriarch of a prominent newspaper family. In a reference to the contrariness of the climate, she wrote on 14th November: 'A pewter jug had been accidentally left outside the tent in a dish containing some water, and on lifting the jug, to my surprise the dish came up with it, for the water had frozen to an eighth of an inch in thickness. This astonished me in a country where I did not expect to see such a thing, and yet the thermometer rose that day to 110 degrees.' Colonel Light, on the other hand, found everything exceeded his expectations. At the end of that first year, he recorded: 'I cannot express my delight at seeing no bounds to a flat of fine, rich-looking country with an abundance of freshwater lagoons, which, if dry in summer, convinced me that need not dig a deep well to give sufficient supply. The little river, too, was deep; it struck me that much might hereafter be made of this little stream.' Within a year or so, some dissatisfied settlers criticised Light's choice of Adelaide site. He was unrepentant. In his cottage near Adelaide, dying of tuberculosis, he wrote on 28th March, 1839: 'Deeply feeling the importance of the trust imposed upon me by the Commissioners when they confided solely in me the task of selecting a site for the capital of the province; and yet feeling more the fact well-being of thousands is now connected with, and may, in a great measure depend on the correctness of the decision I then made, I am anxious, if possible, to convince the Commissioners and the public that I endeavoured scrupulously to do my duty, and that my exertions have been conscientiously directed to the good of the colony. The reasons that led me to fix Adelaide where it is I do not expect to be generally understood or calmly judged at present. My enemies, however, by disputing their validity in every particular, have done me the good service of fixing the whole of the responsibility upon me. I am perfectly willing to bear it; and I leave it to posterity, and not to them, to decide whether I am entitled to praise or blame.' Light died on 6th October, 1839, in the arms of his faithful mistress Maria Gandy, perfectly content in the fair judgement of posterity ... and fair judgement it would become in the eyes of Charles Todd, a schoolboy at faraway Greenwich, on the banks of the Thames, in England ... Charles and his two brothers, Griffiths Jr. and Henry attended the local Roan School, established in 1677 by the family of John Roan, a wealthy Greenwich merchant, to educate the deserving sons of the less well-to-do. Their sisters, Elizabeth and Mary, stayed at home to watch over mother. And it was to the Roan School that the formidable George Airy came in 1841 to pluck the 15-year-old Charles from his scholar's bench. Airy had heard about the lad's amazing facility with numbers; he knew of his exploits at the Trafalgar Tavern where, unknown to his God-fearing parents, for pocket money, he would instantly solve the problem of, say, the square root of 3,258,025

Page 55 of 162

Alice and the Weather Man

20/10/09 1:50 PM

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

Page 56 of 162

Alice and the Weather Man

20/10/09 1:50 PM

Yorkstone pavers, hewn from the Pennines of the North (as he would have known because they paved half the towns of England). What a terribly ordinary young man, thought Alice, short, straggly adolescent whiskers, narrow shoulders. Hardly the knight in shining armour of a twelve-year-old girl's fancy. Nevertheless, she hurried downstairs and concealed herself behind a chaise longue. Her mother entertained him with sherry and cake and attempted to make conversation. He admitted to her that his rooms overlooking Trinity College a few hundred yards away were very ordinary, but they were adequate for a bachelor. 'You should get married, Mr Todd,' said Charlotte Bell. 'Ah, madam, I fear no one would want to marry such a dull fellow as I,' replied Charles. Alice suddenly appeared from behind the chaise longue. 'I will marry you, Mr Todd, if no one else will,' she declared. Charles was lost in his confusion. Decent chaps like him were not often propositioned by raven-haired twelve-year-old girls in front of their Free Church mothers. 'You are far too young,' he said. 'I will wait,' said Alice. The above exchange, related at future Adelaide dinner parties and kept alive by the Todd daughters, became part of the South Australian folklore. It was not until the year 2000, when Alice's great-great granddaughter, the English journalist Alice Thomson, retold it in her memoir, The Singing Wire, that it was given absolute credibility! But why shouldn't it be true? Was it a desperate cry from the grieving heart of a child? By 1849, Alice had lost five of her ten siblings to disease, probably a form of tuberculosis, the most recent her beloved little sister, Eliza, who succumbed in 1845 at the age of five. Alice wanted out. Her girl/woman's instinct drew her to the unprepossessing Charles Todd, who eventually took her to South Australia, one of the healthiest climates in the world. Her mother, Charlotte Bell, may have been her chief conspirator with the connivance of Charles Todd (after all, his surname does mean 'the Fox' in its Middle English derivation). But then, that may be romantic speculation. Alice's father, Edward Bell, was in trade as a corn merchant and maltster, as his father had been, and his father before that, and so on for 150 years, back to the reign of the Good Queen Anne at the turn of the 18th century. By 1849, he was aged in his middle fifties and one of Cambridge's most solid citizens, owning a large retail warehouse on Peas Hill, a few minutes brisk walk from his house and close by the Corn Exchange. He had servants at his house and clerks on high stools at his place of work. In 1847, he had made his eldest son, also Edward, an equal partner in the family business, having taken him into the firm in 1839 at the age of twelve. There was something about the age of twelve for the Bell children ... they went to work, or proposed marriage or wrestled with Death. Perhaps, having shared the grief of his wife in the loss of so many of their youngsters, Edward Bell was also a silent member

Page 57 of 162

Alice and the Weather Man

20/10/09 1:50 PM

of the conspiracy to save Alice. Did he ever take Alice on his business travels to get her away from that house of gloom? We don't know, but might have. Edward didn't travel far: the market at St Ives, 20km northwest, where, he could have explained to her that Oliver Cromwell, hero of religious nonconformists, once lived. That was probably the extent of his Cambridgeshire world. It was said he met his wife, the former Charlotte Clark, a cheery bonnet maker six years younger, at a country fair somewhere in the county. Such was the family that welcomed the twenty-two-year old Charles Todd to one of the sad, empty places at their table. The day after their meeting, he sent Alice a copy of John Bunyan's great religious narrative, The Pilgrim's Progress, which set the agenda firmly for their relationship during her pubescence: he was the de facto uncle who would guide her spiritual path; there was nothing in Bunyan's prose liable to unsettle her romantically ... 'This miry slough is such a place as cannot be mended; it is the descent whither the scum and filth that attends conviction for sin doth continually run, and therefore is called the Slough of Despond'. It was as if Charles was anticipating the future woes of a tortured younger contemporary, Lewis Carroll, who was thought to have all manner of odd sexual ambitions for his own real-life Alice Liddell. There would be no ambiguous, photographic Anglican Wonderland for Charles and Alice! Anyway, as it happened, George Airy summoned him back to London in May, 1854, when Alice was seventeen, and made him supervisor of the Greenwich Time Balls, and a lesser time ball for the city folk on The Strand. This made him the time-keeper of the universe. Or so he liked to joke with friends over a cup of Orange Pekoe tea, out of the hearing of George Airy, of course. 'Why do you insist on Orange Pekoe tea?' Someone would ask. 'My father was once a grocer and I became addicted as a child. It is the finest tea from China, picked from the youngest and smallest leaves, using only the balls of the finger tips, and these dry to a yellow-orange colour,' he'd reply. They'd nod and he'd say: 'Anyway, I'd be odd without my T.' He was always good for a pun, was Charles, even if it was the same old one. Charles watched the ships sail by Greenwich, east towards the Thames estuary and then south through the Channel, many bound for Australia, their decks crammed with passengers getting their last glimpses of England ...' in general, marks of distress were more perceptible among the men than the women; for I recollect to have seen but one of those affected on the occasion, "Some natural tears she dropp'd but wiped them soon",' the Marine officer, Watkin Tench, remarked on the departure of the convict First Fleet from Portsmouth sixty-five years earlier. Perhaps Charles noticed the barque Irene among the outward-bound traffic on 24th September, 1854. The graceful vessel, under the command of Captain David Bruce, was a regular in the Thames; she had been to Australia twice before, Sydney in 1852 and Adelaide in 1853. When Irene returned from her 1854 voyage, she would take aboard the

Page 58 of 162

Alice and the Weather Man

20/10/09 1:50 PM

newly-wed Mr and Mrs Todd. As he navigated his three-masted 400-tonne Irene through the noisy profusion of river traffic, David Bruce would have appreciated the historical importance of Greenwich to seafarers. The Royal Observatory was commissioned by Charles II in 1675, just nine years after he became a folk hero to his doubting subjects by riding among them, unprotected by guards from those who might assassinate him, to bring calm during the Great Fire of London. King Charles ordered his first Astronomer Royal, John Flamsteed, to 'apply himself with the most care and diligence to the rectifying of the tables of the motions of the heavens, and the places of the fixed stars, so as to find out the so much desired longitude of places for perfecting the art of navigation'. Most of the expense of this scientific research was carried, quite unwittingly, by Louis XIV of France who was secretly paying huge bribes to King Charles to (a) support him against the Dutch, and (b) turn England into a Papal realm again. Charles didn't pursue either course with much enthusiasm: the expression 'Merry Olde England' was coined during his jolly administration with the captivating Nell Gwynn (amongst others, the rotter). Eventually, a Yorkshire carpenter-clockmaker John Harrison solved the problem of longitude a century later and this, to cut a long story short, was how Captain David Bruce managed to take the Irene to and from Australia with such unerring accuracy through the 1850s and 1860s. He might have joked with curious passengers that he simply followed his own wake, but he easily beat Charles Todd, who had brought his own sextant aboard, when they competed to fix the Irene's position daily during the 1855 voyage out. Charles knew nothing of what was to come as he went about his time-keeping duties that 24th September, 1854, as the Irene vanished into the autumn Thames estuary mist. He was becoming particularly familiar with the operation of the electric telegraph grid of which Greenwich was an important part. Then, on 10th February, 1855, he was offered the position of Government Astronomer and Superintendent of Telegraphs in the colony of South Australia at a salary of £400 a year. Without much ado, he hurried north to Cambridge. 'So would you be taking anyone with you?' asked Mrs Charlotte Bell, anxiously, for she had lost another beloved child, also Charlotte, aged nineteen, to tuberculosis, in 1851. 'I cannot ask anyone to share what might be a rough and crude life,' said Charles. 'I will go with you, Mr Todd,' said Alice.

12. The man who found the magic tree The England-Australia telegraph, and all others requiring undersea travel, was made possible by the alertness in the 1840s of a Scottish surgeon, William Montgomerie, a colonial old hand in the service of the East India Company in steamy Singapore. He was stationed at there for periods from the 1820s-1840s. The island, at

Page 59 of 162

Alice and the Weather Man

20/10/09 1:50 PM

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

Page 60 of 162

Alice and the Weather Man

20/10/09 1:50 PM

telegraph stations fell into German hands in the occupied territories of Schleswig, Holstein and Lauenberg. The early telegraph was not purely an instrument of international subterfuge, sneaky diplomacy or their low IQ alternative, warfare. British General Post Office (GPO) consumer surveys in the 1840s, when the telegraph was still land-locked, showed that a half of all users were dealing in stocks and shares, a quarter involved sundry business matters, and another quarter were personal and family matters. These surveys were deadly accurate: the polling people simply read everyone's private telegraphs, which was impossible with everyone's private letters. The traditional letter had gone through its own high-tech revolution with the introduction of postage stamps on 1st May, 1840. There were clever people, too, who saw other commercial opportunities in Britain's fervent embrace of the new technologies. In the north of England, someone with a vested interest in encouraging tourism to the Knaresborough district, probably an innkeeper or restaurateur, updated the prophesies of Mother Ursula Shipton, the 'witch of Yorkshire', to incorporate the latest developments. Mother Shipton was born with 'an unfashionable face' in a cave in 1488. She had foretold such routine events as the Spanish Armada and the Great Fire of London, but, suddenly, a new prophesy was unveiled: Carriages without horses shall go And accidents fill the world with woe Around the world thought shall fly In the twinkling of an eye Iron in the water shall float As easy as a wooden boat Clever Mother Shipton! Her newly-discovered prophesy covered such scientific miracles as steam trains, telegraphs and Isambard Kingdom Brunel's grand iron ships, the Great Western, Great Britain, and, of course, Great Eastern, which failed financially as a luxury passenger liner, but was reborn as the majestic layer of the Trans-Atlantic cable, finally, in 1866. In the early-1850s, in the farthest-flung outposts of the English-speaking world, people were anxious to speak to Mother. In Melbourne, Australia, the people wanted to tell her that they had found the Golden Mountain (and to find out if their pleas for separate colonyhood from New South Wales had been granted); in San Francisco, California, some former wayward children of Victoria's wanted to complain about the terrorising behaviour of some of her evil flock from Sydney, Australia. But they had no telegraph and Mother's eyes were fixed firmly elsewhere. The Scientific American magazine explained in its 19th May, 1855 issue in which it referred slyly to the poetic fiasco of the Charge of the Light Brigade the previous 25th October (which wasn't so bad considering the Light Brigade only lost 127 men out of 20,000 war dead). The Scientific American said: 'If the British have displayed great inferiority in military management in the present war with Russia, it cannot be denied but that the national spirit for

Page 61 of 162

Alice and the Weather Man

20/10/09 1:50 PM

engineering enterprise has not failed to show itself in the most favourable light. Thus in the Crimea, Uncle John has carried his railroads with him, and the locomotive is used there to wheel up shot, shell, and other implements of war. To think of a railroad being built in a few weeks, by John Bull, in the possessions of the Emperor of Russia, as an auxiliary of a modern campaign, is something so strange and different from war, as heretofore practised, that we cannot but give great credit to the spirit that planned an executed the work.' The magazine continued: 'In connection with this, the last news from Europe brought the intelligence that an electric telegraph line had been completed from Balaklava to London, and that Lord Raglan sent to and received messages daily from England. From the camp in the Crimea, to the War Office in London, the Commander in Chief now reports directly the state of the siege every few minutes. Two weeks ago, such information could not be conveyed in as many days as it now takes seconds; and last year not in as many weeks. A telegraph submarine cable 301 miles long is laid on the bed of the Black Sea, stretching from the monastery of St George, in the Crimea, to Kalerga, on the Bulgarian shore, from which communication is had by land lines, and other submarine lines, to England. This is an important triumph of modern engineering enterprise and skill which deserves our admiration. English telegraph engineers deserve great credit for the boldness and enterprise they have exhibited in laying down so many ocean lines. They have made the ocean a highway of thought; the government speaks to its soldiers thousands of miles away, through the waves of St George's Channel, those of the Mediterranean, and the Black Sea. 'In a few years more, unless our telegraph engineers move a little faster than they have done, we are afraid that John Bull will take some of the starch out of their collars by building an ocean telegraph which will unite our country with Europe. Mr (Taliaferro Preston) Shaffner, when he was in Europe, it was reported, obtained grants from the Emperor of Russia and the Kings of Denmark and Sweden to run telegraphic lines through their dominions, all of which grants, we apprehend, will be of no use whatever unless something be done quickly to make use of them; for assuredly Uncle John has the advantage of route from Ireland to Newfoundland, and we rather think he will not neglect it. We are a people famous for acting while others are talking. Look out, American telegraphic engineers, that John Bull does not steal away our good name by the construction of the first Atlantic ocean telegraph line.' Ah, what prophesy! And what bad luck for Colonel Taliaferro Preston Shaffner (a colonel of the finger-lickin' Kentucky variety), a smooth-talking promoter who'd made his pile in '51 running a telegraph line from Kentucky to Missouri, tacking the wires to trees, thus saving money on poles. The Americans could jolly well wait for their submarine telegraph connection until Britain had finished her business in the Crimea, or India, or anywhere else the natives were revolting.

Page 62 of 162

Alice and the Weather Man

20/10/09 1:50 PM

13. Sydney crooks show Yanks how it's done In San Francisco, the gun-totin' citizenry had been suffering severely from a new communal disease called telegraph deprivation since late-1850: their cause of anxiety was the arrival in the gold boom town of certain unsavoury citizens from good ol' Sydney town, their sister metropolis on the other side of the Pacific. Their woes began when a storekeeper named Sam Brannan appeared on the streets on 12th May, 1848, waving a bottle full of yellow stuff and yelling, 'Gold, gold, from the American River!' He'd received the precious metal in payment for goods from his store. The rush was on to the foothills of the Sierras. San Francisco was as far from the civilising influences of the Old World as it was possible for any European settlement to be ... apart from the British outposts in Australia and, more recently, New Zealand. It was 4500 kilometres by land from New York, half of it across territory dismissed by those who had encountered it, variously, as the Badlands, or the Wild West. More comfortably, but rarely, if you were the vomiting kind, it was up to three months from New York by sea around the boiling waters of Cape Horn. Significantly, it took the same time to get from Sydney, Australia, over friendlier seas. And blow-ins from Sydney were blamed for most of the ills of San Francisco, a boom town of 100,000 people by 1850. The San Francisco Herald explained: 'There are certain spots in our city, infested by the most abandoned men and women, that have acquired a reputation little better than Five Points of New York or St Giles of London. The upper part of Pacific Street, after dark, is crowded by thieves, gamblers, low women, drunken sailors, and similar characters, who resort to the groggeries that line the street, and spend the night in the most hideous orgies. Every grog shop is provided with a fiddle, from which some half-drunken creature tortures execrable sounds, called by way of compliment, music. 'Shortly after dark, the dancing commences, and is kept up increasing to the sound of the fiddle, until broken up by a row, or by the exhaustion of those engaged in it. These ruffian resorts are the hot bed of drunkenness, and the scenes of unnumbered crimes. Unsuspecting sailors and miners are entrapped by the dexterous thieves and swindlers that are always on the lookout, into these dens, where they are filled with liquor-drugged, if necessary, until insensibility coming upon them, they fall easy victim to their tempters. In this way, many robberies are committed, which are not brought to light through shame on part of the victim. When the habitues of this quarter have reason to believe a man has money, they follow him for days, and employ every device to get him into their clutches ...' The 'habitues of this quarter' were commonly known as 'Sydney Ducks' or 'Sydney Coves'. Contemporary San Francisco writers claim that the human scrum and riff-raff from the ports of the seven seas poured into the settlement when news of the gold rush was heard throughout the world.

Page 63 of 162

Alice and the Weather Man

20/10/09 1:51 PM

'There, in particular,' reports the excellent document, San Francisco Genealogy, 'gathered the ruffianly larrikins from the frontier towns of Australia, and escaped convicts and ticket-of-leave men from the British penal settlements at Sydney, in New South Wales, and on the island of Tasmania, then called Van Diemens Land. This wave of undesirable immigration, which to all intents and purposes was 100 per cent criminal, began to wash against the shores of California about the middle of 1849, in direct and open violation of an old Mexican statute which forbade entry into the territory of person who had been convicted of crimes in other countries.' According to reports, every time a particularly heinous crime was reported, the common saying around San Francisco was that 'the Sydney Ducks are cackling on the pond'. These so-called 'Sydney Ducks' bore names such as Hell Haggerty, a bar owner and ticket-of-leaver, and Dirty Tom McAlear, who frequented an establishment called the Goat and Compass and, for a price, would eat any refuse offered to him. He was arrested finally for making a beast of himself and confessed that he'd been drunk for seven years and last had a bath fifteen years ago in England just before he was transported to Sydney (it can be seen why the wellscrubbed innocents of the future Colony of Victoria wished to separate from the Colony of New South Wales, and quickly, if you don't mind). The honest citizens of San Francisco were in desperate need of the new-fangled telegraph to call for help to rid themselves of this antipodean menace. But the magic wires did not come. Eventually, the solid folk solved the problem by using a traditional method as American as Mom's Apple Pie: lynching. Early in August, 1851, two leading Sydney Ducks, Samuel Whittaker and Robert McKenzie were seized by the local Vigilance Committee and found guilty of robbery, arson and burglary by a kangaroo court and sentenced to death. But on 21st August, Governor John MacDougal sent a force of legal policeman to grab the two evildoers back and lodge them in the City Jail. Three days later, the Vigilance Committee seized them back, spirited them away in a carriage and terminated them with ropes hanging from redwood beams poking from their committee headquarters meeting room. Hearing the news, the rest of the rascally Sydney Coves hastily decamped and San Francisco lost its Cockney/Australian accent. Such behaviour, however effective, ill-behoved a civilised society, and San Francisco's city fathers constantly lobbied their Eastern cousins for a more effective means of communication. They eventually were linked by telegraph early in 1862, but not before they were part of that brief but glorious chapter in American folklore, the Pony Express. On 3rd April, 1860, the first Pony Express rider left St Joseph, Missouri, the most westerly outpost of the telegraph, to begin a series of stages over 2500 winding, mountainous kilometres to Sacramento, California's capital. An overnight river steamer took the mailbag to San Francisco. The journey cut the elapsed time from coast to coast by

Page 64 of 162

Alice and the Weather Man

20/10/09 1:51 PM

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!

14. 'Miss Florence Nightingale? Telegram! But, Sydney Ducks notwithstanding, returning to the 1850s, Britain was still very much ascendant everywhere in the 1850s, albeit the minor hiccups on the Crimean peninsula and in India. The Crimean War had proved to be the blood-soaked social event of the decade; everyone had rushed around to Harrod's, in Brompton Road, to purchase a globe showing the location of this dashed peninsula, just a blob sticking awkwardly into the north side of the Black Sea from the bottom of the Russian state of Ukraine. The Turks had argued with their Russian neighbours and gone to war; Britain and France, who were nervous about the Russian fleet's Mediterranean intentions had decided to interfere on the Turks' side. The leaders rode hither and thither beyond the rows of their gaily-adorned troops in their pompous confusion and the common men turned green and died of cholera and typhus. Florence Nightingale, a mathematician by training, came to help them, invented modern nursing practices, and applied statistics to reckoning the soldiers' plight Like most wars, it had its advantages in improving mankind's use of technology, particularly in distant climes. The most important (apart from nursing) was the telegraph. In 1855, the Turkish government ran a submarine cable northwest 150 nautical miles from Constantinople (Istanbul) to the ancient Bulgarian western Black Sea city of Varna, now a trendy beach resort. Later that year, Britain installed a cable 310 nautical miles from Varna to Balaklava. The Ottoman Empire and the Crimean War were now linked to the European telegraph grid. The previous year, 1854, Queen Victoria's favourite seaside residence, Osborne House, on the Isle of Wight, came online through a one nautical mile submarine cable hooking her to the Empire. It was one of the most significant events on the Isle since Queen Victoria went sea bathing for the first time in 1847. She recorded the momentous happening in her diary: 'I thought it delightful until I put my head under water, when I thought I should be stifled.' Alas, there would be no such luck for the Empire, particularly after she got her own private telegraph office. The Queen's Own telegraph office had very regal connections, indeed. After leaving Osborne House, the cable snaked into the waters of the Solent at the northwest tip of the Isle. It re-emerged on an offshoot of gravelly mainland at Hurst Castle, a fortress built by Henry VIII in 1544 to guard Southampton and Portsmouth against invasion by the dreaded Spaniards, who were

Page 65 of 162

Alice and the Weather Man

20/10/09 1:51 PM

thought to be jolly annoyed after he nationalised the Catholic Church. From Hurst Castle, it made its way to the town of Keyhaven, thus joining the British grid. This regal communications service coincided with two significant happenings in the British psyche: (a) the Charge of the Light Brigade on the Crimea on 25th October, 1854, and (b) the arrival to take up residency on the Isle of Wight of Alfred Tennyson, Queen Victoria's pet poet and chief spin doctor for the infamous Charge ... Half a league, half a league, Half a league onward. All in the valley of Death, Rode the six hundred. Queen Victoria's favourite Prime Minister, the Tory opportunist Benjamin Disraeli, had stood in the House of Commons and declared the Charge to be: 'A feat of chivalry, fiery with consummate courage, and bright with flashing courage.' Oh, if only, if only. But his words cleverly evoked the spirit of Victoria's England. Did the Queen gaze at her new telegraphic device and speculate privately on its propaganda possibilities in the new Age of Hidden Persuasion? She certainly employed it skilfully thirty years later when she contributed largely to the defeat of the liberal Prime Minister William Gladstone in the heroic Affair of Gordon of Khartoum. The Queen, long-widowed, had been sending telegraph upon telegraph in the latter part of 1884 to Gladstone imploring him to send an expedition to save the religious maniac and suspected child molester, General Charles Gordon, from the simply ghastly legions of the Mahdi besieging Khartoum (where the heathen blighters had cut the sole telegraph lines ... heaven knows what would have been said if the Queen had managed to contact Gordon, or even the Mahdi, direct). Eventually, Gladstone sent his soldiers down the Nile. But it was too late. Gordon died a glamorous colonial death at the hands of the Mahdi's men. Outraged, the Queen sent the following telegraph to Gladstone: 'This news from Khartoum is frightful and to think that all this might have been prevented and many precious lives saved by earlier action is too frightful.' The message was sent out uncoded, with deliberation and malice, and was read by a dozen or more telegraph employees. It found its way into the patriotic drumbangers of the Tory-leaning popular press. Gladstone, the reformist Prime Minister and arch enemy of the Queen, beneath whose constitutional widow's weeds beat the heart of a Mediaeval Absolutist, was roundly defeated at the next election. The telegraph had lost its innocence, raped by 19th century Spin Doctors. But let's go back to the wharves at the Thames, in London, on 29th August, 1855, Someone who hadn't lost her innocence, according to her family's anecdote, was Alice. She was just nineteen and about to sail any moment for South Australia on the sturdy barque, Irene, with her new husband, Charles Todd, and a family maid, Eliza, who had been kindly donated by her mother. Alice and Charles had married at the Baptist Chapel in St Andrews

Page 66 of 162

Alice and the Weather Man

20/10/09 1:51 PM

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

15. Alice in a raw and golden southern landscape The tall, chaste and beautiful Alice very kindly married the short, awfully plain and older Mr Todd, it is said, so he wouldn't be without the comfort of a wife in the Great South Land; but when they arrived in Adelaide, the newlyweds found the dusty raw town awash with single women. The immigration administrators of South Australia had miscalculated their need for female domestics: they imported 4050 lasses in 1855 alone and were at a loss, to put it bluntly, where to store them. Charles couldn't help; they weren't really his type; he already had a female helpmate of solid Protestant persuasion. Although the manifests of the unwanted women said they were loaded and shipped from Liverpool, most came indirectly from west across the sea: Ireland, for heaven's sake! Why on earth cart thousands of destitute Roman Catholic girls and women to a province meant to be a paradise for the yeoman Protestant, sturdy English folk or stout German Lutherans? A place where the oompah, oompah of German bands would mingle meaningfully in the perfumed eucalyptus glades with the soulful pealing of Anglican church bells? The Australia of 1855 which greeted Charles and Alice on the late spring day, 5th November, was undergoing the most spectacular changes in its brief 67 years of European occupation; they were transformations that would not be equalled until the magic years of immigration post-Second World War a century later. Alice was bothered by the heat and dust and flies, but captivated by the South Australian landscape which she likened, flatteringly, to the Fens of her native Cambridgeshire. She and her suffering maid, Eliza, were pleased there was no sign of the trembling jungle they had feared and which they had read about in the early African accounts of the Scottish missionary doctor, David Livingstone (who had just discovered Victoria Falls, on the Zambezi, which had far greater scenic encounters than anything Adelaide had to offer). Charles would have seen the landscape, benign on the coast but ever more hostile to the European intruder towards the interior, as a place worthy of scientific conquest. It was a huge island continent, nearly eight million square kilometres in area and occupying almost six per cent of the world's land mass. The important distances to Charles would have been Adelaide southeast to Melbourne: 650 kilometres; Adelaide west to Perth: 2800km; Adelaide east to Sydney, 1200km; and Adelaide to the northernmost coast (the present site of Darwin): 3000km; the last three were not

Page 67 of 162

Alice and the Weather Man

20/10/09 1:51 PM

recommended for the casual backpacker in 1855. By the end of the decade, Australia's white population would be nearly a million people, most gathered in the southeast corner; the aborigines, assumed by guesstimate to number some 300,000 at the time of the arrival of the First Fleet were considered to be a vanishing species and did not count. Charles soon had himself kitted out (and photographed) in the full outback bushman's regalia: jaunty broadbrimmed hat with a fetching veil that could be lowered against dust storms or plagues of flies or mosquitoes, a jacket with accompanying dashing cravat and knee-length cavalry boots; Alice, clever woman, never ventured more than forty kilometres inland in the next forty years! In the 1850s, South Australia's eastern neighbour, Victoria, was the glittering triumph of Britain's Australian colonies. The colony, smallest on the mainland, had been granted Separation from New South Wales in 1850, followed by sensational gold discoveries in 1851. The sleepy Port Phillip District, as it was first known, home to 97,000 people and six million sheep, found itself propelled on to the world stage; gold discoveries in New South Wales were meagre by comparison. In ten years, Victoria's population climbed to 540,000, or 180,000 more than New South Wales and 46 per cent of the Australian total; gold production was 25 million ounces, worth £100 million and a third of the world's output for the decade. In South Australia, the sudden emergence of Queen Victoria's latest jewel was viewed with justifiable alarm. More than 6000 young men joined the gold rush in 1851; another 16,000 went in 1852, almost wiping out the colony's immigration gain of 20,000 from Europe. The Adelaide economy teetered. Then Alexander Tolmer, the handsome, erratic cavalry officer who had recently been appointed South Australia's police commissioner, offered an heroic solution: he would ride across the arid land to the booming new gold towns of Ballarat and Bendigo and bring the South Australian miners' gold home to Adelaide! South Australia's governing citizens were thrilled with the audacious plan and cheered Tolmer and his men when they rode out of Adelaide on 10th February, 1852. Tolmer had been thrice wounded fighting as a mercenary lancer in the cause of Donna Maria in Portugal in 1826. Surely, the scheme would succeed! And it did. Tolmer brought home £20,000 worth of gold at the end of a month and £2 million worth by the time the gold escort was discontinued in December, 1853. Tolmer's eighteen escorts were not without their romantic moments. His main concerns were bushrangers, ex-Vandemonian lags lurking on the scorching plains of the Wimmera, between the unruly goldfields and law-abiding, God-fearing South Australia. These evildoers had made their headquarters at a shanty called the Four Posts Inn. According to Tolmer's informants, they 'swaggered around, cursing abominably, brandishing their guns, knives and swords and bragging how they would snatch the next load of gold from Tolmer and his men'. Tolmer decided to take these bullies by their horns. One day, the assembled bushrangers were

Page 68 of 162

Alice and the Weather Man

20/10/09 1:51 PM

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.

Page 69 of 162

Alice and the Weather Man

20/10/09 1:51 PM

The Victorian Government acted quickly after McGowan demonstrated his Morse apparatus in June, 1853. The Melbourne daily, the Argus, had commented ... 'To us, old Colonists who have left Britain long ago, there is something very delightful in this, the most perfect invention of modern times ... we really begin to wonder what will be left for the next generation upon which to expend the restless enterprise of the human mind ... let us set about the electric telegraph at once.' Quickly, the government announced an experimental line twelve kilometres from Melbourne to the port suburb of Williamstown. As part of a clever deal, McGowan was awarded the contract. And on 3rd March, 1854, the first telegraph line in the southern hemisphere was completed. The Argus reported on 11 March: 'It is a source of great gratification to us and we are sure it will be to our readers that we are able to announce that this useful invention will be open for the use of the press and the public on Monday next. The opening of the line, or construction of new ones to the Heads, Geelong, Adelaide and Sydney, will be most important to all persons, but especially those engaged in commerce; and of the whole of them none will be ordinarily so important to Melbourne as the continuation of the line to Geelong and the Heads. Whenever that is done, we shall be able to issue a bulletin every hour in the day announcing the vessels which are seen coming or going from the Heads, with any other information that may be important.' McGowan was the hero of the hour! He was appointed Victoria's first Inspector of Telegraphs, thus becoming an obedient servant of the Queen for the rest of his life and well-cleansed of his Yankee private enterprise urgings. In Adelaide, on 5th November, 1855, that other dutiful servant of the Queen, Charles Todd, took Alice from the wharf into town perched on a bullock wagon laden with their possessions, including her cottage piano and her complaining maid, known throughout the colony thereafter as 'Poor Eliza'. His heart might have swelled with British pride as they lurched down the dock past large box cases whose markings indicated they had just been unloaded from a ship from Liverpool. They contained wheels made in England for the first three steam locomotives in South Australia. They had been ordered by the South Australian Railways' absentee consulting engineer, none other than Kingdom Isambard Brunel and built at the famous Manchester works of William Fairbairn, the Scottish engineering genius without whom (dare we say it?) many of Brunel's creations would still be on the drawing board. Charles may have felt that he, too, was part of this astonishing Australian communications revolution. He might have explained to Alice that some of those wheels would be fitted to the locomotive, Adelaide, which made the first run on the Adelaide-Port Adelaide line on 19th April, 1856. Alice might have replied, thank goodness, a railway will be much smoother than this jolting wagon. Alice was roundly pregnant. They reached the dusty track beyond the port and Charles might, maliciously, have pointed out to Poor Eliza the spot where Martin Burns, skipper of the coastal brig,

Page 70 of 162

Alice and the Weather Man

20/10/09 1:51 PM

Giraffe, walking through the bush to Adelaide in March, 1838, was speared by blacks. That would have silenced her. Or perhaps not. There were times when even the kind-hearted Charles must have thought that his mother-in-law, Charlotte Bell, was down-sizing her staff when she gifted Poor Eliza among their wedding presents. But Charles would have been even more annoyed at the sight of pirate telegraph wire, strung sneakily behind dwellings, across fowl yards, circumventing pig sties, surreptitiously making its way from the town of Adelaide to the port. This private telegraph was the cheeky creation of a young Adelaide architect, James Macgeorge. The Picturesque Atlas of 1886 recalled the private telegraph: ' ... Mr Todd arrived with telegraphic appliances, and began the energetic course he has since followed. The first work he superintended was from Adelaide to the port, and it recalled, with some amusement, that the revenue therefrom was for the first day five shillings; for the second, two shillings and six pence; for the third, one shilling and nine pence; and for the fourth, one shilling and three pence. A rival line, erected by Mr James Macgeorge, had been opened a week before, and took most of the business, but the government purchased it for £80, and pulled it down.' In fact, Charles' telegraph carried nearly 15,000 messages in its first year and earned £366 (which easily would have covered the colony's patriotic 1856 testimonial gift to Florence Nightingale of £200!) Charles had the intervention of the new Governor, Sir Richard MacDonnell, an aristocratic lawyer with a floppy moustache and splendid side burns, a member of the Irish academic upper classes, who had arrived in South Australia early in 1855. Sir Richard was happy to exert his natural authoritarian streak to crush Macgeorge's entrepreneurial ambitions. Later, this autocratic manner brought Sir Richard into conflict with other leading South Australians, who had to remind him that he had not been appointed the dictator of a convict colony, like some they could name not too far away. Sir Richard took the hint and the South Australians responded, asking the explorer John McDouall Stuart to name a suitable feature after him. Stuart chose the MacDonnell Ranges, in Central Australia, because no white man had yet seen Ayers Rock! They called Blanchetown, a much more hospitable nook on the River Murray, after his wife. Charles and the fortyish MacDonnell became fast friends, and the Todds were occasional guests at Government House. The relationship assisted Charles mightily; MacDonnell had a taste for exploration and in 1859 led a round trip of 3000km to examine the clay pans and salt lakes in the colony's north. He was an ebullient, hospitable man who had an opinion on everything: he publicly disparaged the exploits of the explorers of the 1840s, Charles Sturt and Edward John Eyre, but praised Stuart. Charles and Stuart nodded in apparent agreement, but kept their own counsel; Stuart was a friend and admirer of Sturt, and Charles had written to him at home in England before the Irene sailed. Neither man wished to jeopardise his own project. Stuart further immortalised the Governor in his journal entry on 24th July,

Page 71 of 162

Alice and the Weather Man

20/10/09 1:51 PM

1862, when he finally reached the ocean on the continent's northern coast: 'I dipped my face and washed my hands and feet in the sea, as I had promised the late (former) Governor, Sir Richard MacDonnell, I would do if I reached it.' The Todds (and Poor Eliza) moved into a comfortable twostorey house in North Adelaide, after several weeks of immigrants' boarding house accommodation, while they awaited completion of the stone Observatory/residence in a choice high location in West Terrace with an unimpeded view of the coast from Glenelg to Port Adelaide. It was to be Todd's residence, and that of his successors until it was demolished in the late-1940s and replaced by Adelaide High School. Charles had already begun meteorological observations of Adelaide, Australia's driest capital, at his temporary North Adelaide residence and sometimes, with the encouragement of his new friend, Sir Richard MacDonnell, in the grounds of Government House at the corner of North Terrace and King William Road. Sometimes, we fancy, Lady Blanche would interrupt his deliberations to join him for a cup of tea and a bun. He was a tea connoisseur, was Charles, with a reputation for ghastly puns. His famous, 'I'd be odd without my T', would have been tested on Lady MacDonnell; she might have twirled her parasol indulgently and changed the subject politely with the remark she was glad the stately Government House had replaced the first one, a timber slab and wattle and daub hut destroyed, fortuitously, by fire in 1841. Charles, the future Postmaster General, could have tried her patience with one of his favourites: 'The settlement of Orroroo doesn't need a post office because it doesn't have enough letters.' And so they would while away the afternoon pleasantly enough. Lady MacDonnell was the daughter of the Reverend Francis Skurray, of Wiltshire, a leisured minor composer of dreary published sonnets, so she was a self-trained patient listener. The lawns of Government House were not at their best in 1855; in 1854, Adelaide and surrounds received the lowest rainfall, 330mm (15 inches), since the arrival of the first settlers in the spring of 1836 (Adelaide's average over nearly 170 years is 558mm). That pioneering spring had become a stinking hot summer: at Christmas, 1836, the temperature in the shade for four successive days exceeded 100F (40C). Only Englishmen (there were, as yet, no mad dogs) would venture outside on the colony's Proclamation Day, 28th December. In the eighteen years that followed, the pioneer settlers thought they had become accustomed to the vagaries of the weather. Early in the 1840s, the plains beyond Adelaide were opened to wheat farmers; soon, South Australia had become the continent's granary and, by the time of the Victorian gold rushes in 1851, Australia had ample wheat to feed the booming population. Everyone grew plump with optimism; South Australia's wheat farmers decided the time was ripe to employ domestic help: maidservants to draw the homestead's water from the wells, scrub their dusty clothes clean, beat the carpets, milk the house cows and serve apple pie with cream as the golden orb of the sun settled in

Page 72 of 162

Alice and the Weather Man

20/10/09 1:51 PM

the west. In Adelaide, civil servants wrote Home ordering female domestic servants by the gross. And they were sent out by the shipload. But no one had anticipated the drought of 1854. Suddenly, the wheat farmers faced ruin; the harvest was scant; the depression spread to the merchants in town. The last thing anyone needed was a maidservant. But the spinsters kept arriving until they finally numbered more than 4000. Under the terms of their assisted passages, they were allowed to remain on board ship fourteen days while they waited to be offered their promised jobs and accommodation. Alas, they waited in vain. The Government Immigration Agent, Dr Handasyde Duncan witnessed their despair ... 'the deck of an immigrant ship is a public place where all persons in search of servants have full liberty of access, and at this time the supervision of single women is absolutely impossible,' he reported. Adelaide's whorehouse procurers took the place of honest employers. Alice, whose future home was to be in West Terrace, just a stone's throw from the stews, was scandalised. Adelaide, known as the City of Churches in later years, was also the Borough of Bordellos just six years after its founding. In the Register on 15th April, 1843, a resident complained: 'Can you inform me how long the neighbourhood of Waymouth Street and Light Square are to be infested with brothels, and when the inhabitants are to be rid of the music, dancing, revelry and the mob of drunken blacklegs who idle about there all day and live on plunder and prostitution at night?' Six years later, the situation was no better, reported the SA Gazette and Mining Journal on 2nd August, 1849: 'Thanks to the Emigration Commissioners sending us the scum of the English and Irish workhouses ... these unfortunate and degraded beings parade the City in groups by day and night using the most disgusting language ... If convictions were made here, the nymphs of the pavement would have a wholesome dread of 'Ashton's Hotel', and rather than enjoy free quarters at that gentleman's establishment they would learn to observe a proper respect towards the public.' Adelaide Gaol was dubbed 'Ashton's Hotel' after its first governor, William Ashton, because debtors were housed there with free board and lodging. In fact, Colonel William Light, Adelaide's designer, had not even made provision for a gaol in his colony of sturdy British yeomen: serious offenders were shipped off to Van Diemens Land for a taste of the lash. But then, Light would not have anticipated that the Square bearing his name would become centre of the Red Light District! All this came as a dreadful surprise to Charles and Alice, who even had their doubts about the probity of public vertical dancing. Their situation had been anticipated by a writer in the Register on 20th July, 1854, more than a year before they arrived: 'The residents of West Terrace and the adjacent parts have long been compelled to take a circuitous route on their way to and from various places of public worship in order to avoid the profane offensive language and conduct of Light Square.' The Todds would have found themselves among those profanity-dodging worshippers. Charles and Alice were deeply religious

Page 73 of 162

Alice and the Weather Man

20/10/09 1:51 PM

Congregationalists whose emigrant close co-religionists were the Pilgrims who sailed from England on the Mayflower in 1620 to found the Massachusetts Bay Colony in New England and who would brook no evil. In Adelaide, Charles and Alice learned to adopt an easy Australian-style compromise. When they landed in South Australia, they were greeted by the Congregational minister, Thomas Quinton Stow, who had been sent out by the church's overseas arm, the Colonial Missionary Society, on the Hartley in October, 1837, with his wife and four young sons. By November, 1855, the strains of frontier pioneering life had weakened him. He probably explained to Charles his physical inability to assist personally in the critical cause of the Catholic Irish spinsters. Stow was influential in the colony in maintaining harmonious relations between the religions, but he was pleased to meet the energetic and younger man whom he knew would lend strong lay support. Indeed, as well as all the other things he did, Charles soon became a founder of the Brougham Place Congregational Church, in North Adelaide. This meant that Charles, Alice, little Charlotte Elizabeth (and, of course, Poor Eliza) could take a stately carriage ride around the mannered inner suburbs of Adelaide to their new church, and avoid the tasty tarts of Light Square who flaunted themselves even on the Sabbath between West Terrace and Stow's own Congregational Church in the town centre in Freeman Street (now part of Gawler Place). Dashed good fortune to find a way around the unsavoury quarter and it spared a young wife's blushes! The new Governor, Sir Richard MacDonnell, found himself in the midst of the crisis of the Irish Catholic immigrant spinsters when his ship sailed into the colony of 100,000 white souls on 8th June, 1855. He had a Dubliner's patrician concern for the plight of his countrywomen, despite his lofty views about the role of the working classes generally. He responded quickly to pleas to intervene by the local Immigration Agent, Dr Duncan, and the Colonial Surgeon, Dr William Gosse (the father of Ayers Rock's European discoverer in 1873, William Christie Gosse). Adelaide' embarrassing female over-supply included 300 women aboard the immigrant ship, Nashwauk, which ran aground 90 days out of Liverpool and was wrecked off the beach at Moana, 35km south of Adelaide on 13th May, 1855. Some of the bewildered survivors were still straggling into Adelaide when the Governor arrived a month later. The girls had 'behaved in a most discreditable manner' after their disaster, the upright press reported, and their moral status was a matter of great concern. They, above all, were most vulnerable to the lurking agents of the knocking shops of Light Square. It is not known how many succumbed to the temptations of the 'pestiferous dens' and 'cess-pools' where 'no merciful master would kennel his hounds' and where 'these frail sisters of sin and sorrow' are used by 'emissaries from these hotbeds of vice' as a means 'to rob the unwary bushmen who are enticed to the dens of wickedness in the vicinity of Light Square', as the Register

Page 74 of 162

Alice and the Weather Man

20/10/09 1:51 PM

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

Page 75 of 162

Alice and the Weather Man

20/10/09 1:51 PM

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

Page 76 of 162

Alice and the Weather Man

20/10/09 1:51 PM

Australian Government to find a path 3000 kilometres north through the wilderness for the Overland Telegraph, stayed one of his last nights in civilisation in the town's Bushman's Inn. Early in 1857, Charles had a meeting with Samuel McGowan, wunderkind general-superintendent of Victoria's electric telegraph, who was anxious to link all the Australian colonies, preferably the day after tomorrow, but certainly before he turned thirty. He found New South Wales infuriatingly slow, at first, to grasp the breathtaking implications of the new technology. Then someone in Sydney had the bright idea of poaching Charles Todd's assistant in Adelaide, Edward Cracknell; the young Cracknell, who was McGowan's age, had come from England with Todd on the Irene, so he was familiar with the latest thinking. In turn, Cracknell recruited his brother, William, from England to oversee the infant Queensland telegraph. Charles, who was in his early-thirties, found himself the Old Man of a dynamic little intercolonial clique. Eventually, intercolonial jealousies about the route of the Overland Telegraph line would cause a gentlemanly falling out. And Charles, as history shows, would be the big winner. But on that autumn day in 1857, Charles and Samuel shook hands on an arrangement to link Melbourne and Adelaide by telegraph; work on the line began in April and it opened in July, 1858. By then, the New South Welshmen understood the fundamentals of dot-dash and had joined to form a southeastern Australian triangle. McGowan was feeling exceedingly confident. He had, after all, linked Ballarat to Melbourne by telegraph in 1856, cleverly timing the first message to arrive in the goldfields city on 3rd December, the second anniversary of the bloody Eureka rebellion, costing the lives of 30 miners and five British soldiers. A passing, sympathetic reference to the rebels in the first message went some way to assuage the simmering feelings of resentment in the city. So McGowan took ship to Hobart late in 1858 to discuss with the government the possibility of joining the island of Tasmania, recently a penal colony with the grim name of Van Diemens Land, to the rest of Australia. The Tasmanians were delighted, particularly since the gold-bloated Victorians were paying. This time, the cocky McGowan's luck ran out. The cable was to run from Cape Otway, the Australian mainland's second most southerly point, to King Island, then to Three Hummock Island, and finally to Stanley Head, a distance of 140 nautical miles. It would be only second in length to the Black Sea cable, laid during the recent Crimean War. But McGowan was not aware that nautical activities in Bass Strait are often cursed. Mariners called the 130km of water between Cape Otway and King Island the 'Eye of the Needle' and they did not always thread it. Before the lighthouse on Cape Otway was built in 1848, there were two shipwrecks, in particular, etched into the Victorian-Tasmanian mind. In 1835, the convict ship, Neva, bound for Sydney with 150 Irish women and their 55 children, foundered on a reef off the northern tip of King Island. Twenty survived. Ten years later, the big sailing vessel, Cataraqui, carrying 362 free immigrants from the English Midlands, two doctors and a

Page 77 of 162

Alice and the Weather Man

20/10/09 1:51 PM

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 grimlynamed 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-MelLa). 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

Page 78 of 162

Alice and the Weather Man

20/10/09 1:51 PM

of the colony's revered founding fathers of '36. George and his brother, Hurtle, were accompanying three of their racehorses on the Admella. How long, these men of influence, asked Charles, would it take to install a telegraph to Cape Northumberland, the colony's most southerly tip, so such a disaster might be averted in the future? Not long at all, Charles replied. Cape Northumberland went online. And that was a jolly good thing, too, because Mount Gambier telegraph station, the nearest to the Cape, was completely flattened on 5th October, 1897, by an earthquake which also injured fifty people.

16. Charles, the expert Weather Man 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.'

Page 79 of 162

Alice and the Weather Man

20/10/09 1:51 PM

The bold project was the first aeronautical expedition by the pair; it was deemed a failure. The ascent was made in disarray after torrential rain tore a hole in the balloon and enveloped our heroes in escaping hydrogen. Somehow, they wobbled to 17,000 feet (1500 feet higher than Mont Blanc(!) they would say) and descended to earth in four or five minutes, landing in a vineyard near Lagny, 23km east of Paris, where they were discovered by startled peasants holding on to a tree by their arms and legs 'thus attempting to stop the horizontal advance of the car'. On a second attempt a month later, they achieved 21,000 feet 'from which they could see the blue of heaven' and record a temperature of minus 39C. All of this was heady stuff to the forty-year-old Glaisher, a founder of the British Meteorogical Society. He was one of the world's pioneers in research into the Dew Point Temperatures (indicating the amount of moisture in the air; i.e. humid and sticky at Dew Point 65). Alas, we can only speculate on whether he discussed the possibility with Charles of emulating the feats of the intrepid Frenchmen. Glaisher had to wait impatiently until 1862, when he was fifty-two (and should have known better). The British Association for the Advancement of Science resolve to sponsor a series of flights to study the upper atmosphere. Glaisher made the first on 17th July, 1862, with a veteran balloonist, Henry Coxwell, They achieved 26,177 feet without oxygen and drifted sedately to earth. On 5th September, at Wolverhampton, in the West Midlands, they ascended again in their wicker basket, tastefully dressed as if for a day in the Dickensian woollen mill office: jacket, tie, stiff collar. And what a Boy's Own drama it turned out to be! Had it not been for Coxwell's cool bravery, they might be drifting still through endless space, pieces of heavenly, frozen Victoriana. Accounts of the highest voyage in the world would certainly have reached Charles and Alice. He might have cried, 'Oh, what adventure!' and she would have thought, 'Thank goodness, I saved him from this madness.' 'Our ascent had been delayed owing the unfavourable state of the weather,' Glaisher wrote later. 'It commenced at three minutes past one pm, the temperature of the air being 59ºF, and the dew point 48º. At the height of one mile, the temperature was 41º and the dew point 38º. Shortly afterwards, clouds were entered of about 1100 feet in thickness. I tried to take a view of the surface with the camera, but the balloon was ascending too rapidly and spiralling too quickly to allow me to do so. The height of two miles was reached at twenty-one minutes past one. The temperature of the air had fallen to 32º and the dew point to 26º. The third mile was passed at twenty-eight minutes past one, with an air temperature of 18º, and a dew point of 13º. The fourth mile was passed at thirtynine minutes past one, with an air temperature of eight degrees and a dew point of minus six degrees; and the fifth mile about ten minutes later with an air temperature minus five degrees and a dew point minus 36º. 'Up to this time, I had experienced no particular

Page 80 of 162

Alice and the Weather Man

20/10/09 1:51 PM

inconvenience. Then, at the height of 26,000 feet, I could not see the fine column of the mercury in the tube; then the fine divisions on the scale of the instrument became invisible. At that time, I asked Mr Coxwell to help me read the instruments, as I experienced a difficulty in seeing them. In consequence of the rotary movement of the balloon, which had continued without ceasing since the earth was left, the valve line had become twisted, and he had to leave the car (basket) and to mount into the rig above to adjust it. At that time, I had no suspicion of other than temporary inconvenience in seeing. Shortly afterwards, I laid my arm upon the table, possessed of its full vigour; but directly after, being desirous of using it, I found it powerless,' Glaisher continued. 'It must have lost its power momentarily. I then tried to move the other arm, but found it powerless also; I tried to shake myself, and succeeded in shaking my body. I seemed to have no legs. I could only shake my body; I then looked at the barometer, and whilst I was doing so my head fell on my left shoulder. I struggled and shook my body again, but could not move my arms. I got my head upright, but for an instant only, when it fell on my right shoulder; I then fell backwards, my back was resting against the side of the car, and my head on its edge. in that position, my eyes were directed to Mr Coxwell in the ring ...' And do you know what that heroic rotter Coxwell did? He started to nag the jibbering heap that was James Glaisher about doing his meteorological observations! While powerless, Glaisher heard the words, 'temperature' and 'observation'! He heard Coxwell said, 'Do try, do it now', so he roused himself and said, 'I have been insensible' and Coxwell replied, 'Yes, and I, too, very nearly'. Coxwell announced that he had lost the use of his hands; Glaisher noted they were quite black, so he poured some brandy over them. Coxwell revealed that he had pulled the cord with his teeth (having no hands) to release the gas. They were now plunging towards earth, but eventually came a soft landing near Brown Clee Hill, in Shropshire, at nearly 2000 feet, the highest point in the county, about 40km west of their departure point. And then they had to walk 15km to find an inn for the night ... where none of the rural patrons probably believed their story, anyway. Rubbish, they would have said, and turned away to play shove ha'penny. Charles Todd didn't have any inclination for such space frolics, despite Alice's unspoken misgivings. Oh, he had access to the latest European balloon technology: Charles Coppin, Australia's greatest theatrical entrepreneur, had imported several, with accompanying daring aeronauts, for his Cremorne Gardens extravaganza on the Yarra River at Richmond, in gold-feverish Melbourne. It was modelled on the Vauxhall Gardens, in London, and was the place for successful diggers down from the goldfields, and their 'diggeresses', willing female friends they had just made, to go a-dancing the polka and generally throw nuggets around. Anyway, balloons had a bad press in the Australian colonies. A balloon ascent in the Sydney Domain ended in tragedy: an out-of-control balloon commanded by a French showman, Pierre Maigre, in 1851, careered out of control a metre or so above the

Page 81 of 162

Alice and the Weather Man

20/10/09 1:51 PM

ground and killed a paying passenger, Thomas Downes. On the other hand, Maigre only lost his hat. In another flight in 1859, a balloon ascended from the Sydney GPO at dusk, but landed messily in a paddock at the Haymarket, a few hundred metres away, spewing leaking coal gas. Some onlookers suffered minor injuries, but it was considered a success by NSW standards. Charles Todd read of these events and decided his future was on terra firma.

17. ... Terror Australis, that's what Stuart found ... On that Tuesday morning, 25th June, 1861, Charles Todd's friend and favourite explorer, John McDouall Stuart, was 2200km northnorthwest of Adelaide, on a spinifex and ironstone plain where 'scarcely a blade of grass to be seen'. He had left his main party behind at Tomkinson Creek (which crosses the Stuart Highway 35km south of the Renner Springs roadhouse), and was making a small reconnaissance; he was about to fail in his second attempt to cross the continent from Adelaide in the south to the empty (of white men) tropical coast somewhere near the present site of Darwin, Australia's northern capital. His immediate prospects were dim, though exceedingly better than those of William John Wills, lying in his wurley, 1500km southeast. At the end of the day, he sat beside his campfire while his three men busied themselves caring for their ten horses. They were south of Newcastle Waters, on hostile terrain Stuart named Sturt's Plain, after his exploring mentor, and still 600km south of the coast. 'The country travelled through today is bad, red sandy light soil, covered with spinifex, slightly undulating and having iron gravel on it,' he wrote in his journal of the fifty kilometres they had just traversed. ' Scarcely a blade of grass to be seen. Some gum trees, and a low scrub of different sorts. I seem to have got to the south of a dense forest, but into a poorer country. Not a drop of water or a watercourse have we seen since we left Tomkinson Creek. 'We have crossed two or three rises of ironstone gravel. Not having the dense forest to tear through has induced me to go on all day in the hope of meeting with a change, but at the end of the day there seems as little likelihood as when we first came upon it, and it may continue to the river (Roper, 40km north). I am again forced to return disappointed. There is no hope of making the river now, it must be done from Newcastle Waters with wells. I wish that I had twelve months' provisions and convenience for carrying water. I should then be enabled to do it.' John McDouall Stuart was a brave explorer, but not a reckless one. He returned to Tomkinson Creek, gathered the rest of his men, and attempted to make it to the Gulf of Carpentaria coast, more to the northeast, through thick, clothes-ripping, skin-tearing bush, fatiguing on horse and man. On 10th July, 1861, while searching for a missing horse, one of his men, Wall, encountered some aborigines who drove him off with boomerangs. The horse

Page 82 of 162

Alice and the Weather Man

20/10/09 1:51 PM

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 SurveyorGeneral. 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 recentlydeceased 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

Page 83 of 162

Alice and the Weather Man

20/10/09 1:51 PM

married Frances Mary Smith at the Anglican Christ Church, North Adelaide, on 10th December, 1851, a few months after he arrived from Sydney. They had nine children, but Frances took an overdose of sleeping pills while on a visit to Bristol, England, on 8th April, 1870. In Adelaide, Goyder married Ellen Priscilla Smith, her sister, who had cared for the motherless brood. They subsequently had a son and twin daughters. In England, such a marriage was a violation of Anglican canon law (it was considered almost incestuous) and was not made legal under civil law until 1907 under the Deceased Wife's Sister's Marriage Act. The second Goyder marriage brought inevitable collision with the Anglican Bishop of Adelaide, August Short, a racist bigot who believed, mistakenly, that he was the moral arbiter for this free colony in the New World. But all these dramas were in the future for Goyder when he met Stuart, Todd and their benevolent patron, Governor Sir Richard MacDonnell at Government House in the spring of 1861. The four were all committed to winning the Overland Telegraph line for South Australia. Adelaide would become the communications hub of Australia. The plan seemed simple: Stuart would leave before the end of the year with a powerful expedition and make the final breakthrough to the north coast at Van Diemens Bay; South Australia would thus be entitled to annex the unclaimed Northern Territory; Goyder would follow by sea and survey the future site of Darwin; Todd would oversee the building of the Telegraph. It would all depend, MacDonnell might have reminded them, on Britain bringing the cable to Australia's doorstep. Sometimes, the three might have met (without the Governor) at Charles Todd's Observatory on West Terrace. Alice would invite them to the residence for tea and cakes. George Goyder could not take up her kind invitation, he apologised, he had to hasten home to his wife, Frances, and his growing family; sometimes it all seemed too much for Frances, he murmured. But Stuart, who was a bachelor in his mid-forties, was never in a hurry to return to his lodgings. 'Why, thank you, Mrs Todd!' he'd say in his Lowlands burr. Alice heard he drank whisky. But she could never smell it. She'd heard a man who'd been on an exploration with him in 1855 relate the story of Stuart advising, 'Pick some green leaves and suck them, laddie, and that's as good as a drink.' Perhaps he'd sucked some gum leaves of the Grey Box species in the park before coming to the Observatory. 'I hear you came from Dysart, on the Firth of Forth, Mr Stuart?' Alice enquired in her charming Cambridgeshire lilt. 'Aye, ma'am, right across the water from Edinburgh.' 'And I heard there were such sad reasons for your coming to South Australia?' 'Aye, ma'am.' He'd repeated this story so many times since he landed in 1839 he was beginning to believe it. 'Aye, I was engaged to wed a wee lassie, but when I turned the corner one day, I found her embracing her cousin, my friend, I thought he was. I was so heart-broken I booked a passage on the maiden voyage of the Indus and sailed from Dundee on 13th September, 1838.' 'How tragic!'

Page 84 of 162

Alice and the Weather Man

20/10/09 1:51 PM

'Not really. It turned out she was only giving a farewell peck to her cousin who was migrating to South Australia, too.' That was John McDouall Stuart's story, anyhow. He was the youngest of nine children (six survived infancy) of Captain William Stuart, a retired army officer, and his wife, Mary McDouall. Stuart was born on 7th September, 1815, in Dysart, a village now absorbed into Kirkcaldy, in a 17th century house in Rectory Lane which now houses a collection of his Australian memorabilia. The village can be distinguished today by St Serf's Tower, the remains of an ancient church named after an Irish priest who converted the heathen Picts. Stuart played on the nearby cliffs while his father's men scanned the shore from the tower for smugglers, or listened at night for muffled oars. Dysart was an important port for the maritime trade with the Netherlands and his father was in charge of Customs, but both he and his wife died when he was in his early teens and Stuart and his siblings were cared for by relatives. They sent John to the Scottish Naval and Military Academy across the Firth of Forth in Edinburgh and he graduated as a civil engineer. After his aforementioned unmentionable affaire de coeur casse (as Stuart might have confided to Alice, who spoke French, modestly), the 23-year-old arrived in Adelaide with seventy-two other hopefuls on 21st January, 1839, when the settlement had 5000 souls living in 620 houses. The Port Phillip Patriot, a newspaper in the neighbouring buccaneer town of Melbourne, swindled from the aboriginal inhabitants by the sons of convicts, sent a reporter around by sea later that year and he wrote (with a curl of the lip): 'Melbourne is entirely destitute of half-swells, loungers etc. so prevalent in Adelaide nor is there any nonsensical party spirit with cavilling for office by a few individuals sent out under the patronage of titled men, and whose salaries will neither find them in shoes to tramp their barren wastes, nor turn their pretty bright button threadbare coats into new ones.' Well, despite insults from the shanty town across the plains, 600km southeast, Stuart did have shoes to tramp the barren wastes and would soon do so. Charles Todd and George Goyder were both aged twelve and both living in London when John McDouall Stuart set foot in South Australia on 21st January 1839. Their birth dates were only thirteen days apart - George on 24th June, 1826 and Charles on 7th July. Earlier in their childhood, they had lived fairly close, George in Westminster and Charles in Islington. But by 1830, the toddler Charles had moved down the Thames to Greenwich with his family and George was about to shift to Glasgow with his. They weren't to meet until Adelaide in 1855. Charles had a cheerful, but odd sort of boyhood; George's was cheerful, too, but much, much odder. George, was one of eight children of David George Goyder, a Swedenborgian Church minister and his wife, Sarah. The Swedenborgian Church has been described as 'a community of faith based on the Bible as illuminated by the spiritual teaching of Emanuel Swedenborg (1688-1772)': the founder died in Stockholm, but his message found its way to London fifteen years later. Apart from his spiritual role, Goyder Senior also billed himself as a

Page 85 of 162

Alice and the Weather Man

20/10/09 1:51 PM

'physician' by which he meant he was a phrenologist, or a man who studies the bumps on one's head to determine the character within. In 1857, he published My Battle for Life: The Autobiography of A Phrenologist, which has baffled scholars because the original Battle for Life was the title of an obscure Dickens story published in 1846. Hurriedly, young George Goyder (the name is a version of the Welsh Gwydyr, or Gwydir, and has been traced to the Celtic Coedrwr) studied surveying in Glasgow before rushing to Sydney to join his sister in 1848. Once there, he would have learned that there was a river in northern NSW, named the Gwydir by the explorer Allan Cunningham in 1827 after the Lord High Chamberlain to George IV, Lord Gwydir; and he might have learned the word 'Gwydir' was also local aboriginal for 'river with red banks'. Spooky, wasn't it? Hastily, he packed his bags once more sailed another 1500km around the coast to Adelaide in 1851. At that very time, back in England, Charles Todd was enjoying the unexpected patronage of the Astronomer Royal, George Biddell Airy. The circumstances of the Todd family's move from inner suburban Islington to far outer suburban Greenwich, on the south bank of the Thames, had been very fortuitous for Charles' future, indeed. The family escaped from Islington just in time; the railway brought about the industrialisation of the district from the 1840s, and the gentry (the Todd tea dealer's favourite customers) moved to healthier climes in London's west. Fates had, somehow, conspired to bring this odd trio together.

18. A Wee Scot washes in northern waters! 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

Page 86 of 162

Alice and the Weather Man

20/10/09 1:51 PM

Wills featured earlier in this narrative: his stepfather was George Howe, opportunist intellectual ex-convict editor of the Sydney Gazette who was floored by that divinely-inspired fireball at the end of Chapter Two. Horatio's mother, Sarah, desirable widow of the convict-turned-tycoon Edward Wills, married George Howe on little Horatio's first birthday on 5th October, 1812. Horatio went on to become a wealthy pastoralist in Victoria and fathered Thomas Wentworth Wills, one of the inventors of Australian Rules Football, no less! Horatio's great land hunger caused him to be in central Queensland in October, 1861, just as Stuart was about to conquer the Centre. Wills leased a sheep station, Cullinlaringo, near the present town of Emerald and just south of the Tropic of Capricorn. Early in 1861, he, Tom and twenty-five of their stockmen, servants and their families took ship from Geelong to Sydney, where they set out overland for Queensland, buying stock on the way. By the time they reached Rockhampton, their extravagant caravan was accompanied by 10,000 sheep. Awestruck aborigines followed them 400km west until they reached the new station, where the Europeans began building stockyards and huts. On that warm afternoon, as the whole white establishment followed Wills' routine of taking an afternoon rest, some of the aborigines struck with tomahawks and nulla nullas. Only three men, Tom Wills and two stockmen, were absent from the camp, purchasing supplies several hours ride to the east. Horatio Wills was one of the first to die; the others followed in minutes and the aborigines escaped with their plunder. Tom returned to the scene; it is said he never recovered from the shock which led to his alcoholism and suicide in Melbourne on 3rd May, 1880 (thankfully, he'd already invented Aussie Rules with his cousin, Henry Harrison, before the slaughter). The rest of Horatio's family, including his wife, Elizabeth, were safely in Victoria during the massacre; his heirs continued to hold Cullinlaringo until most of the station was submerged under Fairbairn Dam in 1972. It was not an auspicious time to be traipsing around the Outback. Burke and Wills had recently died at Cooper's Creek and people dispatched to find them were having frightful difficulties. The day after the Cullinlaringo massacre, a search party under John McKinlay, sent by the South Australian Government, was battling away (oblivious of the murder and mayhem to the northeast). A team member, John Davis wrote on 18th October, 1861, at Lake Buchanan, 700km north-northeast of Adelaide: 'The weather is very sultry and close. Mr McKinlay says there will be a storm. About 7pm, it was as black as midnight; at 9pm a regular westerly gale. All hands turned out; but our little canvas camp was soon flying in all directions. The tents we tried to peg down as fast as a peg drew, but all to no use, they were soon blown down; then came lightning and thunder, and during the flashes could be descried hats, trousers, gaiters, shirts, taking their private airing by themselves, and McKinlay holding on to his tent pole, "There go my trousers!" "There goes my hat!" sings out another, and so on. Had I the pencil of 'Crowquill' (contemporary

Page 87 of 162

Alice and the Weather Man

20/10/09 1:51 PM

English Punch cartoon satirist, 'Alfred Crowquill', real name Alfred Forrester, 1804-72) or the well-known "George" (not so wellknown?) might scratch that scene; and although shivering with cold and wet we could not help laughing, and the picture was too ludicrous. It soon came to an end, then we tried to settle ourselves somehow or other, but, oh, so wet!' Notwithstanding all the Unknown Perils of Terror Australia awaiting, a confident crowd gathered at the North Adelaide compound of South Australia's pre-eminent pioneer, James Chambers and his wife, Catherine, in the mid-morning of 25th October, 1861. They were there to farewell the 'South Australian Great Northern Expedition', led by the forty-six-year-old John McDouall Stuart. The benevolent James Chambers, originally a Surrey farmer, and his partner, another entrepreneurial pastoralist and copper mine owner, the German immigrant William Finke, were Stuart's keenest patrons in the colony. Two of Chambers' unmarried daughters, Catherine and Anna, who'd inherited their mother's broad, open features and sturdy figures, had embroidered a Union Jack for Stuart to unfurl when he reached the Top End (one of the exploring party, William Billiatt, kept a chunk of the makeshift flagpole until the day he died sixty years later) The expedition's men were hand-picked by Stuart and Chambers from scores of aspirants: William Kekwick, aged thirtyseven, the deputy, and Francis Thring, twenty-four, the number three, had explored with Stuart before; the rest were aged around twenty, the sons of pioneers of the late-1830s. There was James Frew Jr, son of an immigrant Scots landowner; Pat Auld Jr, whose vintner father was about to open the first South Australian wine outlet in London; William Billiatt, who became a beloved headmaster and died in 1919, the last of the explorers. There was the tall, quiet Stephen King, a stockman whose sister, Annie, caught the eye of William Billiatt and became his wife of fifty or so years. John McGorrerey was the shoeing blacksmith and Heath Nash was another stockman. One man, Jeffries, was dismissed by Stuart before Christmas for insubordination, and another, Woodforde, turned back early in February after repeated clashes with the leader. Sadly, James Chambers died, aged only fifty-one, on 4th August, 1862. He did not hear news of the expedition's triumph. William Finke, a quiet, generous man, died in 1864, having lived to see Northern Australia annexed to South Australia. The odd man out in the expeditionary party was not chosen by Stuart: in fact, Stuart objected to his presence on the team, but was overruled, in good humour, by the Governor, Sir Richard MacDonnell. He was Frederick Waterhouse, aged forty-six like Stuart, a naturalist and first curator of the South Australian Museum. He was presented with the opportunity, as the colony's first museum curator, to examine first hand the creatures of the world's oldest continent in an age of insatiable scientific curiosity! Waterhouse was a pepper-and-salt thickly-bearded, kindly sort of demurring chap; the Wee Scot, who was all Action Man, would have seen him, in 21st century terms, as a bit of a nerd. Waterhouse's chatter irritated Stuart and he collected

Page 88 of 162

Alice and the Weather Man

20/10/09 1:51 PM

beetles in match boxes, the sort of geeky things only desperately frustrated mid-19th century spinsters were supposed to do. Bronte stuff. Stuart gave him menial tasks at first, chasing rabbits down burrows (except there were only wombat holes). Waterhouse took all this in good humour: he'd been a leading zoologist at the British Museum and suspected, accurately, that Stuart didn't want him on the trip because he might cut into the post-expedition London publishing possibilities. It was an old Australian tradition: several of the First Fleet officers landed in 1788 with English publishing contracts stuffed in their pockets. So Waterhouse kept his sketches secret and, after a while, Stuart calmed down and the two older men became good friends. Anyway, as they feast in that great Valhalla for old explorers, Waterhouse can claim the last laugh: his great-great grandson turned out to be the Adelaide-born NASA astronaut, Dr Andy Thomas, who flies across Stuart's desert route. Whoosh! Just like that! Charles Todd was at the lunch, but Alice sent her apologies: she was terribly busy packing for first her trip back Home to England on the Irene (of course!) with the charming Captain David Bruce who'd been skipper in 1855 when she and Charles (and their maid, Poor Eliza) first came to the colony. Alice was taking their eldest child, Elizabeth, back to Cambridge to see her family and would return (on the Irene, of course) to South Australia; it was nearly a year in which she would not get pregnant, a prospect to be savoured. Oh, how she envied the wives of long-distance explorers! Alice and Elizabeth were to sail on 19th December. Sadly, this was where they were so disadvantaged living in a remote corner of the globe, unaware of latest developments in the civilised world: Prince Albert, Our Beloved Consort, died of typhoid at Windsor Castle on 14th December, and when Alice and Elizabeth arrived in England EVERYONE was wearing black. Except them, for goodness sake. Oh, for a colonial telegraph link! Charles Todd might have found himself seated at lunch next to Pat Auld Snr, tucking into steaming plates of lamb and vegetables. The elder Auld had brought his family to South Australia in 1842 from Wigtown, in southwest Scotland and encouraged young Pat to take up a cadetship in surveying with the South Australian Government. Charles might have said, politely: 'I see your son is going with the expedition.' And Auld would have replied: 'Aye, he's to be Mr Stuart's personal assistant.' Auld didn't refer to Stuart as the 'Wee Scot' because he was an even Wee-er Scot. Charles could have changed the subject to another matter of vital concern to South Australians: 'I believe you are making great progress with your wine exporting plans?' Auld might have tapped him on the arm and said; 'It's going famously! The British Government have abolished preferential duties favouring Cape wines from South Africa, and so my Auldana Vineyard here is opening the first Australian Wine Company (later the Emu Wine Company) in London.' Charles, who was well-informed on such matters, probably said: 'The opportunities for overseas traders improved steadily since they abolished the Corn Laws way back in '46.' And Auld may have remarked: 'Well, it'll be easier to trade

Page 89 of 162

Alice and the Weather Man

20/10/09 1:51 PM

when we have your electric telegraph to England, laddie!' Hugh Dennison, the jovial, wheeling and dealing politician and businessman probably dropped in briefly; he bought the Chambers house after James died in 1862 and eventually built a grand house, reminiscent of a Rhine castle, with a tower meant to inspire thoughts of the Queen of the Elves combing her locks, and other North Adelaide fantasies. Mysteriously, he named it 'Stahlheim'. Someone who desperately wanted to be there was young John Langdon Bonython, who was aged only thirteen at the time, around the corner at The Brougham School, who would start as a boy reporter on the Adelaide Advertiser in 1864, rise to become its multi-millionaire proprietor ... and buy the Rhine castle folly from Dennison and make it his family home until his death in 1939! He re-named it 'Carclew', after the family home in Cornwall, and that's the name it bears today as the headquarters of the South Australian Youth Arts Centre, and one of the happiest places in the State. But going back to 25th October, 1861 ... the members of the expedition rode out from the Chambers compound through the northwest gate (still standing) and began the slow trek northwest to the Flinders Ranges and their marshalling point at Chambers Creek to the north. Stuart was not with them. He injured a hand in an accident with a horse and stayed in Adelaide for five weeks of treatment. One young man who wasn't there to see them go, but might have considered himself unlucky not to be among them was William Christie Gosse, a 19-year-old cadet surveyor of gentle temperament. He was away surveying in the northeast. But his moment came on 19th July, 1873, when the South Australian Government sent him to see what lay 300km southwest of Alice Springs and find a route to Perth ... '... What was my astonishment to find it was one immense rock rising abruptly from the plain ...' He was the white discoverer of Ayers Rock. Stuart caught up with expedition at Moolooloo Station, west of the Flinders Ranges on Friday, 20th December. Everyone was worried about horses; they kept straying and there was concern that some were getting 'knocked up' in the early summer heat. That evening, around the campfire, he told them of news that had reached Adelaide the night they left. The first major land battle of the American Civil War had taken place on 21st June, 1861, at Bull Run, a buggy ride from the American capital, Washington. No less than 30,000 Union soldiers faced 32,000 Confederates and lost! They called the Union's disorderly retreat 'the Great Skedaddle' and even the Washington elite, who'd come out to watch the battle, had to escape in their carriages in great confusion. 'This happened more than four months ago, you say?' someone might have asked. 'Yes, the news only reached Sydney by ship from the States and was passed on by electric telegraph,' Stuart could have replied. 'Ah, if only we had a worldwide telegraph system, sir,' one of the youngsters might have said. He probably didn't, but he might have. On 8th January, 1862, they reached Chambers Creek, a

Page 90 of 162

Alice and the Weather Man

20/10/09 1:51 PM

pleasant nook in a sheltered desert gorge which Stuart had used before as an assembly point before venturing into the barely known country to the north ... 'One of the horses that came with Thring knocked up on the road. Perfectly useless to me,' he recorded in his journal. It was breathlessly hot: about 350km east-southeast, John McKinlay's search party was recording temperatures ranging from 59F to 124F. John Davis wrote on 3rd January: 'I sat in the water (Lake Strangways) yesterday for a long time with only my shirt on, and the consequence is my legs, from the intense heat of the sun, are so burnt I cannot wear any trousers, and feel very unwell. Applied glycerine and they got better. The lake is literally covered with wildfowl.' McKinlay had been told Burke and Wills had been found dead, but was continuing his explorations in the whimsicallynamed 'Lakes District', near Sturt's Stony Desert. By mid-February, the expedition had crossed the 26th latitude, the present Northern Territory-South Australia border and was making due north for the Finke River, which Stuart had named for his friend in 1860. It is, geologically, one of the oldest rivers on the planet. It runs, occasionally, rarely, southeast from Palm Valley 500km to the Simpson Desert. In fact, the Finke was flooding ten years later, in 1871, when overlanders were driving the first sheep to Darwin; it was 400 metres wide, so, hey, those 5000 furry lamb chops just learned to breaststroke! Stuart was noticing some disturbing behaviour among the aboriginal inhabitants. They already knew about white men and their horses; Stuart had passed this way during his unsuccessful attempt in 1860-61. So there would be no repeat of the shock near Lake Torrens on 25th June, 1858, when he became the first European seen by a black man ... 'What he imagined I was, I do not know; but when he turned around and saw me I never beheld a finer picture of astonishment and fear. He was a fine, muscular fellow, about six feet in height, and stood as if riveted to the spot, with his mouth wide open and his eyes staring. I sent our black forward to speak with him, but omitted to tell him to dismount. The terrified native remained motionless, allowing our black to ride within a few yards of him, when, in an instant, he threw down his waddies, and jumped into a mulga bush as high as he could, one foot being about three feet from the ground and the other about two feet higher.' Stuart enjoyed describing the native people caught in a state of confusion, but many aborigines meeting whites for the first time thought they were the ghosts of the dead. On Sunday, 11th February, usually a Sabbath day of rest for men and horses, Stuart wrote: 'Early this morning, the horses started off at full gallop. During the time that Thring was searching for them, he came along five natives armed with boomerangs, concealed behind some bushes, who, on his approaching, ran off at full speed across the sandhills. They must have been the cause of the horses going off this morning. About eleven o'clock a.m. all the horses were mustered and found right. 'Monday, 17th February - Marchant's Springs (near Finke River). As Auld was approaching the waterhole, a native was there, who, upon seeing him, called to some others who he saw up some

Page 91 of 162

Alice and the Weather Man

20/10/09 1:51 PM

trees; shortly afterwards, at a little distance down the creek, several native smokes were seen, and one very large one to windward, blowing smoke towards the camp, which made it evident that it was their intention to attack us under the cover of the smoke, but Thring, while looking for the horses, came suddenly upon three of them concealed behind a bush, armed with spears and boomerangs; he did not perceive them until within twelve yards of them,' the journal entry said. 'They immediately jumped up, and one of them threw a boomerang at him, which fortunately missed both him and his horse. He was obliged to use his revolver in self defence. Saddled the horses and proceeded to Polly's Springs in the Finke without any further annoyance from the natives. In the course of the day, we met with numerous native tracks up and down the bed of the Finke. Lat. 25º11'44.' They were ninety kilometres inside Northern Australia, and seventy kilometres west of the Simpson Desert. The Finke was flowing sand, with the intermittent waterholes, shared since time immemorial. Jealously guarded waterholes. On Saturday, 22nd February, they climbed their horses from the uneasy, sheltered comfort of the Finke River bed and headed for the Hugh River, 50km north, a similar sandy watercourse which rises dustily in the red ramparts southeast of Alice Springs and waits patiently to carry off excessive rainfall from the MacDonnell Range east towards the Simpson Desert. That night, having encountered thick mulga scrub and seeing the horses suffering in extreme heat, they made a stockyard of ropes and took shelter from the easterly wind. Next day, Stuart decided not to observe the Sabbath and marched his weary horses and men north; they disturbed a family of aborigines in a creek bed preparing a meal by a small waterhole and, having seen the blacks flee, dug out a decent bloody white fella's dam and watered their horses in the now muddied, stomped and manured, yet precious, waterhole not once, but twice. On Monday, they made the Hugh River. 'All the last purchased horses are failing,' Stuart recorded, 'Latitude 24º21"41'.' Word was spreading among the tribespeople, who made an unconscious practice of living in harmony in this delicate, dry land about the foulsmelling visitors who were permitting their bizarre beasts to defecate over the most cherished places. 'Tuesday, 25th February. - The Hugh, south of James's Range. Proceeded up the creek, and found water at the south entrance of the gorge of the Hugh, but on arriving at the waterhole where on our last trip we saw our spitting friend (an angry old aboriginal spat at them when Stuart used the same waterhole on 6th March, 1861!) to our great disappointment we found no water. Proceeded on through the gorge; when about halfway, the natives set fire to the grass and dry wood across the creek, which caused a dense smoke to blow in our faces,' Stuart recorded. 'I had the party prepared for an attack. After passing through the smoke and fire, three natives made their appearance about twenty five yards off on the hillside, armed with spears and shields, and bidding us defiance by placing the spears in the

Page 92 of 162

Alice and the Weather Man

20/10/09 1:51 PM

woomeras, and yelling out at the highest pitch of their voices. I ordered Auld to dismount and fire a shot a little distance on one side of them, to let them know what distance our weapons carried. The ball struck the rock pointed out to him to aim at and stopped their yelling, but seemed to have no other effect. I again ordered him to fire at the rock on which the middle one of the three was standing; the shot was a good one, and the ball struck the desired spot, which immediately had the effect of sending them all off at full speed, his journal continued, 'I then proceeded to the conglomerate rock, a mile and a half through the gorge, where we found plenty of water and camped. The weak horses are very much knocked up. We have neither seen nor heard any more of our hostile friends. Wind southeast. Latitude 24º13'41.' Auld developed a negative attitude towards the blacks. In 1864, while a member of a party led by South Australia's first Resident of Northern Australia, Boyle Finniss, he was charged with murdering an aboriginal man: the first white to face such a charge in the colony. He was acquitted only after a long trial. Stuart and his party crossed the MacDonnell Range on 1st March, 1862, at the cliff known as Brinkleys Bluff, 50km west of the present town of Alice Springs, which was yet to be discovered, let alone named; the nearest thing to an 'Alice's Springs' was Anna's Reservoir, named after the buxom Anna Chambers, on Stuart's previous trip. And that's where Stuart headed next, north through 100 kilometres of hard, whipping scrub. On 5th March, they had threatening encounter with another tribe ... 'On crossing the plains under Mount Hay, we came suddenly on three natives armed with long spears and shields; they did not observe us until we were within two hundred yards of them, when they ran off to a belt of scrub near the foot of Mount Hay. 'We proceeded on a short distance and found some rainwater in a creek; while watering the horses, the three natives again appeared, accompanied by four others, and made signs of hostility, by yelling and shaking their spears at us, and performing other threatening antics while widely separating themselves into a half-circle. I had the party prepared to receive an attack, but when they saw us stationary, they approached no nearer. I ordered some of the party to fire close to them, to show that we could injure them at a long distance if they continued to annoy us; they did not seem at all surprised at the report of the rifles, nor the whizzing of the balls near them, but still remained in a threatening attitude; with the aid of the telescope, we could perceive a number of others concealed in the belt of scrub,' Stuart wrote. 'They all seemed fine muscular men - a tall one in particular with a very long spear (upwards of twelve feet) and a large shield, which he seemed very anxious to use if he could have got within distance. We crossed the creek, and had proceeded a short distance across the plain, when they again came running towards us, apparently determined to attack; they were received with a discharge of rifles, which caused them to retire and keep at a respectful distance. Having already wasted too much time with

Page 93 of 162

Alice and the Weather Man

20/10/09 1:51 PM

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

Page 94 of 162

Alice and the Weather Man

20/10/09 1:51 PM

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 growthpromoting 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

Page 95 of 162

Alice and the Weather Man

20/10/09 1:51 PM

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

Page 96 of 162

Alice and the Weather Man

20/10/09 1:51 PM

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, newlyminted 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

Page 97 of 162

Alice and the Weather Man

20/10/09 1:51 PM

sandy soil, is good for pasturage purposes, in the valley it is of the finest description.' In chivalrously naming the waterways after the Chambers cousins, Stuart has left us a conundrum or two: Fanny's Creek seems to have evaporated, goodness knows why, and Katherine's Creek (which became the river) was named after, well, Catherine ... but the name has stuck and is now a fine river, a world-famous gorge and a town of more than 6000 people, the third largest in the Northern Territory. And that 'skull of a small alligator'? Freshwater crocodiles are not usually aggressive, but their macho saltwater comrades have been found 300km inland. Charles Todd would have to be forewarned before he sent crews in there to erect his whistling wire. Stuart's expedition was less than 250km due south of their objective, Van Diemens Gulf. Northwest was the Beagle Gulf, and the site of the future city of Darwin, named in 1839 by Beagle's captain, John Clements Wickham and his second-in-command, John Lort Stokes, after the evolutionist Charles Darwin, a passenger on an earlier circumnavigation by the Beagle. West was Joseph Bonaparte Gulf, discovered in 1803 by the French navigator Nicholas Baudin, who honoured Napoleon Bonaparte's eldest brother. East was the Gulf of Carpentaria, named in 1623 by the Dutchman Jan Carstenszoon after Pieter de Carpentier, Governor of the Dutch East Indies. And coming up the middle was the Wee Scot who'd one day have the highway up the centre bearing his name! Think! He might become the most applauded Scottish long-range explorer since Alexander MacKenzie crossed Canada in 1793! Even more famous than David Livingstone in Darkest Africa! Unless some other explorer stole his thunder, of course ... The party crossed the Katherine early on 9th July, but Stuart suddenly felt unwell, and they camped after just 20km. Next day, he had recovered and they pressed on ... 'Tuesday, 15th July. Billiatt's Springs. I have named these springs in token of my approbation of his thoughtful, generous and unselfish conduct throughout the expedition' ... the plethora of landmarks meant Stuart began to exhaust his supply of names: Priscilla Chambers, who had a creek in South Australia, got another in the Top End at Latitude12º56'54 on 18th July; so, too, did Anna Chambers on the 19th! ... the landscape changed and they were passing clumps of bamboo ...' Thursday, 24th July - I did not inform any of the party, except Thring or Auld that I was so near the sea, as I wished to give them a surprise on reaching it ... '...they struggled on through twisted scrub ... ' ...'Thring, who rode in advance of me called out, "The Sea!" which so took them all by surprise, and were so astonished, that he had to repeat the call before they fully understood what was meant. Hearing which they gave three long a hearty cheers. The beach is covered with a soft blue mud; it being ebb tide. I could see some distance, found it would be impossible for me to take the horses along it; therefore I kept them where I had halted them, and allowed half the party to come on to the beach

Page 98 of 162

Alice and the Weather Man

20/10/09 1:51 PM

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 wellsatisfied, 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

Page 99 of 162

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!

19. 1860s: Money Men and the first Global Net John Pender, financier in 1870 of the £666,000 Singapore-Australia telegraph, was born into modest circumstances at Dumbarton, on the Clyde, on 10th September, 1816. His birthplace in the west was across the pinched waist of Scotland from Dysart, on the Firth of Forth, where John McDouall Stuart was a squalling one-year-old. Indeed, that year, 1816, was a good one for Australia. On 30th December, another Scot, Governor Lachlan Macquarie, in Sydney, sneaked the word 'Australia' into his official journal ...'I talked to Secretary Campbell this day, for the first time, on the important subject of his collecting the necessary materials and information for writing a correct and impartial history of New South Wales, alias Australia ...' Australia. Matthew Flinders wanted to use the word, but was stymied by Joseph Banks. But Macquarie would quietly triumph. Australia. Not New South Wales, or Botany Bay, or Van Diemans Land. Australia. A name free of the dreaded convict taint. In fact, much was made of that taint in the Old Country, but it was all but forgotten in most colonial society in the winter/ summer of 1862 as John McDouall Stuart made his way, painfully, home to Adelaide, and John Pender, in his warehouse in Manchester, plotted a worldwide electric telegraph grid with Australia as a prized destination. The humble lad Pender had grown into a multi-millionaire. Leaving Glasgow High School, he went to work for a local textile factory. By the age of twenty-one, he was manager, so he married his childhood sweetheart, Marian Cairns, and she was promptly with child. Sadly, she died in 1841 giving birth to their son, James. Heartbroken, John Pender left baby James in the care of relatives and went to Manchester where he made his pile in the cotton trade. And it got better ... Indeed, many ambitious small businessmen have been known to dribble with envy on reading of the foundations of the Pender family fortune and how it contributed to the England-Australia telegraph link. The financial complexities aren't well known, but a brief unravelling proves rewarding. The story began in the mid-18th century when a nouveau riche money-

Page 100 of 162

Alice and the Weather Man

20/10/09 1:51 PM

grubber, William Denison, sought a stately house, Ossington, to match his wealth. (Our narrator is Cornelius Brown, the amiable lateVictorian [1852-1907] journalist and historian in a series in the Nottinghamshire Guardian, 1889): 'The owners (of the manor) in 1753 were four heiresses, and these ladies sold Ossington to Mr William Denison, an opulent merchant of Leeds, who took up his abode there, and was High Sheriff of the county in 1779. Mr Denison, by exercise of great diligence and sagacity, accumulated a large fortune, amounting, it is said, to three-quarters of a million. One of the successful enterprises attributed to him in several local publications may be thus described: When the great earthquake took place at Lisbon (1755), swallowing up large parts of the city, many of the inhabitants who escaped with their lives were left almost destitute of provisions and other necessaries. 'Mr Denison happened to have at that time a ship heavily laden with such goods as the Lisbon people stood urgently in need of; and the captain of the vessel, who had heard of the calamity, sailed at once for the unlucky city, arriving there in advance of any other ship. The result was a ready sale at high prices, and the realisation of a profit which has been stated to be the equivalent to a large fortune. That this is not a mere tradition is assumed from the fact that when Mr Denison died at Bath, after discharging his public duties faithfully and well, the monument erected to him in Ossington Church consisted of a full-length marble figure, standing on a pedestal, having a scroll in his hands, and underneath him the representation of a ship unloading in the port of Lisbon.' There are some concerned people who might consider the Anglican layman William Denison's monument, while a tribute to the virtues of dynamic enterprise, isn't in the very best of taste against the backdrop of 60,000 and 90,000 corpses from the Great Earthquake and subsequent tsunami on the Catholic All Saints' Day, 1st November, 1755, but, sometimes when opportunity knocks to make an opportunistic killing, it really bangs loudly. After Denison's death in 1782, the estate passed through family members until it reached John Evelyn Denison, who cleverly married Lady Charlotte Cavendish-Bentinck, daughter of the Duke of Portland, no less, who arrived at Ossington Hall, bent double under the weight of her dowry. Lady Charlotte and John Denison, later a respected Speaker of the Commons, didn't have children, but much of their fortune was inherited by a relative, Emma Denison. And this was where the widowed John Pender entered the picture! In 1851, he wooed and won the welcoming Emma Denison. She gladly stowed her fortune in his vaults alongside his and they lived happily ever after. She probably confessed, after they were married, that she was related to the sour, unamused Tory Governor of NSW, Sir William Denison, who had the pretty little Fort Denison built on a rock near today's Sydney Opera House. John Pender would have noted this fact before taking his carriage to his vast three-storey warehouse located, by delicious coincidence, in Portland Street, Manchester. His workers packed cotton products to be distributed

Page 101 of 162

Alice and the Weather Man

20/10/09 1:51 PM

through Britain and Europe while Pender planned breathtaking speculations in his panelled chambers. Speculate to accumulate: that was the slogan of the Industrial Age. His thoughts often turned to the advantages that would be offered by the electric telegraph in the rapidly-changing raw fibres markets, particularly in those dark times when the cotton produce of the U.S. Southern States was all but denied to the mills of northwest England by the Civil War. Pender had speculated millions in 1857 in the formation of the Atlantic Telegraph Company, which planned a submarine telegraph cable to the United States via Ireland and Newfoundland. In the northern summer of 1862, the laying of that cable was proceeding only intermittently, but John Pender was a man of great patience. American oceanographers had identified a vast ocean prairie they named the 'Telegraph Plateau' between the west of Ireland and the North American land mass; this Nullarbor the of icy depths would provide a smooth passage for the cable, eventually. To his east, though his interest was purely curious, John Pender had been receiving telegraphed reports from the Continent that summer of the successful laying of a cable 20km across Lake Constance, Europe's third largest and diplomatically most sensitive: the lake, fed by the Rhine, was bounded by Austria, Switzerland and German states, principally Wurttenberg. The Money Men were gathering and their eyes roamed the world.

20. Stuart's painful north-south homecoming Meanwhile, in the southern winter of 1862, John McDouall Stuart, heading south, had a puzzling encounter with aborigines which seemed to bode ill for Charles Todd's future telegraph parties... 'Sunday, 3rd August. - Kekwick's Large Springs. Last evening, just as the sun was dipping, five natives made their appearance, armed with spears, and came marching up boldly within eighty yards of the camp, where they were met by Mr Kekwick and others of the party who had advanced to meet them; they were all young men, small and very thin.' Stuart wrote. 'Seeing so many approaching them they soon went off. They were all smeared over with burnt grass, charcoal, or some other substance of that description. This morning, shortly after sunrise, the same five again made their appearance. I went up to see what they wanted; saw that they had painted their bodies with white stripes ready for war. As it is my intention to pass peaceably through the different tribes, I endeavoured to make friends with them by showing them we intended them no harm if they will leave us alone. 'One of them had a curious fish spear that he seemed inclined to part with, and I sent Mr Kekwick to get some fish hooks to exchange with him, which he readily did; we then left them. They continuing a longer time than I wished, and gradually approaching nearer to our camp; thinking perhaps they did not really wish to part with the spear, sent Mr Kekwick back with it to them to see if that was what they wanted, and to take the fish hooks from them; but

Page 102 of 162

Alice and the Weather Man

20/10/09 1:51 PM

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

Page 103 of 162

Alice and the Weather Man

20/10/09 1:51 PM

Our brave explorer trod, And traversed o'er again, Before he reached the goal, And cooled his burning brow, And stayed his halting steps Where the northern waters flow. Grim silence reigned supreme, Save alligator's plash, Or sea-mews's shrilly scream, Or ocean's restless dash: Yet flashed that leader's eye' And triumph filled his soul As he heard bird's discordant cry, And saw the water's roll. It was enough to make a grown Scotsman reach for the bottle! Caroline Carleton, South Australia's unofficial Poet Laureate, was only recently widowed when she wrote those emotional verses. She had received acclaim in 1859, when she won a competition sponsored by the Gawler Institute, for Song of Australia ... There is a land where summer skies Are gleaming with a thousand dyes Blending in witching harmonies, in harmonies; And grassy knoll and forest height, Are flushing in the rosy light, And all above in azure bright Australia! (Etc) There is no record of John McDouall Stuart humming the above lyrics (music by Carl Linger, founder of the Adelaide German Leidertafel) as he marched through the wilderness, nor that he knew of her tragic circumstances; both her children died during the 1839 voyage to Australia, her husband breathed his last in 1861, and her South Australian-born son, Charles, died aged twenty-two in 1875. Caroline herself had already passed away the year before, aged fifty-four. She would have sympathised with a fellow immigrant, Sarah Brunskill, who lost both her children between Portsmouth and the Canary Islands in 1838 ... 'I never look at the sea without lamenting our poor, dear children,' she wrote to her mother from Tenerife ... But, it's December, 1862, and we've another future tragedy, John McDouall Stuart, making his painful way slowly to Adelaide. Stuart and the faithful Auld arrived in the metropolis on 17th December and the rest of their weary party joined them for a grand parade through the city streets on 21st December, the same day Melbourne had a public holiday so people could farewell the remains of Robert O'Hara Burke and William John Wills. A great mourning overcame the city of Melbourne, a sense that this marked the end of the Golden Age, but there was a festival feeling in the summery streets of Adelaide. Alice Todd watched the parade with Charles and their children, Charlotte Elizabeth (Lizzie), Charles and Hedley. And, of course, the new addition to their family, Charles' niece, Frances Ann

Page 104 of 162

Alice and the Weather Man

20/10/09 1:51 PM

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.

21. The 'Great Cable Armada' heads east 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

Page 105 of 162

Alice and the Weather Man

20/10/09 1:51 PM

of present-day Pakistan, and overland to India, the brightest jewel in Victoria's Crown. Both the British Government in London and its civil servants in the 'Raj', the new governing body which had assumed power from the East India Company after the Mutiny, were tired of India's telegraphic isolation; a message to England took a month by sea, and many people were still nervously mindful of the appalling tragedy, on both sides, of the Indian Mutiny, or Sepoy Rebellion, or the First War of Independence, depending on your historic viewpoint, in northern and central India in 1857. The Red Sea cable had been commissioned in embarrassed haste by the British Government in 1858, when the events of the Mutiny were still the shocked topic of conversation of Britons, lowliest and loftiest; the mutineers had not discriminated on the basis of class: the British victims had included people of all ranks, particularly women and children. The entrepreneurs, Lionel and Francis Gisborne, won a concession from the Egyptian Government to run an overland cable from Alexandria to Suez and began to lay the cable in 1859, the same year construction of the Suez Canal began (open for navigation, 1869). The Gisborne brothers were Money Men supreme. They scored a fifty year guaranteed divided from the British Government of 4.5 per cent on their stockholders capital of £800,000 - without having to give a guarantee in return that the service would work! The ships of the British firm Newall and Company won the contract from the Gisborne brothers to lay the cable from Suez, 2000km southeast down the Red Sea and east past Aden. Unfortunately, the cable failed because Newalls did not allow enough slack for the Red Sea whose floor they did not survey adequately; they were not prepared for thousands, nay millions, of jagged rocks; it was sadly un-Biblical and certainly unsuitable for the Pharoah's chariots. The whole venture was abandoned, but the Treasury kept paying investors in the Red Sea Telegraph Company £36,000 a year for the next fifty years! Ten years later, in 1870, the British Government laid a successful cable through the Red Sea to India and, ultimately, to Australia. The Persian Gulf invasion fleet assembled at the Thames wharves at North Woolwich across the broad river from Charles Todd's boyhood borough of Greenwich and took aboard nearly 2000km of submarine cable between the five sailing ships, Marian Moore, Kirkham, Assaye, Tweed and Cospatrick. The only steamer in the fleet, Amberwitch, carried 40km of armoured shore ends. A crucial private supplier in this largely government enterprise was the London-based Gutta Percha Company whose equipment (said, romantically, to be based on Italian pasta-making machines) made the cores of copper insulated with gutta percha. The other principal private company was William Henley's Telegraph Works, at whose wharves the ships were berthed. Henleys provided the iron wire armour-plating around the core, and the cable-laying expertise. William Henley, who was then fifty-eight, liked to tell his admirers that he made his unique wire-covering machine from an old lathe he bought with a legacy left to him, in her

Page 106 of 162

Alice and the Weather Man

20/10/09 1:51 PM

dying breath, by an adoring maiden aunt. Whatever, he eventually made the shore ends for the Trans-Atlantic cable and became enormously wealthy. Of course, the grand Persian Gulf enterprise would not be complete without Charles Tilston Bright, then aged twenty-nine, knighted by the Queen at just twenty-six for his services to the telegraph and, by inference, the advancement of Her Glorious Empire. Sir Charles was the latest high achiever from an ancient Yorkshire family. He became a clerk in the Electric Telegraph Company at age of fifteen and supervising engineer of the Magnetic Telegraph Company at twenty; his immediate task then was to lay the cable from Portpatrick, Scotland to Donaghadee, Ireland, the first across the northern Irish Sea. William Henley welcomed him to the team in London as Consulting Engineer; he wouldn't have to go to the Gulf, but his name was important for the image of the project, just as Isambard Kingdom Brunel's was as non-visiting Consulting Engineer to the fledgling South Australian Railways in the 1850s. On 15th August, 1863, the Marian Moore sailed east into the Thames Estuary, and south for the Cape of Good Hope, with her cargo of 175 nautical miles of cable. The others began to depart within a month and assembled in December-January among the seven islands of the northwest Indian port city of Bombay (Mumbai). They were greeted by Sir Baartle Frere, the new Governor, and Lieutenant Colonel Patrick Stewart, the Royal Engineer who had become Director General of the Indian Telegraph Service. Early in 1864, two steamers towed the Marian Moore and Kirkham 1100km northwest across the Arabian Sea to the strategic port of Gwadar. Kirkham began laying cable westwards towards Musandam, at the entrance to the Persian Gulf, at a hearty speed of up to six knots. When she had exhausted her supply of 181 nautical miles of cable, Marian Moore took over and completed the run to Musandam. Now, it was the turn of the Tweed which was towed up the Persian Gulf, trailing 347 nautical miles of cable to Bushire, an East India Company trading post on the eastern coast of the Gulf. Assaye laid the final 364 nautical miles of deep sea cable to the port of Fao (Al-Faw), the southernmost port of the Basra province of Ottoman Mesopotamia. It was here they encountered their only difficulties: the flat-bottomed 'landing craft' Comet could not get closer than seven kilometres from shore, so they lashed the expedition's ten boats together and tried to make the beach. In the end, seamen and local helpers manhandled the line through the final two kilometres of low tide mud. Assaye, which still had cable left, returned to Gwadar and laid the final section to Karachi with Cospatrick in April-May, 1864. So that, technically and geographically, was that: a telegraph line ran nearly all the way from England to Singapore. The only area of contention was part of Mesopotamia, where raiding parties of Arab horsemen kept harassing construction gangs. Someone came up with a clever idea: Why not pay the raiders to be the construction workers' guards? Various sheiks endorsed the plan and the line proceeded. In Manchester, John Pender, a quiet investor in the Far Eastern schemes, turned his attention to the

Page 107 of 162

Alice and the Weather Man

20/10/09 1:51 PM

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

Page 108 of 162

Alice and the Weather Man

20/10/09 1:51 PM

material for a book, had photographed a girl named Alice Liddell, aged about twelvish (the same as her girls) in an off-the shoulder vest. She would buy a copy of the book as soon as it was published in 1865 and assess it for indecencies before handing it to her daughters. It was to be called Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. Goodness gracious, these were difficult modern times to be bringing up girls, what with all the new technology, and all! John Pender's attention was not entirely distracted from business by the family's giddying social and artistic success. By this time, nearly 20,000km of cables had been laid west from Britain in attempts to link the Old World with the America; the first cable, in 1857, had been abandoned; the second, a year later, caused jubilation, particularly in New York, when congratulatory messages were sent between Queen Victoria and President James Buchanan, but the line failed after five weeks. It was disclosed later that the cable had deteriorated, having been exposed to the air too long before laying; its insulation was uneven and defective and, finally, an attempt to revive it with a huge charge of electric current killed it off completely. The outbreak of the Civil War dulled any immediate initiatives to resume the project. In the meantime, a British Joint Parliamentary Committee on Submarine Telegraph Cables, taking advice from such authorities as the physicist Lord William Kelvin, recommended innovations in the construction, laying and electric operations ... then waited for an outcome of the ghastly tragedy which was the American Civil War. By mid-1864, it had become clear to keen European observers of the conflict that the North was ascendant. General William Sherman had begun his savage scorched-earth 'March to the Sea' in Georgia on 6th May which would end in Savannah two days before Christmas; earlier, on 4th May, the Union Commander, General Ulysses S. Grant, invaded Virginia with 100,000 men and engaged in four battles over the next month, culminating in the Battle of Cold Harbour, Virginia, in which 7000 men on both sides died in twenty minutes. In September, the Confederates lost control of the Shenandoah Valley, in Virginia, which made the North impregnable from attack; unaware of this, across the Atlantic a month later, some desperate Southerners named their last raiding ship Shenandoah; and this ship would drag Australia, unwittingly, into the last stages of the Civil War. On 21st December, Sherman telegraphed President Abraham Lincoln offering him Savannah as a Christmas present. And just as it all began to draw to a close, the rampaging vessel Shenandoah was steaming past South Australia, on its way to Melbourne. Never was worldwide telegraphic contact with Mother more urgently required! The Shenandoah was an auxiliary steamer which had been bought surreptitiously in England by Confederate agents as the innocent Sea King. She sailed from Liverpool on 8th October, 1864, and was met off Madeira by a tender which carried the eight guns needed to convert her to an armed merchantman. As the Shenandoah, she sailed south, capturing or ransoming Union cargo

Page 109 of 162

Alice and the Weather Man

20/10/09 1:51 PM

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.

Page 110 of 162

Alice and the Weather Man

20/10/09 1:51 PM

Field had met the American telegraph company owner, Frederic Newton Gisborne, in the early-1850s and joined with him in running a line from the North American mainland peninsula of Nova Scotia 110km to the island of Newfoundland in 1855. All that was needed now was a cable from Ireland 3000km to Newfoundland and Europe would be linked with America. Just like that! In 1856, Field sailed to England to raise venture capital and met the British Foreign Secretary, George Villiers (Lord Clarendon). Their conversation is said to have gone: Clarendon: 'Suppose you make the attempt and fail ... your cable is lost at sea?' Field: 'Charge it to profit and loss, and go lay another.' Clarendon had just negotiated a treaty favourable to Britain at the Congress of Paris to end the Crimean War and was well-disposed to the American's forthright manner. He recommended him to John Pender, who had quietly interested himself in the telegraph industry in 1852 by becoming a shareholder, and later, director of the English and Irish Magnetic Telegraph Company. In August, 1856, he was one of 245 people who bought £1000 shares in Field's newly-floated Atlantic Telegraph Company; he was elected to the board in December. His new American partner crossed to Ireland and watched HMS Agamemnon and USS Niagara leave the southwestern island of Valentia, with the cable ... 'What God had joined together, let no man put asunder,' said Field, seeing a mysterious plighting of the troth between Old Europe and its young American bride. But the marriage was not blessed. Two more abject failures and the shortlived success of the 1858 line were followed by the intervention of the Civil War and further efforts were curtailed until 1864. That year, John Pender took charge, with the backing of the railways magnate, Thomas Brassey. Cyrus Field was active in raising £300,000 for the revived project. Pender suggested the merger of Gutta Percha and Glass Elliott companies and personally guaranteed £250,000 for the purchase of Gutta Percha's assets and patents. The new company, the Telegraph Construction and Maintenance Company (Telcon) was to make the main cable and, having guaranteed this, the Atlantic Telegraph Company then signed an agreement with the Great Eastern Steamship Company to hire the mighty steam liner Great Eastern to lay the cable. The Great Eastern, launched in 1858, was the vast, opulent creation of the engineer, Isambard Kingdom Brunel, and the designer, John Scott Russell. The 19,000-tonne vessel followed the success of Brunel's pioneering iron steamship, the 3000-tonne Great Britain (1843), previously the largest ship afloat. The Great Britain had a shaky start, grounded off Ireland for nearly a year in 1846-47, but became famous on the England-Australia run from 1852-73. She brought 15,000 immigrants on thirty-two stormwracked, telegraph-free voyages, principally to Melbourne, the preferred destination during the mid-Victorian Goldrush and postGoldrush era. (For the demographically-minded, who'd like a change in discussion from the telegraph and the weather, those 15,000

Page 111 of 162

Alice and the Weather Man

20/10/09 1:51 PM

immigrants have produced 250,000 descendants, or one person in 80 to be seen at any given time in Australia. To make the statistics more personal, the Great Britain immigrants to Melbourne alone consisted of 142 Smiths and 170 Jones, all solid full-fare-paying immigrants, compared with, say, the 1828 Census of NSW which showed 462 Smiths living on mainland Australia, of whom, not counting their 'Currency Lads and Lasses' offspring, 95 percent were convicts. But that was New South Wales in 1828! And using the same mathematical formula, 2.67 million of Australia's population of 20 million people are descended from 160,000 pre-20th century convicts from the British Isles.) The Great Eastern's beginnings in the Thames were most inauspicious: because she was the largest ship in the world (211 metres) she had to be launched sideways and refused to slide any further after a metre. It wasn't until three months later, 30th January, 1858, that she floated on the river. Troubles dogged her fitting and Brunel died of a second stroke on 15th September, 1859, when he heard of a fatal explosion on board. Anyhow, after a series of unhappy Atlantic crossings her owners decided she was too expensive and laid her up in 1862. She remained idle until the Atlantic Telegraph Company chartered her in 1864. Pender and his partners recognised she had one obvious advantage: she was the only ship in the world big enough to carry all the telegraph cable for the Atlantic. This meant ripping out much of her luxurious interior to make space. The Great Eastern began laying the line on 23rd July, 1865, but the cable broke 2000kms out from Valentia, Ireland, on 2nd August and was lost in the murky depths. The great paddlewheeler turned for home. But all was not lost. A director of Atlantic Telegraph, Daniel Gooch, who was on board, wrote this letter from 'Lat 51-40-30. Long 14-4' on 16th August (edited for comprehension) ... 'I daresay you will be glad we are close at hand again. We hope to send letters ashore at Crookhaven (Cork) and a telegram for the information of the papers and the public. We laid a little over 1200 miles of the cable when from an accident it broke and the end went down two-and-a-half miles (four kilometres) into the depths of the Atlantic. As before starting we believed such an event to be its death, we did not come with proper tackle to get it again and had to do the best we could with what we had. By way of practice, three times we hooked it and after bringing it up about a mile each time, our tackle broke and let it down again. After spending about ten days in these operations and losing all the rope we had, it became necessary to return to England and get what is necessary and go out again. Whether we do this in October, or defer it to the Spring, which I think best, there is no doubt the cable will be raised, joined and completed ... ' On 30th June, 1866, the Great Eastern left the Thames with new line and, on 13th July, began laying the cable across the Atlantic from Valentia, joining the main cable with a shore line laid by the vessel, Caroline, the previous year. In the flush of excitement in London, hardly anyone commented on the miserable death of John McDouall Stuart on 5th June. He returned to London in 1864 to live with his widowed sister,

Page 112 of 162

Alice and the Weather Man

20/10/09 1:51 PM

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.

22. Charles Todd, bare breasts ... and Eatanswill In the southeastern Australian winter of 1865, while the mad warship Shenandoah, was still massacring the Northern U.S. whaling fleet, the Melbourne Herald made an extraordinary editorial plea to be rescued from colonial outpost isolation: 'What with ocean mails that won't arrive until their news is no longer news,' the newspaper wailed on 20th June, 'and with telegraph lines that will keep eternally breaking down whenever there is anything of especial interest or importance to report from the great world outside the Australian territory, we are undoubtedly a muchenduring people here in Victoria. We freely disburse thousands of pounds annually in order that we may get early and correct intelligence of what is going on in the busy centres of civilisation in Europe and at the theatre of the great war in America' ... Just a moment! The American Civil War ended two months ago and Abraham Lincoln's been assassinated by John Wilkes Booth while attending the play Our American Cousin at Ford's Theatre, Washington, and lies a-mouldering in his grave! Haven't you antipodean colonials been told, anything? Are you Australasians always the last to know? And those telegraph lines that kept breaking down must have been Australian internal links,

Page 113 of 162

Alice and the Weather Man

20/10/09 1:51 PM

because the continent remained telegraphically isolated from the world. The newspaper's grievance was with the P. and O. Line, the arrogant, belching steamship company which had a rich imperial monopoly on the colony's communication with the faraway world ... 'Month after month comes round, and with it arrives not the punctual mail steamer, but the annoyance of disappointed expectations, the disgust created by news, out-of-date -news which is so stale, the reader is conscious that he is filling his mind with matters that have been swept both out of existence and memory in the countries in which they first saw light. And this is all we get for subsidising the great monopolistic company with a princely fortune annually. The P. and O. Company treats us, in fact, as if we were very small people, who must be made to feel it is a very great favour that they condescend to serve us at all ... they place none but worn-out old steamers on the Australian line, and leave their early or late arrival here to all the mischances of wheezing machinery, or a barely seaworthy vessel ... ' The Herald wasn't demanding an earlier implementation of the England-Australia telegraph - it knew that was on the way - but a revolutionary scheme to break the dastardly P. and O. monopoly: it suggested that Victoria, NSW, and South Australia should combine their Immigration Funds to set up an independent shipping service to provide faster immigrants and mails ... and news from the Old World! But it all came to nothing. It would be like a Unilateral Declaration of Independence. Who was more important in the eyes of the Imperial Government - P. and O. or the Australian colonies? And on 3rd March, 1875, three years after Melbourne came online with the international telegraph, the same overbearing monopolist could still advertise on page one of the Herald: 'Peninsula and Oriental Steam Navigation Company, The company's steamship, Ceylon, Captain W.B. Hall, 2111 tons 450 horse power. Under contract to the Victorian Government for the conveyance of H.M Mails will be dispatched from the Williamstown Dockyard Pier ... ' Across the dusty Mallee plains or over the foaming Southern Ocean surf, 800km west in Adelaide, anticipating the arrival of the electric telegraph on Australia's northern tropic shores, Charles Todd quietly laid plans in Adelaide for the meteorological forecasting network that would make him Australia's first People's Weather Man. He'd already had a plan accepted by the the South Australian Government based on daily reports from his expanding network of postal and telegraph stations. It was much easier for him now that he had been recognised as Postmaster-General as well as Superintendent of Telegraphs (and Government Astronomer: the sky's the limit, as he would say!). He'd organised the exchange of data with the other colonies, particularly with his new friend, Samuel McGowan, in Melbourne, and even by sea mail to faraway New Zealand. Charles' Observatory in West Terrace, from where he could hear the comforting hum of his family in the attached Residence, became something of a rendezvous for the scientifically-minded in Adelaide. He understood why Colonel William Light had chosen the hill, with

Page 114 of 162

Alice and the Weather Man

20/10/09 1:51 PM

its commanding view of the district, to be his original Surveyor's Depot in 1836. But it was not easy to avoid being distracted in those busy years of the late-1860s. Despite his dogged determination in the matter of his duties, those weren't the easiest years for Charles, he'd have to admit. It wasn't Alice's fault, really. Her life seemed to be a continuing tragedy. It was her family, you know. They kept dying. Brothers. Sisters. Father. It was the Bell family tradition, see, Constant Death ... it seemed Alice could hardly open the post some days when there wasn't another desperately sad epistle with a Cambridge postmark ... the last was her dearly beloved sister, Sarah, who died in 1868; and before her, brother Alfred, in 1866, and before that again her father, the patriarch, Edward Bell, who passed away in 1865 aged 71, indeed, a remarkable innings in that poor, poor family. Now, there was only her brother, John, left in Cambridge to run the family corn and seed business ... and he'd brought a manor house at Chesterton, on the Cambridge outskirts to escape their House of Sibling Death at 3 Free School Lane ... and, of course (how could he possibly forget!), Alice's mother, dearest Charlotte, had taken ship to Adelaide kindly to join their happy little family and give Alice advice on how to raise the children in the beastly summer climate. And, he's reminded, his little brood had increased with the addition of a girl in 1865 (what was her name?) Ah, Alice Maude Mary! Another Alice! (how could he forget?) If those domestic distractions weren't enough, delightful as they might be, there was the jolly Royal Tour! Prince Alfred, second son of Queen Victoria, stepped ashore on 31st October, 1867, from his very own frigate, HMS Galatea, every British lad's dream, bristling with the latest high technology: there was even a telegraph cabin which could be hooked up to the domestic communications grid so Prince Alfred's equerries could send messages ahead to Melbourne organising supplies of Bollinger champagne and comely professional girls of polite and discreet disposition. There were many such lasses in the Golden City, and Alfie's (that was the name he was known by his Mummy) equerries knew just the chap to round them up, as the colonial sheep-herders might say; his name was Frederick Standish, a chronically-broke, gambling bachelor chappie who lived at the Melbourne Club and happened to be the Chief Commissioner of Police. The Prince's equerries didn't mess around when they arranged His Highness's Pimps by Appointment! Anyway, the Prince, who was also Duke of Edinburgh (as if you'd never guess) was a Post Captain in the Royal Navy at the age of only twenty-three: his astounding seamanship and personal qualities must have led to his very rapid promotion. He visited Charles Todd's Observatory without doing much damage, but he had a particularly urgent request to make of the dusky maidens of aboriginal persuasion who lived in the shadows of the whispering white-barked gums at the edge of the metropolis of Adelaide. Their spokeswoman's famous response was reported in the South Australia Register of 4th November, 1867:

Page 115 of 162

Alice and the Weather Man

20/10/09 1:51 PM

'What for we do it more than white women?' Alfie's equerries had asked them to dance bare-breasted for him! They, quite reasonably, thought the opportunity to display their wares should go to the town's society matrons. This was an unexpected development and the whole proposal was hastily abandoned even before the memsahibs had an opportunity to consider their response. But what fun if they'd said, 'Yes'! In fact, the magnificent riposte by the aboriginal women of Adelaide in that spring on 1867 was in stark contrast to the indignities being suffered by their indigenous kin elsewhere in the world. In the United States, Colonel George Armstrong Custer, a detestable media tart, was involved in a series of genocidal moves against the Plains Indians which would culminate in the triumphant slaughter of Black Kettle's Cheyenne on the Washita River the following November, 1868; in Abyssinia (now Eritrea/Ethiopia), the British were engaged in an exercise in imperialism which was breathtaking in its cynicism and it has repercussions today in the return of plundered crowns, manuscripts etc (through an Addis Ababa-based organisation, AFROMET). The Abyssinian crisis began early in 1867 when the Coptic Christian King Theodore II (Tewodros) became impatient at Queen Victoria's tardiness in replying to his request for guns to rough up his Muslim neighbours. As a petulant reminder, he took eight British hostages, including a woman and baby and the British Consul, Captain Charles Cameron, and ensconced them in comfort in his palace at Maqdala, in northwest Abyssinia. This came to the attention of Queen Victoria and her pet imperialist Prime Minister, Benjamin Disraeli, who was looking for a decent foreign policy issue to hoodwink the British voter at the coming General Election. Hapless King Theodore handed it to him. Britain sent 12,000 soldiers from India, accompanied by 8000 labourers to build railways and so on. The British lost two dead and 27 wounded in the subsequent campaign; the Abyssinians suffered 500 killed, countless wounded and King Theodore shot himself dead with a pistol Queen Victoria had given him on a happier occasion. The hostages were perfectly well and the British looted the palace, spectacularly: they used seventy Indian elephants to haul the treasure away; however, certain guilty parties are now returning pieces of booty to the Ethiopian people. And the election? The great British Public kicked the devious Disraeli out and installed honest old William Gladstone who had what was known as an 'ethical foreign policy'. The only positive to come out of the whole affair was the successful test of a telegraph line from the Red Sea coast to the hinterland in desert conditions. Charles Todd was grateful for that but, as a humanitarian, would have preferred the British had sought a less extravagant method. At the time John Bull's mighty sledgehammer was about to crush the piddling Abyssinian conker, Prince Alfie's Galatea was paddling gaily along the southern Australian coast, having made an opulent stopover at Rio de Janeiro with Emperor Pedro II, of Brazil, and another at Capetown, where he met his first African chiefs. In

Page 116 of 162

Alice and the Weather Man

20/10/09 1:51 PM

Adelaide on 31st October, he was welcomed by the congenial Irish Governor Sir Dominick Daly of whom the Picturesque Atlas of 1886 said: ' ... was the only Roman Catholic governor that the colony has ever had, and while his co-religionists were gratified by his appointment, his judiciousness and liberality of sentiment rendered it impossible for others to object to him on that ground. By his venerable appearance, urbane manner and strict attention to constitutional principles, he retained from first to last a high degree of popularity ...' Unfortunately, the Atlas reported, on 19th February, 1868, his career was 'terminated by his death'. No one foresaw this impending event during the Royal Visit, of course, and the Prince laid the foundation for the Wesleyan College, which bears his name today, and Charles Todd's Adelaide Post Office. Prince Alfred sailed east to the glittering fleshpots of Melbourne and Sydney, and the garden parties of Hobart and Brisbane. In Melbourne, Irish Catholics stormed the Loyal Orange Lodge on 27th November to mark his visit and one man died; in Sydney, a tortured Irishman named Henry James O'Farrell shot him in the back at a picnic at Clontarf on 12th March, 1868. The Prince survived and O'Farrell was hanged on the 21st April while the Sydney Morning Herald and other super-patriots screamed 'Fenian Conspiracy'. The Prince, hearing tales of O'Farrell's muddled mind, had suggested clemency; but the loyal execution had been carried out. Adelaide, having buried its own Irish governor without conspiratorial talk, drifted back to its English provincial torpor. On 11th June, 1868, the Register's editor commented: 'Adelaide, like all small and isolated communities, has passed through an Eatanswill state of development during which it was full of its own importance impressed with the dignity of its increasing wealth, on familiar terms with all leading citizens, and tormented by a passion for local news.' The good people of Adelaide knew, in their hearts of hearts, what the editor was talking about because everyone read Mr Dickens. Eatanswill was the fictitious borough in Charles Dickens' first novel, the Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club, or Pickwick Papers, first published in instalments over 1836-37, at a shilling a month in association with the Times. It was 'edited by Boz', Charles Dickens' pen-name and became immensely popular, even though some literary snobs rubbished it as an upmarket soap opera. The Papers came out in complete book form on 17th November, 1837, and in 1840, the celebrated novelist, William Thackeray, something of a populists hack himself, gave it a powerful stamp of approval: he said that 'a man who, a hundred years hence, should sit down and write a history of our time, would do wrong to put that great contemporary history of Pickwick as a frivolous work.' Eatenswill and the Pickwick Papers came into being about the same time as Adelaide, and the Register suggested that the pioneers of the far colonial town, having read Dickens' serialisation before sailing, might have modelled their future home, in their subconscious minds, on Eatanswill!' Why not? Confess your faults early! ... 'It appears then,' Dickens wrote, 'that the Eatanswill

Page 117 of 162

Alice and the Weather Man

20/10/09 1:51 PM

people, like the people of many other small towns, considered themselves of the utmost and most mighty importance, and that every man in Eatanswill, conscious of the weight that attached to his example, felt himself bound to unite, heart and soul, with one of the two great parties that divided the town - the Blues and the Buffs.' Was there such a division in Adelaide? All towns, even Adelaide, have their social mysteries only understood by those who have resided there for generations. But, surely, Adelaide did not have a darker side like Eatanswill, described by the Dickens scholar G.K. Chesterton (1903) as 'alive with loathsome corruption, hypocritical in all its public utterances, and venal in all its votes.' Certainly, a visiting Melbourne journalist wrote of the Torrens River ' ... the river is emptied at stated intervals to allow people to search for their friends and relatives ...' But that was just a rude remark. Wasn't it? Charles Todd went into the Observatory garden on warm summers mornings to read the gauges on his white-fenced weather instruments. His nostrils were tickled by the sweet breakfast tang of fresh, steaming droppings on West Terrace, that busy, horsey boulevard, and his hand swished the air, lazily but frequently, not unlike the tail of a grazing steed ... There is a land where summer flies Come buzzing in your nose and eyes Blended in witching harmonies Australia! Australia! So went the schoolboy parody of Caroline Carleton's Song of Australia. But what use complaining about the natural hazards of life in South Australia? Chin up! What was this defeatist poem in a local newspaper titled 'Hot Weather'? The author complained ... I puff, I blow, to ease my pain, But none of this will do, So long as Fahrenheit remains All day at ninety-two. Alice was uncertain about one occasional visitor to Charles' Observatory. He was the eminent, rollicking George Strickland Kingston, a pioneer of '36 and a discoverer of the supposedly frequently-drained Torrens River. He had named the river after a London-based Colonisation Commissioner, Robert Torrens, who happened to be Protestant Irish, like himself, and therefore a man of uncommon good qualities. Some said Kingston was rude and overbearing, but Alice, being a young woman who knew about such things, detected a vein of tragedy behind his bluff facade. 'You are a man who has known unhappiness, I suspect, Mr Kingston?' she probably whispered. 'My wives keep dying,' he said. She sighed. 'I have similar misfortune,' she said. 'With your husbands?' Kingston enquired. 'Oh, no! With my brothers and sisters!' she exclaimed, 'With husbands, I have been singularly lucky.' Charles came to her rescue: 'She means she has had only one husband.' George Kingston was born in 1807 in the market town of

Page 118 of 162

Alice and the Weather Man

20/10/09 1:51 PM

Bandon, County Cork, a descendant of extreme Protestant enthusiasts (zealots, some would say) from England and Scotland who were 'planted' in the district in the 17th century by the Earl of Cork, Richard Boyle. Kingston trained as an architect and civil engineer in Ireland before moving to England and becoming involved in the planning for South Australian colonisation. He embarked on the Cygnet in 1836 as deputy surveyor-general to Colonel William Light, who sailed on the Rapid. Kingston made the voyage without his first wife, his childhood love, Henrietta, but he had the acquaintance of several South Australian Company officers and their wives and children on the Company-chartered 240-tonne barque under the sober command of Captain John Rolls. Alice probably walked with George Kingston in the charming flower garden she had established beneath the parlour window of the residence. 'An English country garden,' she might have said, wistfully, 'mind, we didn't have one at our town house in Cambridge, so it's peculiar that I should start one here. I confess to feeling a longing for Home at times, though I was ever so glad to leave its deathly gloom a decade and a half ago.' George Kingston paused to sniff a rose, as he'd heard a gentleman does, in a gentlewoman's modest country garden: 'Charming, charming,' he murmured. 'Yes,' she agreed, 'but the credit must go to Mr Charles Newman's nursery at Highercomb, in the Adelaide Hills. He imports the roses in the dark holds of sailing ships all the way from the gardens of Kent ... Mr Newman says roses are ideal for growing in South Australia on account of their hardiness and drought resistance.' George Kingston laughed, indulgently. 'You forget, madam, that I know more about drought than anyone else in the colony. I've been keeping the colony's rainfall records since the unfortunate demise of Colonel William Light in 1839.' Oops! Charles had told her to be ever so careful in her conversations with Mr Kingston, especially since he was the guardian of those precious rainfall records, a member of the Statistical Society, and extra especially since he was so sensitive about the subject of Colonel Light. Charles said there was some jealousy there and you just couldn't be too careful about ruffling feathers in Adelaide. He mumbled something about Eatanswill. 'Your poor first wife, Henrietta, didn't come with you on the Cygnet in '36?' Alice said, subtly changing the subject. 'Harriet, I called her, Harriet,' he said, 'no, she was ailing and died in 1839. I saw her briefly when I returned on Company survey business in 1837, but she was ailing, poor dear.' She patted his arm, partly in sympathy for the loss of his Harriet and partly because it was rumoured Colonel Light had sent him back to England to get him out of the way because he was making such a hash of the survey of the new colony. 'Ah, well,' she sighed, 'I suppose that you were fortunate in 1842 in finding an exotic, seventeen-year-old bride, Luduvina Cameron, to comfort you in your loss back in Adelaide.' 'She was the granddaughter of a Portuguese nobleman.'

Page 119 of 162

Alice and the Weather Man

20/10/09 1:51 PM

he muttered, rather too defensively. 'And a fertile one, too!' Alice might not have exclaimed. 'Six children before she died in 1851.' George Kingston paused. 'I gather,' he said, rather too boldly, 'you were a ripe child bride yourself.' She averted his flirtatious glance. 'But now, Mr Kingston,' she said, 'I gather you have found renewed happiness since 1858 with your third wife, Emma, the widowed daughter of our late foundation Harbourmaster, Captain Thomas Lipson?' 'Indeed, Mrs Todd, childless, but happy!' Alice lowered her eyes. 'In fact, I believe you have may have first met her during the long days and nights in 1836 when her family were fellow immigrants aboard the barque Cygnet?' 'Ah, madam, I was twenty-nine years old and she was but a slip of a girl,' he said. Whether he blushed or not is beyond the imaginative powers of this narrator. But it is unlikely: his brashness would have forbade it. George Kingston was Speaker of the House of Assembly and about to be knighted (1870) by the Queen. His wife looked forward to the effect her elevation to the Bunyip Nobility would have on the other ladies in Adelaide, Lady Emma Kingston! Such a delirious promotion to the aristocracy was an undreamed fate in the democratic days of the foundation of the colony in the 1830s. Kingston was an assiduous self-promoter, but this would not really bear fruit until the 1980s when some revisionist academics offered the opinion, outlined in the Adelaide Review, that 'the site of Adelaide had not been founded by Light. The survey of Adelaide had only been managed by Light. William Light was officially the founder because he had the authority to ratify the site. Due process aside, he had little impact on the establishment of Adelaide at all. The true founder was George Strickland Kingston, a civil engineer previously disregarded as a plodding maker of uninspired buildings ... ' Kingston's companions on the historic voyage of the Cygnet in 1836 also included another twenty-nine-year-old, Boyle Travers Finniss and his wife, Anne. Finniss was a pleasant, bumbling fellow (as later alarming events showed), an Indian Army brat born in a Raj-bound transport off the Cape of Good Hope in 1807. He attended the Royal Military College at Sandhurst and was posted to Mauritius, then Ireland, with the 82nd regiment. In 1835, he married Anne Rogerson, daughter of a Protestant landowner near Mullingar, in the haunted beauty of County Westmeath west of Dublin, and immediately began to plan a new life for them in the soon-to-be colony of South Australia. Finniss secured a land grant and sailed as one of the assistant surveyors. He became a good and loyal friend of Colonel Light, supported his choice of the site of Adelaide, and resigned with him in 1837 in protest at annoying new instructions from the London-based Commissioners brought to Adelaide by George Kingston. Light was snubbed by Adelaide society as he lay dying of tuberculosis in 1839, ostensibly because he was being nursed by his faithful mistress, Maria Gandy, but the loyal Finniss was

Page 120 of 162

Alice and the Weather Man

20/10/09 1:51 PM

constantly at his side and was rewarded at seeing Adelaide's true founding surveyor given a lavish funeral after his death on 6th October. Finniss and Kingston were present in March, 1851, when an Old Colonists' Festival was held to celebrate the achievements of 1836 and the greatness of their Sovereign across the seas. They joined in a song whose lyric might have made Caroline Carleton, later author of Song of Australia, tremble in envy: Let all our cares and griefs be drowned! With joy let every bosom bound! Voices and instruments resound It is our festal day! A realm embracing every sky O'er which broad day doth never die From every shore sends forth the cry, "Victoria, our Queen!" God save Victoria! God save the Queen! Shout 'mid Australia's festive scene, God save the Queen.' (Many years later, as the original settlers began dropping dead in numbers - George Kingston died in 1880 - a letter in March, 1882, in the Register stirred thought about the urgent need for an Old Colonists' Association. An association was eventually founded, accompanied by this poem in December, 1883: A noble monument they leave behind. Those brave old men. They meekly pass away. We miss the gentle hearts, the sturdy mind; But still their work grows mightier day by day. Who made the desert bloom, the solitude Grow tuneful with the voices of men? T'was they Those brave old hearts - that noble brotherhood Who one by one now meekly pass away.) Finniss, who didn't pass away until 1893, had more reason than most to attend that Old Colonists' Festival with his wife, Anne, and their daughter, Fanny: she was born on 31st December, 1836, said to be the first white girl born in the colony (although there have been some other claimants) ... But, goodness! We are being distracted by meaningless social chit-chat from the important Men's Business being discussed by Charles Todd and Boyle Finniss in the late-1860s. Finniss, who'd had some business setbacks in the 1840s, was elected to the first colonial legislature and, briefly, became the first Premier in 1856-57. On 3rd March, 1864 he was appointed the first Government Resident in the Northern Territory after its annexation to South Australia by the Imperial Government the previous June. Far away in London, important people had decided that the Colony of South Australia had earned the right to administer the hitherto unnamed portion of Australia, particularly after the exploring feats of John McDouall Stuart. A mildly dissenting voice was Henry Pelham-Clinton, Secretary for Colonies, Fifth Duke of Newcastle, an Old Etonian friend of William Gladstone and an informed supporter of colonial reformers in Australia.

Page 121 of 162

Alice and the Weather Man

20/10/09 1:51 PM

Pelham-Clinton voiced doubts that the Colony of South Australia, with just 140,000 white souls, would be capable of managing and exploiting the vast fiefdom. But the South Australians and their friends with contacts in high places in London lobbied incessantly and conjured a land grab which would have been the envy of Genghis Khan and his Mongol Hordes. The problem was that they hadn't even explored the remotest corners of South Australia properly: some happy tribesfolk lived in blessed ignorance of the presence of the dreaded white invaders until the 20th century. The British Government left the South Australians to it; they had made clear they were not going to finance the venture. But they also made clear they could take the Northern Territory back any time they felt like it. The South Australians took enormous satisfaction from having put one over on Queensland which had been their chief rival for stewardship of Northern Australia and the London-Australia telegraph. Queen Victoria went to Westminster Palace to sign the takeover, which put uppity Queensland firmly in its place ... 'Victoria by the Grace of God of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland Queen Defender of the Faith to our trusty and well-beloved Sir Dominick Daly Knight Greeting Whereas by an Act passed in the session of Parliament holden in the fifth and sixth years Our Reign entitled 'An Act for the Government of New South Wales and Van Diemen's Land' it was enacted that it should be lawful for Us by Letters Patent from time to time issued under the Great Seal of Our Great Britain and Ireland to define as to us should meet the limits of the Colony of New South Wales and to erect into a separate Colony or Colonies any territories which then were or were reputed to be thereafter might be comprised within the said Colony of New South Wales And whereas by an Act passed in the session of Parliament holden in the twenty fourth and twenty fifth years of Our Reign entitled 'an Act to remove doubt respecting the authority of the Legislature of Queensland and to annex certain territories to the Colony of South Australia and for other purposes' ... So much for Queensland's territorial ambitions. And certain elements in that colony were about to engage in nefarious activities which would put them further off-side with the fair-minded Duke of Newcastle and other liberals in Britain: the nasty industry of 'blackbirding' which meant luring South Sea islanders aboard ships and carrying them off to the tropical fields of northeast Australia; the Brisbane Courier denounced it as 'Slave Trade in Queensland'. The evil trade began, more or less, when the Sydneybased cotton planter, Robert Towns, anxious to take advantage of the paucity of cotton in Europe because of the American Civil War, wrote a cunningly-phrased letter to the piratical skipper, Ross Lewin, in Brisbane, on 30th May, 1863: 'You will call at such (Melanesian) islands as you are known to the natives and explain to them what your objective is, namely to engage for me fifty to 100 natives, all males on the present voyage until they are better known in the district and colony. I will prefer young lads from fifteen to eighteen in preference to older men as the bulk. You must have some older men among the

Page 122 of 162

Alice and the Weather Man

20/10/09 1:51 PM

lots to induce the younger ones to enlist ... In conclusion, I must remind you of my earnest desire that the natives are treated with the greatest kindness, and on no account allow them to be misused by the crew or any person on board.' With words greased in hypocrisy, Towns despatched the notorious Lewin to the New Hebrides and any other islands convenient for the human harvest of his cotton fields labour. What really happened was described on 30th January, 1868, by Ishmael Williamson, a cook on the vessel, Syren: 'Some of them came into the boats while others came in canoes to see the vessel, numbering twenty-one, many of them bringing their clubs and instruments of war with them. They were relieved of these on decks and taken down to see the mysteries of the hold. When the vessel set sail, the canoes were cut adrift and we bore away from the island. The wives of some of these men swam after the ship for more than three miles, crying loudly for the restoration of their kidnapped husbands.' By this time, blackbirders had brought 2000 'kanakas' (a Melanesian dialect for 'men') to labour on the plantations of Queensland. Legislation outlawing the trade was introduced into the Queensland Parliament and a number of blackbirders were jailed. Several Royal Navy ships, notably the Basilisk, under Captain John Moresby, hunted them down. It was hardly a congenial atmosphere for the Colony of Queensland to be pressing its claim to be involved in the very latest in technology, the international electric telegraph. But we're being diverted by the delightful manners of 19th century tropical North Queensland from Her Majesty's bossy document putting the uppity Australian colonies firmly in their places ... 'it was amongst other things provided that it should be lawful for Us by Letters Patent as aforesaid to annex to any Colony which was then or might thereafter be established on the Continent of Australia any Territories which (in the exercise of the powers thereinbefore mentioned) might have been erected into a separate Colony. Provided always that it should be lawful for us in such Letters Patent to reserve such powers of revoking or altering the same as it us should seem fit or to declare the period during which such Letters Patent should remain in force and also on the revocation or other determination of such Letters Patent again to exercise in the respect of the territories referred to therein or any part thereof all such powers and authority as might have been exercised if the said Letters Patent had never been made now know you that We have thought fit in pursuance of the powers so vested in Us and of all other powers and authorities to Us in that half belonging to annex And We do hereby annex to Our said Colony of South Australia until We think fit to make any other disposition thereof of any part or parts thereof so much of Our said Colony of New South Wales as lies to the Northward of the 26th Parallel of South Latitude and between the One hundred and twenty ninth and One hundred and thirty eighth degrees of East Longitude together with the bay and gulfs therein and all and every the Islands adjacent to any part of the mainland within such limits as aforesaid with their rights members and appurtenances. And We do hereby reserve to Us Our heirs and successors full power and authority from time to

Page 123 of 162

Alice and the Weather Man

20/10/09 1:51 PM

time to revoke alter or amend these Our Letters Patent as to Us or them shall seem fit In Witness whereof We have caused these Our Letters to be made Patent. Witness ourself at Westminster the sixth day of July in the twenty seventh year of Our Reign.' The agreeable Henry Pelham-Clinton fell ill in April, 1864, and resigned from all government offices; it is thought that his sickness was caused by anxiety resulting from him carrying much of the blame, as War Minister, for the deprived conditions British soldiers suffered during the Crimean War. He died at his estate, Clumber Park, Nottinghamshire, on 18th October, 1864, at age of fifty-five. The historian, Cornelius Brown, reported: 'His Grace died at Clumber with awful suddenness ... at twenty-five minutes past six o'clock on that day, he was conversing freely with his solicitor, Mr Quvry, that gentleman having been to the church festival in Shireoaks, and the Duke had been expressing his gratification at the great success of the festival, when he suddenly threw up his arms, gave a shriek and died in about four minutes.' Gladstone lamented: 'He was high and strong in character, very true, very noble, and I think intelligible, which, as you know, I think is rare in politicians.' Henry Pelham-Clinton was justifiably estranged from his late father, the fourth Duke, who had none of the above admirable qualities. Quite the contrary. He was a member of the 'Ultra Tories' whose anti-Reform stance so enraged the citizens that they burned the family seat, Nottingham Castle Mansion, to the ground in 1831. The Fifth Duke, on the other hand, had all of the qualities some South Australians of the period prized in themselves. Today's South Australians wishing to give thanks to this unsung hero can visit Clumber Park where the five-kilometre entrance driveway of lime trees he created stand as his memorial. Fortunately, the merciful intervention of death saved the noble Henry Pelham-Clinton from the awful realisation of his misgivings: Boyle Travers Finniss, while a man of unimpeachable character, was a disaster as first Government Resident of the Northern Territory. He took up his post in March, 1864, a month before Pelham-Clinton reluctantly resigned as Secretary for the Colonies, and promptly chose, to the horror of his companions, the mosquito-infested mud flats at Escape Cliffs, at the mouth of the Adelaide River, as the site of the future capital. The area was supposedly dubbed 'Escape Cliffs' in 1839 when a survey party sent ashore from HMS Beagle used a desperate ploy to escape from a band of threatening aborigines: the whites began to dance and sing to distract the cliff-top natives, who found the performance so side-splittingly funny the party was able to retreat to the Beagle without loss of life. Finniss named his new 'town' Palmerston, after the British Prime Minister (known fondly as 'Lord Cupid' to Lady Jersey, Princess Dorothea de Lieven, Russian Ambassador's wife etc etc) and ordered his staff to survey town blocks for eager investors in Adelaide and London. But his assistants and many of the eighty settlers complained about the hopelessness of the muddy, malariaridden site; Finniss pig-headedly refused to heed the dissent and

Page 124 of 162

Alice and the Weather Man

20/10/09 1:51 PM

secret letters were sent by coastal steamer to important people in Adelaide ... and Finniss was recalled to face a Royal Commission which censured him for wasting £40,000 pounds of public money. Finniss' commission was withdrawn, but because he was such a likeable chap, he was permitted to wear the title of Honourable and was even appointed South Australian AuditorGeneral in 1876! Finniss' Palmerston was abandoned in 1865, but the intrepid visitor today will find remains of the bakehouse oven, ship's water tanks, survey point, well, clay brick floor of Government Resident's house, remains of a kiln, footpath and garden. About the time the first Palmerston was abandoned, Henry Temple, Lord Palmerston, died on 18th October, 1865, exactly a year to the day after his loyal Cabinet member, the Duke of Newcastle shuffled off the mortal coil; Palmerston was sadly missed: he had presided over a period of Empire consolidation, he was a fierce Abolitionist and he had succeeded in being named corespondent in an adultery divorce involving a Mrs O'Kane in 1863 at the age of seventy-nine, a feat that was warmly applauded by some aristocratic old chaps, and increased his popularity among the common folks, even after it was dismissed. Two years later, when he died, the population waited in anticipation to learn the cause of death, and her identity. But it was only a chill, they said. His famous last words were: 'Die, my dear doctor? That is the last thing shall do.' Naturally, he was an imperialist well worth remembering, so his name was transferred to the new site surveyed by 'Little Energy', George Goyder in 1869 at Port Darwin and the town kept the name until March, 1911, when it was changed by proclamation to Darwin. But that was not the end of the name: on 1st May, 1981, a satellite town 21km east of the City of Darwin was gazetted 'Town of Palmerston' and such was its popularity (like his Lordship's) that it achieved the status of 'City of Palmerston' on 2nd August, 2000. But we are getting a little in front of ourselves ... on 9th February, 1869, George Goyder and his 150 survey men and others arrived from Adelaide in the Moonta to answer the demands of land buyers who were still awaiting title of properties they had bought before the ill-fated Finniss foray (the Moonta expedition was particularly civilised: they had their own ship's newspaper, the Moonta Herald, published seven times during the long voyage, and a Greek cook, Mr Kangris, forerunner of Darwin's vibrant nonindigenous 'ethnic' community in 'Greek Town' and 'Salonika'). Goyder recommended the site of the new Palmerston (Darwin) for the capital and his men began a survey of the future city streets and adjoining agricultural lands, totalling 660,000 acres (267,000ha) by the end of August; Goyder named a suburb after Bellamack, a member of the local Larakia tribe who befriended the party on its arrival, perhaps recognising, as Bennelong had done in Sydney in 1788, the inevitability of the white invasion and who was sworn in as a court reporter many years later to act as an intermediary between the gentle Larakia and the new proprietors' inflexible laws. Goyder established his Lands Offices in the camp stables

Page 125 of 162

Alice and the Weather Man

20/10/09 1:51 PM

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 longanticipated 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

Page 126 of 162

Alice and the Weather Man

20/10/09 1:51 PM

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

Page 127 of 162

Alice and the Weather Man

20/10/09 1:51 PM

probably wouldn't have been overly concerned, even if he had been alerted. The odds of it happening again in the near future were fairly slender, even in someone like Charles' seemingly-endless term of office in the South Australian Public Service. This particular meteorite strike, known to scientific insiders as 'the Acraman Impact Event' (presumably described in nonalarmist language so the populace wouldn't panic) wasn't detected until the late 20th century by Australian geophysical/astrobiological boffins assisted by unmanned American satellites. Their report said, in part, 'the ejecta horizon is a significant synchronous marker layer that provided datum for plotting planktonic acritarch species distributions observed during biostratigraphic studies in the Australian terminal proterozoic ... ' If that sort of alarmist talk isn't enough to make you drive your mobile home off the Stuart Highway and study the heavens very, very nervously ... ! The collision of the Acraman meteorite (or comet?) was in the Officer Basin, later the peaceful Pitjantjatjara tribal lands, then the Woomera rocket range, stretching from the Stuart Highway, in northwest South Australia far into the desert of Western Australia. More recent research has indicated that the impact may have caused greater earthly disruption than earlier thought - a global catastrophe on a scale similar to that which caused the extinction of the dinosaurs about 65 million years ago, leading to the end of the 'Age of Reptiles' and the beginning of the 'Age of Mammals' ... Goodness gracious! And you said nothing dramatic ever happened in South Australia! This severe local Neoproterozoic Perturbation, as the scientists describe it, takes Adelaide right out of the realms of Dickens' Eatanswill and puts it up there with New York, London and Paris! And that's not all ... In 1873, the explorer Ernest Giles came upon a feature 150km west of Alice Springs he named Gosse's Range (or Bluff). Much later, astronomers came to the conclusion that a very large lump of space rock slammed 600 metres into the ground, vaporised and exploded, sending a mushroom cloud into the sky that was not equalled until the British nuclear tests at Woomera 130 million years later. Charles, of course, was not aware of any of these events, but he would have become suspicious about galactic activity had he seen one of the planet's most perfect craters at Wolf Creek, south of Hall's Creek, Western Australia. But, in 1869-70, that was yet to be discovered by white men.

23. Outback ... and Byron's inspirational girl-child A government surveyor, William Whitfield Mills, aged twenty-six, came upon an oasis in this flinty Red Centre landscape; he urged his mare to a dry river bed of soft, yielding sand, muffling her hooves now, drifting silently past hastily-abandoned campfires, aware of the black figures flitting nervously, noiselessly, among the grey-white eucalpyts. Those people had been custodians for tens of thousands of years of this delicate, fragile piece of earthly elegance, lost to them forevermore from this moment. Mills was the first white

Page 128 of 162

Alice and the Weather Man

20/10/09 1:51 PM

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,

Page 129 of 162

Alice and the Weather Man

20/10/09 1:51 PM

cutlass-waving style of British naval officer; George Goyder, 'Little Energy', the South Australian chief surveyor ... and the quiet, determined and very clever Charles Todd. John Pender, who had grown enormously wealthy, gradually withdrew from day-to-day involvement in his Manchesterbased textile interests in the late-1860s. He was able to express a longtime interest in progressive and humanitarian British politics through William Gladstone's socially reforming Liberal Party (no relation to its later Australian conservative namesake) and became MP in 1865 for Totnes, in Devon, coincidentally the hometown of the lately-deceased explorer, William John Wills. Pender took up stately residence at Footscray Park, in Kent, to be closer to the action in London, and participated in the foundation of various temporary telegraph companies as the need arose ... Anglo-American Telegraph Company to lay the Atlantic cable, British Indian Submarine Telegraph Company in 1869 to rationalise communications with Britain's most valuable colony ... and the British Australian Telegraph Company in 1870 when he took responsibility for raising £660,000 to complete the task of linking Australia to the British Empire through Java (which was then Dutch) and British Singapore. Sometime in the 1860s, or earlier, John Pender, had become acquainted in London with Sherard Osborn RN, who was basking in the glow of publication of his rousing My Journal in Malayan Waters (1861), a pigtail-pulling account of his adventures in suppressing pirates, principally Chinese, in the blockade of Kedah, a sultanate on the west coast of the Malay Peninsula. These pirates seized local trading ships and stole their cargoes of spices and other delicacies required in the refined houses of Europe; therefore, they had to be suppressed by the navies of the faraway colonial masters. Sherard Osborn, later to become an admiral, was one of the most heroic European commanders in these foreigner-bashing Oriental pursuits. He was one of those commendable Children of the Empire, born in Madras, India, in 1822, son of an army colonel, a Navy volunteer at fifteen attached to the India station, commander at twenty-seven of the Pioneer, sent to the Arctic to search for the ill-fated Sir John Franklin, missing since 1845 in search of the Northwest Passage. In 1864, he became managing director of the Telegraph Construction and Maintenance Company, founded the same year by John Pender. It became the umbrella company covering all Pender's telegraph activities, including Australia. Osborn was in his late-forties, a celebrated publicist, the sort of reliable chap you'd see on the cover of a 21st century prospectus for a retirement village; Pender was in his mid-fifties, the devious and worldly Scots holder of the strings of a very fat purse. In London, they'd been fortunate to find a friend of their ambitions in Francis Dutton, a clever, mid-fifties man who knew more about South Australia than anyone outside the colony. He was South Australia's loyal Agent-General in London, the colony's mercantile and diplomatic 'ambassador'; he'd made his pile in the discovery in 1842 of the fantastically-rich Kapunda copper mine,

Page 130 of 162

Alice and the Weather Man

20/10/09 1:51 PM

north of Adelaide whose ore produced 22.5 percent pure copper, nearly a world record. The discovery, in partnership with Charles Bagot, helped cushion South Australia against the wool recession of the early-1840s and the eastern colonies' gold discoveries of the 1850s. As a consequence, everyone in South Australia adored Francis Dutton. One day late in 1869, rumour has it, a luncheon meeting took place in the recently-renovated Parliamentary dining room; Commons now shared with Lords and, because of the more refined culinary tastes of the latter, a tank of live turtles was installed in a corner at the behest of the Joint Houses Kitchen Committee. It was near this tank that John Pender MP's guests sat down. Present, apart from the host, were Francis Dutton, Captain Sherard Osborn and his younger brother, Noel, a navy commander who had taken leave to perform certain private travelling duties for his elder sibling. Host Pender might have put his guests at ease with a little-known tale about the dining customs of British politicians ... 'In the old days, before there was a dining room,' he said, 'Members of Parliament used to take their meals at Bellamy's eating house. And do you know what the younger William Pitt's last words were in 1806?' 'Oh, I know that, sir! Every British chap knows that!' exclaimed Noel Osborn, 'He said, "Oh, my country! How I love my country!"' A shake of the head. 'No,' said John Pender,'In fact, he said, "Oh, for one of Bellamy's veal pies!" The more patriotic lines were invented by his spin doctors who wanted the House of Commons to pay his £40,000 debts.' Francis Dutton leaned forward. 'Why are you telling us this little parable?' he enquired. 'Because,' said Pender, 'Captain Osborn and I have resorted to some, er, imaginative tactics to stir activity from the Australian colonial governments with regard to international telegraph services.' Sherard Osborn, on behalf of the Telegraph Maintenance and Construction Company had written in August, 1869, to all Australian governments advising them of the company's offer to lay a cable from Java to Burketown, in the Gulf of Carpentaria, to connect with the Queensland telegraph system! This was a gigantic bluff, aimed squarely at the tardy South Australians; Burketown was considered the most lawless settlement in Australia, plagued with tropical diseases and frequently isolated by monsoonal floods covering areas the size of European principalities. Dutton probably saw the joke and agreed to play the game in the interests of South Australia's future: as he did in 1842, when he and Charles Bagot found the Kapunda copper, he was riding to the colony's rescue! At the request of urgently-concerned Higher Ups in Adelaide, he 'convinced' Pender and Sherard Osborn to reconsider, in the light of George Goyder's recent survey. So Pender and his director cronies formed the British Australian Telegraph to lay a line from Java to Darwin, raised the capital quite magically, and had Sherard Osborn write to the latest

Page 131 of 162

Alice and the Weather Man

20/10/09 1:51 PM

Governor of South Australia, Sir James Fergusson (who, interestingly, died in an earthquake in Jamaica in 1907, the only Scottish governor to suffer such a fate) on 22nd January, 1870, to inform him of these developments. This letter effectively killed the chances of two Londonbased rival hopefuls, the Anglo-Australian Telegraph Company and the Eastern Oceanic Telegraph Company, which were little more than postal addresses. Sound familiar? Hey, that's international capitalism at work! You'd have to admire the steel nerves of some of these investors. Of course, they were attracted by some fancy names: one of Pender's star director draw-cards was the 4th Viscount Charles Monck, lately the beloved first Governor-General of Canada and Lord of the Treasury in the Palmerston Government from 1855-57. Talk about credentials, even if he was a director-bycorrespondence from his lordly estate in Ballytrammon, County Wexford. John Pender and Sherard Osborn couldn't resist a tease in the January, 1870 letter; they suggested that their company would be happy to run a branch connection to Burketown from the main Darwin-Port Augusta line. They added that Commander Noel Osborn was about to board a ship in London for Adelaide to discuss these proposals. On 29th March, the South Australian Government wrote back suggesting they'd much prefer the line didn't include any Queensland connection ... and quietly asked Charles Todd to work out how much it would cost South Australia to build its exclusive line south. Todd produced a figure of £120,000 and, on 18th June, the South Australian Parliament hurriedly passed legislation agreeing to this sum. The deal was done. The British Australian Telegraph Company would pay to bring the telegraph to Australian shores in Darwin; South Australia would pay to carry it to Adelaide via Port Augusta. And Adelaide would become the hub of the Australian telegraph. According to Frank Clune in Overland Telegraph (Angus and Robertson, 1955), Charles Todd described the events of 1870 in a lecture he gave many years later. In this talk, he gave credit to the lawyer and politician Henry Strangways, who is often ignored in the narrative of the momentous happenings of the 1860s-70s: 'I discussed with Commander Noel Osborn (in Adelaide) my old project of a landline across the continent, and pointed out the advantages such a line would possess over one which kept for a great distance in the flooded country around the Gulf of Carpentaria. Mr Strangways, who was then Attorney-General, and in whom the Overland Telegraph line had found one of its earliest promoters in connection with Stuart's explorations, now took up the matters very warmly.' Henry Bull Templar Strangways was a lawyer, but an admirable man all the same, if a little impatient with the intellectual and administrative shortcomings of many of his fellow South Australians. Charles Todd was not, of course, among this unfortunate group. Strangways' great triumph was the Act of Parliament which still bears his name: the Strangways Act of 1869

Page 132 of 162

Alice and the Weather Man

20/10/09 1:51 PM

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

Page 133 of 162

Alice and the Weather Man

20/10/09 1:51 PM

the other (sensible) way round Australia, appeared in the harbour. Her passengers included the doughty John McKinlay, a searcher for the late Burke and Wills, who was empowered to check the survey on behalf of the impatient absentee land owners, many of them investors in Britain; McKinlay was aged fifty-one, but he was worn down by the exertions of his Outback life and died in Adelaide two years later. On this assignment, one of his last, he had as his assistant Stephen King, one of the splendid young men who had accompanied John McDouall Stuart on his heroic journey of 1861-62. Another Bengal passenger was Daniel Dominick Daly, nephew of the late Governor, Sir Dominick Daly, a plain sort of honest toiler, employed as a senior government surveyor and who, for the sentimentally-inclined, nursed a burning passion for Resident Commissioner Douglas' eldest daughter, Harriet, a slender, homely, late-teenage girl, a true pioneering daughter of the Empire with a tremendous tolerance for heat, monsoons, mosquitoes and the earth-floored hut which became the first Government House. On 15th September, 1870, about thirty of the European residents trooped out to plant the first rough timber pole of the Overland Telegraph line; the next critical stage would be the arrival of the undersea cable from Java on 7th November, 1871, followed by the grand opening of the line in Adelaide on 22nd August, 1872. The Larakia people, who'd kindly donated the land free of charge, turned out in numbers to applaud the white folks from the sidelines, but their presence was not evident in the official photograph. Resident Commissioner Douglas, the tallest figure in his topee, is in the left of the picture, Harriet is near the centre, holding a peg-pounding mallet, and Douglas' suffering wife, Ellen, is to the right; she was not well, but she soldiered on courageously. Instructions had already been sent by steamer from Adelaide to the nearest cable connection in Ceylon (Sri Lanka) urgently requesting Agent-General Francis Dutton to send supplies of wire, insulators, batteries, 3000 iron poles six metres long and all the other paraphernalia of telegraphy. In Adelaide, Charles Todd assumed the unsung role of Dictator of the Project; he was taking an awful risk; if it became unstuck, there wouldn't be a wombat hole on the Nullarbor safe enough for him to hide. But, confidently, he stood at his work table and divided the centre of the great island continent into three sections: Southern, Central and Northern. Let the work begin. Todd must have felt the same nervous anticipation as William Hudson, new supremo of the Snowy Mountains Scheme when they fired the first ceremonial explosive charge of that other great public works venture at Adaminaby in 1949, eighty years later. A city reporter asked Hudson: 'You're drilling the tunnels from opposite ends of the mountains? What if they don't meet?' Bill Hudson didn't blink: 'Two tunnels,' he said. Charles Todd ordered the Southern and Northern Sections, with their easier access to supply from the sea, to be handled by private contractors; the more difficult and remote Central Section would be the responsibility of his own Department. John

Page 134 of 162

Alice and the Weather Man

20/10/09 1:51 PM

McDouall Stuart's maps were the guide, but a new generation of explorers were authorised to select alternative routes if necessary. Waterholes were the keys. Alfred Giles, one of the boldest bushmen, recorded: 'The fact that we were the first white people to pass through this country added greatly to the pleasure we all experienced.' Droving bosses with teams of stockman were hired to push vast mobs of sheep north; the initial order was for 2000 fresh trotting mutton. Afghan camel drivers were imported to run regular supply trains. This time, they remembered the lessons of Captain James Cook in the 1770s and provided lime juice to ward off the dreaded scurvy that so severely affected the earlier expeditions of Charles Sturt and John McDouall Stuart. In the northern South Australian desert of Todd's Central Section, east of the Acraman Outer Space Object's crash landing 590 million years ago, a team under the government surveyor Richard Knuckey, horses and men exhausted by the relentless, breathless summer heat of 10th January, 1871, saw east-bound bronze-winged pigeons low overhead, flying towards the south western fringes of the Simpson Desert. The young horsemen were Australian-born sons of pioneers, most of them, and they knew the birds were making for water at dusk. They followed the flock across a glowing orange moonscape and their horses suddenly raised their weary heads. They smelled water. Soon, the riders came upon reeds and then they saw, by moonlight, the gleam of a spring. This was a place Stuart had missed in the northward journey 1861 and they knew they had found an ideal waterhole for the Overland Telegraph. Next day, Knuckey named this oasis 'Charlotte Waters'. Naturally, everyone assumed he'd was trying improve his position by sucking up to the boss, the rotten crawler ... you know, naming the place after Alice Todd's mum, Charlotte Bell. But that wasn't true (though it could be supposed he was having, in the Australian vernacular, a bob each-way). For heaven's sake, William Whitfield Mills had already pulled that stunt in Alice Springs! No, no! 'Charlotte Waters' was a wildly romantic choice of name involving the depraved Lord Byron and his dazzling heroine Ianthe ... and here's how it came about in that speck in the Australian Outback ... In Adelaide, resided the widowed Lady Charlotte Bacon, ageing gracefully despite a wonderfully extravagant and abandoned girlhood in the London of the Regency. She was born in 1801 and learned everything she knew from her mother, Lady Jane Harley, wife of Edward Harley, the fifth Earl of Oxford; she was said to have been the brainiest, most beautiful and easily most promiscuous woman in London; Lady Charlotte's own paternity was a constant source of intellectual discussion over candle-lit suppers, as was that of all her siblings (the children were known, jocularly, as the 'Harleian Miscellany', after one of his Lordship's obscure publications). Anyway, one day, when Charlotte was aged eleven, Byron visited her mother and noticed the nubile lass. He dedicated Ianthe in his book, Childe Harold's Pilgrimage to Charlotte and told his

Page 135 of 162

Alice and the Weather Man

20/10/09 1:51 PM

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 twentytwo, 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

Page 136 of 162

Alice and the Weather Man

20/10/09 1:51 PM

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 privatelycontracted 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 newlywidowed 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,

Page 137 of 162

Alice and the Weather Man

20/10/09 1:51 PM

Governor of Victoria, etc, Colonel Ackland Anderson', among many notables. In other developments in communications Australia in 1871, Tasmania got its first steam railway, between Launceston and Deloraine, Warwick connected with Toowoomba, in southern Queensland, and a saw-milling company opened Western Australia's railway first near the settlement of Busselton. And a fast, reliable mail steamer service was about to begin between Sydney and San Francisco. While these distractions were happening elsewhere on the continent, Charles Todd's Overland Telegraph was about to encounter its first serious difficulties in the Northern Section. The private contractors, William Dalwood and Joseph Darwent had come from Adelaide on the steamer Omeo with eighty workmen and began to build the line from Darwin towards Tennant Creek, 1000km south where the Central Section began. All of the Northern Section, including Tennant Creek, was north of the Tropic of Capricorn. Good progress was made and they planted 300km of their poles south; then the summer monsoon arrived in November, 1870. Rain turned the earth into an endless bog from which a man could barely extricate a booted foot; mosquitoes brought tropical diseases; supplies became irregular and the once-hearty meals became inedible; on 7th March, 1871, the desperate contractors' men went on strike against the conditions. The South Australian Government's Northern overseer, the 26-year-old surveyor and architect, William McMinn, impetuously rescinded Dalwood and Darwent's contract in May and returned to Adelaide. Subsequently, he was dismissed for his ill-judged actions and the hapless contractors awarded £11,000 damages. But the Northern Section was in a shambles. This was where Charles Todd showed his leadership mettle. He and his new Northern Section head, Robert Patterson, boarded ships in Adelaide with 200 men, 170 horses and 500 bullocks to drag their equipment through the north's sticky morass. On 24th August, 1871, they arrived in Darwin and, reviewing the critical situation, Charles decided to move the rescue expedition east to the Roper River, on the Gulf of Carpentaria. This would give them closer access from the sea to the bogged 'head of the line' near Mataranka. Two tall-masted steamers, Omeo and Bengal, penetrated the river mouth and found safe anchorage on its deep, broad lower reaches. A camp town was established on the banks. The wet season of 1871-72 was almost on them and the undersea cable was drawing closer to Darwin. Charles knew that the Southern and Central Sections were nearing completion. He had only to hasten the completion of the Northern Section with his fresh men. In the Roper River camp at this time, probably early-1872, a famous photograph (among Overland Telegraph buffs) was taken of four of the key men in this daring and risky seaborne rescue strategy. They were pictured leaning against one of the bullockdrawn drays that would jolt their supplies westward to Mataranka. They had a jaunty, not-a-care-in-the-world air about them and were (left to right): John Little, future head of the Darwin telegraph

Page 138 of 162

Alice and the Weather Man

20/10/09 1:51 PM

station; Robert Patterson, Todd's second-in-command (with dashing bandana around his waist); Charles Todd (wearing his glamorous cavalry riding boots) and a surveyor, A. J. Mitchell. The photograph was taken by Captain Samuel Sweet, who had just piloted the Bengal to its safe anchorage in the river. He had taken an equallyfamous photograph of the large group gathered at the site of the ceremonial planting of the first telegraph pole in Darwin on 15th September, 1870. Samuel Sweet, along with the New Yorker Townsend Duryea, became the most prominent of the people who recorded the heroic age of South Australian exploration in photographs. Townsend Duryea was primarily an Adelaide studio photographer, capturing the pioneers, men and women, and their children in their Sunday best: Sweet was a ship's skipper and enthusiastic amateur/ professional photographer who, fortuitously, was contracted to the South Australia Government at the time of these historic events on the colony's desert or eucalyptus jungle frontline. Sweet was born in Portsea, Hampshire, in 1825, joined the Royal Navy as a lad, and rose to various obscure commands before joining a Liverpool-based shipping company as a master. Early in the 1860s, he married Elizabeth Tilly in England and the pair migrated to Australia where he'd vowed to make his fortune as a cotton-grower in Queensland, assuming that the American Civil War would last forever and there would be an insatiable demand from the dark, satanic mills of Manchester. Well, that didn't happen and the Sweets drifted to Adelaide where he re-invented himself as a professional photographer and worked in a studio in Rundle Street. Then the colony's impulse to settle the north became urgent, the colonial government bought the comfortable schooner Gulnare and, in 1870, Sweet found himself captain of the vessel, ferrying Resident Douglas, his family and associates north to Darwin. Later, he found himself under Douglas' orders, carrying out an errand in the Gulnare to the Portuguese-held island of Timor to the north, Darwin's nearest 'European' neighbour, during which he collected a cargo of eighteen buffaloes, ponies and, unbelievably, monkeys which, mysteriously, vanished in the tropic stillness of the Great Outback. On another mission to the Roper River, he ran the Gulnare aground on a reef after which he was sent back to Adelaide and the vessel condemned. Sweet was released from government service and joined the Adelaide-based Black Diamond Line, skippering colliers to the coppers smelters of the Yorke Pensinsula. However, he lost that job in 1875 when his ship, Wallaroo, ran aground in a gale near the copper port of the same name; there was some gossip that he was engaged in a cuddlesome moment in the cuddy with his desirable wife, Elizabeth, who was on board at the time, having left their nine children in the care of an understanding housekeeper. Anyway, the resourceful Samuel Sweet established a photographic studio in Adelaide, bought a horse-drawn mobile darkroom and began photographing the good citizens of Adelaide,

Page 139 of 162

Alice and the Weather Man

20/10/09 1:51 PM

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

Page 140 of 162

Alice and the Weather Man

20/10/09 1:51 PM

thousands of his negatives. Duryea took up a land selection in the NSW Riverina, but his sons followed him as Adelaide photographers. Meanwhile, way up north, Charles Todd refused to be distracted by the events back home (particularly the Affair of the Baptist Organ) and a looming local Darwin scandal and pressed southwards with his Overland Telegraph. The South Australian Government was subject to severe penalties if the line to Adelaide was not completed before the undersea cable came ashore in Darwin from Java. The irritating Darwin troubles were caused by Resident Douglas, frustrated in his efforts to be regarded as a Great White Rajah, allowing his judgement to be swayed by certain investments he'd made in the new-found Northern Territory gold, and generally made a nuisance of himself by taking to the bottle, the White Man's Tropical Curse. Eventually, he was recalled to Adelaide and sacked with a generous payment. But instead of retiring Home, as was devoutly hoped, he followed his daughter, Harriet and her new husband, Dominick Daniel Daly, to Malaya; they had hoped to make a new life there in the colonial civil service, away from the old rogue. He stayed for some years, embarrassing them frightfully, until he went to Canada, fibbed about his age, and got splendid government jobs. Daniel Dominick Daly died on 15th July, 1889, at Mempakol, British North Borneo, and Harriet retired to London to become an occasional correspondent for the Sydney Morning Herald. She had already written an account of her brief stay in the Territory, Digging, Squatting and Pioneering Life in Northern Australia (London, 1887) and a piece on importing British roses to British North Borneo to compete, no doubt, with the delicate, indigenous begonia ... But we're being diverted from our purpose once more ... An assistant of Charles Todd, a vigorous Scotsman in his fifties, John Ross, found a successful route through the MacDonnell Ranges after William Whitfield Mills' delightful discovery of Alice Springs. On 22nd August, 1872, the two ends of the line met at Frew's Ponds and the Overland Telegraph was complete. Charles Todd sent the historic message to Adelaide down the wire: 'We have this day, within two years, completed a line of communication two thousand miles long through the very centre of Australia, until a few years ago a terra incognita believed to be a desert.' On 22nd October, the first telegram arrived in Adelaide from England and the tyranny of distance was banished.

24. Samuel Pepys and the Weather Man Samuel Pepys, the London diarist, came home to Seething Lane on 21st January, 1661, and wrote: 'It is strange what weather we have had all this winter: no cold at all; but the ways are dusty, and the flyes fly up and down, and the rose bushes are full of leaves, such a time was never known in this world before here. This day many more of the Fifth Monarchy men were hanged.' Mid-winter in Ye Olde England and they were sufferin' a bleedin' drought! Mind you, the ones bleedin' the most were the ten Fifth Monarchy Men,

Page 141 of 162

Alice and the Weather Man

20/10/09 1:51 PM

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 lateVictorian 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?'

Page 142 of 162

Alice and the Weather Man

20/10/09 1:51 PM

'That's probably what killed her after childbirth in 1537,' said Alice, ever the cheerful one on the subject of death in the family. Charles refused to be diverted. 'But only three years later, a four-year drought began so severe that the Thames began to dry up and sea water actually extended past London Bridge and they were picking cherries before the end of May.' 'Ah, to be in England in May!' sighed Alice. 'The history of the weather has nothing to do with the past, but everything to do with the future,' he said, mysteriously. The year was 1873 and exciting news had reached Adelaide. William Gosse, a young government surveyor trying to find a route to Western Australia, had struck out west from the telegraph line south of Alice Springs and discovered the most extraordinary monolith ... on 19 July, 1873, he wrote in his journal: 'The hill, as I approached, presented a most peculiar appearance, the upper portion being covered with holes or caves. When I got clear of the sandhills, and was only two miles distant, and the hill, coming fairly in view, what was my astonishment to find it was one immense rock rising abruptly from the plain ... I have named this Ayers Rock, after Sir Henry Ayers (Premier of SA).' The aborigines, who actually found it first, called the rock Uluru, a name that was restored more than a century later. About this time, Charles' friend, George Goyder, having returned from his successful survey of the Top End, was having problems with a reckless bureaucracy determined to abandon his 'Line of Rainfall' which he had devised in the 1860s as the northernmost line people could farm safely. By 1874, immigration pressures had caused the government to throw open the land above Goyder's Line. 'Rain follows the plough,' they said, quoting an old English adage that breaking the soil released moisture into the atmosphere, encouraging the formation of rain clouds. Not in South Australia, it didn't. At first they were lucky, but from 1880 onwards the rains were intermittent; farmers failed and were relocated south of the Line, leaving sheep runs denuded of native vegetation and causing large-scale erosion. Goyder took no satisfaction in his vindication. But his power increased and he insisted on the retention of stands of trees when parcels of land were opened up to farmers and graziers. Ultimately, it was all about adapting to the vagaries of weather in the driest colony in the driest continent. Charles Todd, meanwhile, thanked his lucky stars that the Overland Telegraph was completed before one of the most exciting events of his astronomical life: the first Transit of Venus since the 1769 event that brought James Cook and Joseph Banks in the Endeavour to Tahiti and eventually, the discovery and claiming of eastern Australia for the British Crown. The Transit, in which Venus comes between Earth and the Sun, happened on 9th December, 1874, and was vividly observed from Australia, the western Pacific, Japan and Central Asia. The entire Transit across part of the Sun's blazing orb took four-and-a-half hours. Charles was so taken with the spectacle that he had a temporary observatory built at

Page 143 of 162

Alice and the Weather Man

20/10/09 1:51 PM

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

Page 144 of 162

Alice and the Weather Man

20/10/09 1:51 PM

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

Page 145 of 162

Alice and the Weather Man

20/10/09 1:51 PM

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.

Page 146 of 162

Alice and the Weather Man

20/10/09 1:51 PM

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

Page 147 of 162

Alice and the Weather Man

20/10/09 1:51 PM

technology. The Berlin Conference concentrated particularly on international obligations protecting the European nations undersea cables. Most had to be rewritten after World War One. After Berlin, he and Lizzie went to Cambridge, a quiet triumph for Charles, who had left the university city with Alice thirty years before in such nervous anticipation. In Cambridge, he was made honorary M.A. of the university. His sponsor was the exalted Professor John Couch Adams, a Cornishman who had figured by mathematics the existence of the Planet Neptune in 1845 with the smallest help from the very insignificant Charles Todd, a junior in the astronomical department. Adams had become a world authority on gravitational astronomy and terrestrial magnetism, subjects close to Charles' heart and which he rarely (perhaps never!) discussed with Alice back in Adelaide. In Cambridge, Lizzie stole away during Adams' talks with Charles and met her future husband, Charles Squires. She was the first of his children to return Home; another was a younger daughter, Gwendoline, who married the English-born physicist, William Bragg, who shared the Nobel Prize for physics for the application of X-rays to the study of crystals with their Adelaide-born son, Lawrence, in 1915. The whole family gathered at the Observatory in 1897, the year before Lady Alice's passing, and looked positively modest in their group portrait.

25. Life of Alice ... ' ... DEATH OF LADY TODD. - We would not have it expressed in mere form of words our heartfelt sympathy with the dear old father of the Service, Sir Charles Todd, in the incomparable calamity that has befallen him in the loss of his dear wife, the companion of his best days, and his very best friend. We cannot adequately articulate the language of the heart towards our brother-in-office on such an occasion, and we feel that, while it is our function to record, on behalf of the Service, the natural sympathy of its members, we are sure Sir Charles will find some consolation in the many individual tributes of friendship that he has received, and in the knowledge that the whole Service sincerely mourns with him in his affliction ... ' The Public Service Review, Adelaide, South Australia, August, 1898.

26. Charles ... alone into 20th century Alice died of a rapidly-weakening heart a few days after she saw her youngest daughter, Lorna, make her debut, along with other pretty girls from Adelaide's First Families, in the presence of the Governor, Sir Thomas Buxton. Charles went to work next day; there was nothing else he could do. Indeed, he continued working until 1906, his eightieth year; South Australia refused to change its Constitution when the Australian Colonies federated in 1901 so the grand old man could continue to report at the office as long as he liked. His position as Postmaster-General became a

Page 148 of 162

Alice and the Weather Man

20/10/09 1:51 PM

Commonwealth position, so the South Australians merely changed his title and he continued to live in the Observatory. Charles Todd continued to make his daily weather observations, taking into account, particularly, data available from the other Colonies, then States, so a whole Australian continental meteorological picture emerged. He began as the 'people's weather man' in the early-1860s, when, having moved into the Observatory residence, he began issuing daily forecasts to the Adelaide Advertiser. In time, with the extension of the telegraph to other Australian cities, his forecasts could be picked up by their newspapers. After 1872, absentee pastoral landowners in London could expect daily updates on the paucity, or otherwise, of rain on their holdings in, say, western Queensland. Charles said later his weather forecasts had a human safeguard: he and his assistant would write out their forecasts separately, have a reasoned discussion, then publish the results. In 1893, at an Adelaide meteorological conference, he claimed that his daily forecasts over the previous four years were accurate 73 per cent of the time, partly accurate for 20 per cent and completely wrong the remaining seven per cent. Charles Todd finally retired in 1906, so frail that he walked with the aid of two sticks. He spent much of the time at his house in Semaphore, looking out across Gulf St Vincent and the broad beach with signs enforcing Edwardian modesty among the sea bathers: Ladies to the left; Gentlemen to the right. One day, pottering in his garden, he scratched himself; the wound became infected and he died of gangrene on 29th January 1910. He was laid to rest beside Alice at North Road Cemetery

27. The Life of Charles ... '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.

28. Nearly 100 years later ... 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

Page 149 of 162

Alice and the Weather Man

20/10/09 1:51 PM

combined wisdom of the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) and the Australian Bureau of Meteorology outlined the new Australian Federal Government's stance in a very political speech in Melbourne ... to the howls of outrage from the global warming nay-sayers, dreaming of coalpowered Jumbo Jets in age of never-ending, belching industrialisation, re-born as Australia's Shout-Ya-Down Climate Change Sceptics. Garrett explained Australia's position, mildly ... 'It’s well accepted now that one reason the Rudd Government was elected last year,' said the former Midnight Oils rock star, 'was because of community concern about our future climate. It is the case that the previous Government had failed to act or recognise the seriousness of global warming and its potentials. 'That was the community sense, a sense that Australia’s interests, our environmental health and our economic health, even our security interests, were jeopardised by the failure to act resolutely on climate change. I think, as well, we witnessed a rapid transformation in Australians’ understanding that a stable climate actually underpins an environment that is healthy, ensuring a sustainable economy and the lifestyle that we have and want coming generations to enjoy as well. And, whilst it is the case that Australians have always been weather aware, I would argue now that they’re increasingly climate aware too. 'Today, I would like to share with you the Rudd Government’s plans for protecting Australia’s climate now and into the future. And also on this occasion pay tribute to the important role that the Australian Bureau of Meteorology has played, and will continue to play in the future. As you know, 2008 is the 100-year anniversary of the formation of our national meteorological organisation. 'Like the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, the Bureau is one of those national institutions with which all Australians have a day-to-day relationship. It helps us with simple decisions like: Should I take an umbrella or wear a coat? And the Bureau’s work informs business decisions like: Should I harvest today? Should we start building work today? We check in on what the weather is doing at any given moment, using the Bureau’s information-rich website, including its fantastic online radar. It’s one of Australia’s most popular websites. 'But I also want to point out the other roles of the Bureau are less well known are equally important, particularly the significant contribution it makes in monitoring, recording, analysing, researching and predicting our climate. It is the case that the Bureau’s work no longer deals only with weather and climate, but extends to understanding and protecting the oceans, monitoring the air we breathe, and the assessing the data around the management of water resources. 'The first step in doing all these things is “observing” what is actually happening, with the weather, the climate, the oceans, the air and water. These observations tell us about the past, and from that enable us to better predict the future. So I guess the first

Page 150 of 162

Alice and the Weather Man

20/10/09 1:51 PM

question to ask is what we do know about Australia’s climate past? First of all, we know that the Australian climate changes a lot from year to year and from decade to decade. Through the research of the Bureau and its partners, we’re starting to better understand these changes. 'For example, from 1910 to 2004, the average maximum temperature rose 0.6 degrees Celsius and the minimum temperature rose 1.2 degrees. Most of that change, dramatic as it is, occurred after 1950, in our lifetimes, and it is very likely that increasing greenhouse gases contributed to that warming trend. We also know that over the past 50 years, rainfall has increased in north-western Australia and decreased in southern and eastern Australia. 'The decrease in the south-west is probably due to a combination of increased Greenhouse Gas concentrations, natural climate variability and land-use change. Some of the changes are already substantial. Stream-flow in the south-western corner of Western Australia decreased by fifty per cent since the mid-1970s. That is an extraordinary statistic given the importance of a reliable water supply to our health, the environment and agriculture. 'The changes in the climate are accompanied by other signs in the natural world. Rain forest is expanding at the expense of eucalypt forest and grassland in the Northern Territory, Queensland and New South Wales, linked to changes in rainfall and fire regimes. Snow gums are encroaching into sub-alpine grasslands at higher elevations and more feral mammals are intruding into alpine areas. And in a region that is one of this Government’s priorities, the Great Barrier Reef, the dangers noted are extreme. Before 1979, no serious coral bleaching events had been observed. Since 1979, there have been eight mass bleaching events, triggered by unusually high sea surface temperatures. 'Taken together, the changing climate and along with other observations informing our understanding, this picture invites us to look seriously to Australia’s climate future. And for Melburnians it will be serious. You can expect up to 84 more hot days over 35 degrees by 2050 and up to 32 fewer frost days. So the Bureau will be delivering the science that informs these startling figures and then of course will relay the news to the city around the clock, daily, monthly and yearly. 'It is a dual role that the Bureau now has and one that is critical. It is also likely that evaporation will increase while soil moisture and runoff decreases over most of Australia. Now that may seem like a bland enough statement but when we look more deeply at it, it means that droughts, already a feature of our climate pattern, will likely be more frequent and certainly more intense. And those plant and animal communities and, critically, human communities living in these areas and thus affected will really be facing considerable challenge. Fire danger is likely to increase more frequent fires, increased fire intensity, a decrease in fire extinguishments and faster fire spread. 'On the coast, we can expect more inundation and wave

Page 151 of 162

Alice and the Weather Man

20/10/09 1:51 PM

damage from storm surges, exacerbated by sea level rise. For Australians, we’ve got a number of 'hotspots' which are especially vulnerable to climate change and they include: • Kakadu. One of our most important national parks and world heritage listed, where rising sea level may push saltwater into freshwater wetlands; • South-western Australia, where drying may lead to water shortages, less cropping land and fragmented natural habitats; • And of course the Murray-Darling Basin, where reduced water supply we know is expected to affect irrigation, cities, industries and environmental flows, so necessary for the health of the river system. 'So I don’t think it is any wonder the Australian people gave the Rudd Government a mandate to take serious action on climate change. Frankly, ignoring dangerous climate change was no longer an option. The Bureau’s role in climate science may not be as well recognised as its role in forecasting weather, but what we know about our climate in the past, the present, and the future, stems directly from the daily actions of its meteorologists, hydrologists, and oceanographers. 'Australia is fortunate to have the detailed climate record that it has. There may be some quibbles from those of us in political life or students of our history about the Constitution, but I think it has to be said that the framers of the Constitution had the foresight to lay the basis for Australia’s climate record. They gave Parliament the power to make laws with respect to meteorological observations, among many other things. In that nation-building spirit, meteorology was put on a national footing, with offices in each State and Territory, and a set of consistent standards by which to measure and record temperature and rainfall. Early observations were manual, haphazard and mainly taken near populated areas. 'A century on, the observing networks and the people who operate and maintain them span the entire continent and extend to all our territories, from the Indian Ocean and Coral Sea islands to Antarctica. They are supported by a vast network of volunteer observers whose dedicated efforts provide the remarkable delivery of a community service every day. In the early days, as now, the Bureau used the data it collected to forecast the day- to-day weather across Australia. Then, as now, its attempts were often criticised as highly inaccurate, but I am in no doubt that this was a more valid concern in those days, than now. "In those days meteorological science was in its infancy. Now the Bureau delivers meteorological science of technological sophistication and correspondingly of fine and more accurate forecasting. One of the first policy uses of the Bureau’s climate data was to demonstrate the desirability of Australia as a place to settle, to attract new migrants. So part of the Bureau’s history is in helping to shape the culture and the demography of the settler nation, Australia. These early efforts have produced a great legacy –the nation’s climate record. Because of this record, we now know that climate is not static as initially thought but constantly varying on all time scales like the weather itself. Hence the observing and data

Page 152 of 162

Alice and the Weather Man

20/10/09 1:51 PM

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

Page 153 of 162

Alice and the Weather Man

20/10/09 1:51 PM

technology is already playing an increasing role, with observations now routinely taken from satellites, radars, instrumented weather balloons, commercial aircraft, and automatic observing stations. Like any organisation with a long and distinguished history, the Bureau will adapt to the times and to the new challenges. And it must, in a period of intense climate interest with its new responsibilities for monitoring our water supplies and with the opportunities presented by new technology, the Bureau is clearly evolving. But it is also a period of fiscal restraint for governments and these changes will need to be put in place carefully with a clear eye on the services the Bureau provides, in the public interest. I am sure that by continuing to provide a world class weather forecasting service and acknowledging and understanding the needs of the community it serves, the Bureau will chart a successful path into the new century. 'The third pillar of the Government’s approach to climate change is helping to shape a global solution. That’s why the first act of the Rudd Government was to ratify the Kyoto Protocol. Ratifying Kyoto put Australia back on the map. It meant that for the first time we were a full negotiating partner in all key international climate change forums. And because international collaboration is critical in addressing climate change and has been essential to developing our understanding of Australia’s weather and climate, the Bureau’s role in international collaboration remains critical. Understanding meteorological activities in other parts of the world depends critically on Australia’s observations here. So to this extent, since the establishment of the World Meteorological Organisation in 1950, members have worked tirelessly toward a common goal to produce comprehensive, integrated global observing, weather, climate, and research programs. The Bureau has always been a significant player in this forum. In 1988 the then Director of Meteorology, Dr John Zillman, became the first Vice-President of the World Meteorological Organization, becoming President for eight years from 1996. And I want to acknowledge Dr Zillman who is with us today. At that time, Australia was closely involved in the establishment of the most authoritative source of scientific advice on the state of the global climate, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. 'Australia’s role in this extraordinary international effort has been highly significant. From 2002 to 2003 the current Director of Meteorology, Dr Geoff Love, was Secretary of the Panel. Australian scientists, including many from the Bureau, have contributed to the Panel’s assessments of scientific findings on climate change for the past twenty years, helping to bridge the gap between the technological community and the policymakers. The 2007 Nobel Peace Prize acknowledged the significance of their work. 'The Bureau also represents Australia in the Group on Earth Observations which is coordinating international efforts to build a Global Earth Observation System of Systems. This emerging public infrastructure connects a range of systems for monitoring and

Page 154 of 162

Alice and the Weather Man

20/10/09 1:51 PM

forecasting changes in the global environment, to support policymakers, resource managers, science researchers and many other experts and many other decision- makers. The observations collected by the Bureau of Meteorology since its establishment 100 years ago have played a key part in developing our current knowledge ... Climate change offers new possibilities, new industries, new development, new ways of thinking. We do have time to act and this Government is acting. After 100 years, the Bureau of Meteorology has emerged at the beginning of this century an accomplished organisation, not only providing Australian’s with the best, up to the minute weather information they need to plan and build their lives, but able to respond to the many environmental challenges facing Australia, especially in a time of climate change.' The CSIRO said, simply: 'In 2007 the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) released their fourth assessment report, concluding that: • Warming of the climate system is unequivocal • Humans are very likely to be causing most of the warming that has been experienced since 1950 • It is very likely that changes in the global climate system will continue well into the future, and that they will be larger than those seen in the recent past.' Charles Todd would have suspected all the aforementioned, we can confidently surmise, even though he had died 98 years before! And did he wonder if William Blake was hinting (1804) at the future perils of Heavy Carbon Footprints ... ? And did those feet in ancient time, Walk upon England’s mountains green: And was the holy Lamb of God, On England’s pleasant pastures seen! And did the Countenance Divine Shine forth upon our clouded hills? And was Jerusalem builded here, Among these dark Satanic Mills? These 'dark Satanic mills'! There you have the culprit! These were the origins of too many 'Greenhouse Gases', way back in the mid-1700s. Charles would have known, perhaps by a different name, that the natural process of determining the temperature near the surface of Earth is a balance between energy from the Sun, and heat reflected from Earth to Outer Space. The Industrial Revolutions of the 18th and 19th centuries brought about a dramatic increase in plumes of Greenhouse Gases (principally carbon dioxide), as well as some new gases such as chlorofluorocarbon and sulphur hexafluoride. Simply, the balance is becoming upset ... and global cooperation is required to bring it back to a desirable level. It all seems so easy, if we can all work together! Charles Todd had great confidence in our future; in 1893, he gave a long address, summarising colonial meteorological achievements on the eve of Federation, to the Australasian Association for the Advancement of Science. His final words were ...

Page 155 of 162

Alice and the Weather Man

20/10/09 1:51 PM

'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). Abbott, Henry, Sydney convict (amazing mathematical death) Abdulmecid, reforming Ottoman Turkish Sultan (1839-61) Aborigines, (Yantruwanta assist Burke, Wills and King), other references throughout. Abyssinian Crisis (1867) 'Acraman Impact Event', (comet strike, SA) Adams, John Couch, astronomer, (discovers Neptune) Adelaide, settlement and city references throughout Admella, wrecked coastal ship Airy, George, Astronomer Royal Aldini, Giovanni, scientist ( gruesome 'London Experiment') Alfred, Duke of Edinburgh, (women's 'no' to nudity) Alice Springs American (U.S,) Civil War 'Ashton's Hotel' (Adelaide Gaol) Auld, Pat, Stuart's expedition Auld, Pat, Snr, SA wine export pioneer Australian Bureau of Meteorology Ayers Rock, (named after SA Premier Sir Henry Ayers) Bacon, Lady Charlotte, entrancing widow, (Byron's Ianthe) Bacon, Harley, Overland Telegraph meat supplier, (son of above) Bagot, Charles, SA pioneer Bagot, Henry, SA pioneer Ball, Henry, First Fleet lieutenant, (fathers convict's child, but takes kangaroo Home) Ballarat, (Eureka Stockade)

Page 156 of 162

Alice and the Weather Man

20/10/09 1:51 PM

Barrow Creek (NT) Bathurst (location) Bathurst, Henry, Secretary for Colonies Batman, John, Victorian pioneer Barral and Blixio, balloon ascent, Paris, (1850) Bass, George, naval surgeon/explorer Bass Strait (Vic/Tas) Baxter, John, explorer with Eyre Bell, Alexander Graham, (patents telephone) Bell, Charlotte (Clark), Alice's mother Bell, Edward, corn dealer, Alice's father Bendigo Bengal, barque Bentley, Richard, Wills Sr's London publisher beri-beri (Burke and Wills' killer) Billiat, William, Stuart's expedition Binney, Thomas, 'Archbishop of Nonconformity' Bismarck, Otto, German Chancellor, captures Danish telegraphs Black Sea, 157 (submarine telegraph) Blackfellows Bones Blanchetown (SA) Bonython, John Langdon, newspaper proprietor Brinkley's Bluff (NT) Brahe, William, explorer with Burke and Wills Brett, John and Jacob, English telegraph entrepreneurs Brisbane, Thomas, Qld governor and astronomer British Australian Telegraph Company Brock, Daniel, explorer with Sturt/journalist Broken Hill (NSW) Brooke, James, Rajah of Sarawak Brown, Cornelius, historian/journalist Browne, John, medical practitioner/explorer with Sturt Bruce, David, captain of Irene Brunel, Isambard Kingdom, visionary British engineer (and contributor to excess Greenhouse Gases) Bruny D-Entrecasteaux, Raymond, French admiral Bunyan, John, author (Pilgrim's Progress) Bunyip Aristocracy Burke, Robert O'Hara, explorer Burketown (Qld) Burra (SA) Buxton, Thomas, governor SA Cape Northumberland (SA) Cape Otway (Vic) Carleton, Caroline, SA songwriter 'Carroll, Lewis', author, (comparisms with Alice in Wonderland) Castle Hill Uprising (Sydney) Cataraqui, wrecked immigrant ship Celsius, Anders, Swedish astronomer Central Mount Stuart Ceylon-Cocos/Keeling telegraph proposal Chambers daughters Chambers, John, SA pioneer Chambers, James, SA pioneer Chisholm, Caroline, social worker Clune, Frank, author Collins, David, First Fleet's legal authority Congregationalists Cook, James, explorer

Page 157 of 162

Alice and the Weather Man

20/10/09 1:51 PM

Cooke, William Fothergill, telegraph pioneer copper insulation (telegraph cables) copper mining, (Kapunda) Coppin, Charles, theatrical entrepreneur Corbett, William, really unlucky First Fleet convict CSIRO Coxwell, Henry, balloonist, (1862 ascent) Crampton, Thomas, telegraph pioneer Cracknell, Edward and William, telegraph pioneers Crimean War, use of telegraph (Scientific American, 1855) CSIRO. see Global warming Cullinlaringo sheep station, (massacre) Custer, George Armstrong, U.S. army general Cygnet, pioneering ship Dalwood, William, telegraph contractor Darwent, Joseph, telegraph contractor Daly Waters (NT) Daly, Daniel Dominick, surveyor Daly, Dominick, governor SA Darling, Ralph, NSW governor Darling River (NSW) Darwin (settlement and city, NT), (references throughout) Darwin, Charles, evolutionist Davis, John, explorer with Sturt Dawes, William, First Fleet Marine and astronomer Denison, William, UK landowner Dennison, Hugh, SA entrepreneur Depot Glen (NSW) Dew Point Temperature Dickens, Charles, author (David Copperfield allusions) Disraeli, Benjamin, British PM Dobbie, Alexander, SA telephone pioneer Douglas, Harriet, 337, 354 (wife of Daniel Daly) Douglas, William Bloomfield, colourful SA public administrator Drummond, Johnson, Gould collector Duncan, Handasyde, SA government immigration agent Dunlop, James, astronomer Dumont-D'Urville, M.J., French naval explorer Duryea, Townsend, photographer Dutton, Francis, SA agent-general/pioneer Eatanswill (comparism with Adelaide) El Nino weather pattern (linked to Indian monsoons) Encke's Comet Esperance (WA) Eucla (WA), telegraph station Eugenie, French Empress, (opens Suez Canal) Eureka Stockade Everest, George, colonial surveyor (India) Eyre, Edward John, explorer Fahrenheit, Daniel, physicist Fallows, Fearon, astronomer (UK and Capetown) Fergusson, Lady Edith, governor's wife Fergusson, James, governor SA, (killed by earthquake) Field, Cyrus, American telegraph entrepreneur Fink, William, SA pioneer Finn, Edmund (Garryowen), pioneer Melbourne journalist Finniss, Boyle Travers, administrator First Fleet, (arrival in Sydney, 1788 and references throughout) Fisher, James Hurtle, SA founder, (family tragedy)

Page 158 of 162

Alice and the Weather Man

20/10/09 1:51 PM

Fisher, John, First Fleet tragic romance with Ann Morton Flamsteed, John, 17th century astronomer Fleet River (UK), (compared with Tank Stream (Sydney) Flood, Robert, stockman with Sturt Fowler, Robert (and Fowler's Bay, SA) Francis, George, SA botanist Franklin, Sir John, governor/ill-fated Arctic explorer Frederick VII, Danish king, use of telegraph Fremantle, Charles, naval officer, (family and friends) French Revolution and metrification Frew, James, Stuart's expedition Frew's Ponds (NT) Galvani, Luigi, electrical inventor Garrett, Peter, Australian Climate Minister Gason, Samuel, SA police trooper, (Barrow Creek) Gawler, George, SA governor Gawler (SA) Gilbert, John, naturalist/collector with Leichhardt Giles, Alfred, surveyor Giles, Ernest, explorer Gisborne, Frederic Newton, American telegraph owner Gisborne, Lionel and Francis, telegraph entrepreneurs Glaisher, James, meteorologist, (world's highest balloon ascent, 1862) Gladstone, William, British PM, (victim of Queen Victoria's telegraph 'leak') Global warming Gordon, Charles, British soldier, (telegraph cut by Mahdi) Gosse, William (Dr) Gosse, William Christie, 'discoverer' of Ayers Rock, (named after Premier Sir Henry Ayers) Goulburn, Frederick, NSW colonial administrator Goyder, George, SA surveyor-general, ('Line of Rainfall') Gray, Elisha, telephone pioneer Great Britain, ship 'Great Cable Armada', 266 (technological invasion of the Persian Gulf) Great Comet of 1844, Great Eastern (cable-laying ship) Greenhouse Gases Greenwich (UK) Grey, George, SA governor Guardian, First Fleet storeship Gulnane, SA government schooner Gunn, Aeneas and Jeanne, Little Black Princess controversy Harrison, John, longitude pioneer Heavitree Gap, 325 (named after Essex location) Hennessy, Katherine, Irish immigrant girl Henty family, Victorian settlers Heywood, Peter, ship's captain and Bounty survivor Howe, George, Sydney Gazette convict editor Howitt, Alfred, naturalist/bushman, 9 (finds Burke and Wills) Hudson, William, Commissioner, Snowy Mountains Scheme(comparisms with Overland Telegraph) Hunter, John, NSW governor Hunter, Rachel, Lady Juliana convict mother of Australia's only Waterloo veteran Ice Age, 1650-1850 (mini) Iluru, see Ayers Rock Industrial Revolutions International Telegraphic Conference, Berlin, 1884 Irene, Todds' favourite ship

Page 159 of 162

Alice and the Weather Man

20/10/09 1:51 PM

Irish immigrant women Jackson, Charles T., American entrepreneur Johnson, Richard, First Fleet parson (and wife, Mary) Jones, Mary, famed Sydney convict brothel-keeper Kanaka trade (Qld) Kapunda (SA) Kekwick, William, Stuart's expedition Keenan, Matron (rescues poor Irish girls) Kelly, Edward ('Ned'), bushranger Kelvin, William, scientist King Island (Tas) King, John, explorer with Burke and Wills King, Philip Gidley, governor King, Phillip Parker, hydrographer King, Stephen, Stuart's expedition Kingston, George, SA politician Knuckey, Richard, surveyor, (finds Charlotte Waters) Kyoto Protocol 'Lachlan Swamps' (Centennial Park, Sydney) Lady Juliana, desperately-desired female convict ship Lake Alexandrina (SA) Lake Torrens (SA) Landor, Edward Willson, WA early settler and solicitor Lady Penrhyn, First Fleet female transport La Perouse, Comte de, French explorer Lawson, Henry, Australian poet Lazar, John, mayor and scandalous theatre owner Leichhardt, Ludwig, explorer Lewin, Ross, Kanaka trader Light, William, SA founder Little, John, telegraph supervisor Livingstone, David, Scottish explorer Lockyer, Edmund, (British soldier forestalls French, WA) Louis Napoleon, French Emperor Love, Dr Geoff McGowan, Samuel, Victorian Superintendent of Telegraphs MacDonnell Range (NT) MacDonnell, Lady Blanche, SA governor's wife MacDonnell, Richard, SA governor Macgeorge, James, SA architect and telegraph entrepreneur McKinlay, John, explorer McLeay, Alexander, NSW colonial administrator McMinn, William, surveyor Margaret Brock Reef (SA) Maria massacre Maskelyne, Nevil, astronomer Mataranka (NT) Melbourne, illegal settlement and city Mereweather, George, inventor (at Crystal Palace) Millais, John, 19th century celebrity painter Mississippi, French ship (aids Eyre and Wylie) Mitchell, A.J., telegraph officer Mitchell, Thomas, NSW surveyor-general Mills, William, surveyor, (names Alice Springs, 1871) Monck, Charles, colonial administrator/telegraph investor Montgomerie, William, discoverer of gutta-percha Moonta, ship Moorhouse, Matthew, SA Protector of Aborigines Moorundie (SA) settlement

Page 160 of 162

Alice and the Weather Man

20/10/09 1:51 PM

Morse, Samuel, U.S. artist and telegraph pioneer Murphy, John, explorer with Leichhardt Murray River Nashwauk, wrecked immigrant ship Neva, wrecked female convict ship Newcastle Waters (NT) nardoo cakes, 6 (accidentally poison Burke and Wills) Neumayer, Georg, Astronomer Observatory, Adelaide (Todds' residence) O'Farrell, Henry James, failed assassin Omeo, ship Osborn, Noel, British naval officer, telegraph promoter Osborn, Sherard, British naval offer/telegraph promoter Palmerston (see Darwin) Parker, Hyde, British admiral, (Battle of Copenhagen) Parmelia (and Sulphur), WA settlement ships Patterson, Robert, telegraph officer Peacock, George Edwards, English fraudster, NSW colonial artist and meteorologist Peel, Thomas, disastrous WA colonising entrepreneur Pender, John, British industrial and telegraph financier Pepys, Samuel, London diarist 'Petit-Prince'. see Eugenie, French Empress Phillip, Arthur, NSW Governor Pitt, William (Younger), (anecdote about dying words) Pony Express (US) Poole, James, explorer with Sturt Port Augusta (SA) Port Essington (NT) Pybus, William, organist railways rainfall Rapid, barque, SA founding ship Red Sea Telegraph Caper Renner Springs (NT) Riou, Edward, navy captain Roper River (NT) Ross, John, bushman Ross, Robert, lieut. governor, first sheep killed by lightning Ruemker, Christian, astronomer Rufus River (trib. of Murray) (NSW) Russel, Henry Chamberlain, NSW astronomer San Francisco (US), suffers 'telegraph deprivation' Semaphore (SA) Shenandoah Affair Ship Wreck Coast (Vic) Shipton, Mother Ursula, Yorkshire witch Short, Augustus, SA Anglican bishop Smith, Ellen (Goyder's second wife) Smith, Frances (Goyder's first wife) Smyth, Arthur Bowes, ship's surgeon South, James, astronomer Speke, John, explorer (Africa) Standley, Ida, schoolteacher, ('Beloved Lady') Stanley Head (Tas) Stanley, Henry, journalist/explorer, (finds David Livingstone) Stirling, James, WA governor Stokes, John Lort, ship's captain Stowe, Thomas Quinton, church minister

Page 161 of 162

Alice and the Weather Man

20/10/09 1:51 PM

Strange, Frederick, Gould collector Strangways, Henry, SA premier Stuart Highway (NT) Stuart, John McDouall, explorer Sturt, Charles, explorer Sturt's Plain (NT) Sturt's Stony Desert (SA/NT) Suez Canal 'Sydney Ducks' ('Sydney Coves'), ex-convicts terrorise San Francisco, Sweet, Samuel, ship's captain/photographer Swift, Jonathan, author, 17-18th century social commentator Tank Stream (Sydney) 'Telegraph Plateau' (Atlantic Ocean) telephone, Temple, Henry (Lord Palmerston), British administrator Tench Watkin, Marine officer, First Fleet thermometers Tennyson, Alfred, English poet and propagandist Thomas, Andy, astronaut Thomas, Mary, SA newspaper proprietor Thring, Francis, Stuart's expedition time balls Todd, Alice and children ( throughout) Todd, Charles, the weather man, (throughout) Tolmer, Alexander, SA police commissioner Tomkinson Creek (NT) Torrens River Towns, Robert, Queensland planter, (see also Kanaka trade) Troughton, Edward, English astronomical instrument maker Vail, Alfred, partner of Samuel Morse Van Diemens Land (Tasmania) Volta, Giuseppe, electrical inventor Venus, Transit Victoria, British monarch Waterhouse, Frederick, naturalist, Stuart's expedition Weather reports, (first 'modern' style) Wheat farming West, Charles, layer of first undersea cable Wheatstone, Charles, White, John, First Fleet navy surgeon/author Wills, Horatio, squatter, 218 Wills, Thomas, massacre survivor Wills, William John, explorer Wylie , Eyre's teenage aboriginal companion Yantruwanta, aborigines, Cooper's Creek Zillman, Dr John

Page 162 of 162