LOST IN INTERIOR

Wairarapa Times-Age, 23 August 1938, Page 7

LOST IN INTERIOR

LEICHHARDT’S ILL=FATED EXPEDITION DISCOVERY OF SKELETONS. NINETY-YEAR-OLD MYSTERY. The reported discovery in Central Australia of the bones of eight apparently white human beings may provide the finish to a chapter of history which for very many years has been shrouded in mystery. The remains are believed to be those of the members of an expedition led into the interior of the continent in 1848 by Ludwig Leichhardt, a famous explorer, whose exploits rank with the greatest in the records of early Australian exploration. The South Australian Government has decided to send an expedition to Central Australia to check the information, and its finding will be awaited with the greatest interest. The discovery of the remains in the solitudes of the centre of the great Australian continent gives additional interest to a book recently published by Messrs Angus and Robertson, Of Sydney, entitled “Ludwig Leichhardt and the Great South Land,” the author being Catherine Drummond Cotton. The writer provides a graphic picture of the scientist and explorer, and simply and vividly sketches the outstanding facts of his career. His childhood in Prussia, his struggles as a poor university student, his life in Paris and in England, his journey to Australia, where he was to meet adventure, triumph, defeat and death, provide chapters of absorbing interest.

Leichhardt, as the author points out, had but two aims in life —to make a path into lands where there was no path before, and to further the cause of science. Driven by these urges, he came in 1842.. to New Holland; then, without knowledge of the country, ignorant of bushcraft, and without a penny of aid from the Government, he led a party'over the blazing miles between Moreton Bay and Port Essington, on the Gulf of Carpentaria. That journey, with its plague of flies, its dust and heat, its brushes with hostile natives, lasted more than a year, and it won Leichhardt a certain amount of fame. But when, later on, the explorer was forced to give up an attempt on the overland route from Moreton Bay to Perth, he became a target for calumny and slander. There was but one answer to that —Leichhardt tried again, and this time he did not come back; not even a dry bone of the party was found. It was in February, 1848, that Leichhardt’s party set out. In April they passed through Macpherson’s station, the last station they would see till they reached those outlying from the Swan River settlement in Western Australia. Leichhardt wrote from Macpherson’s: “My mules are in good condition, and my companions are in high spirits. , Three of my steers are lame; one of them I shall kill tonight and lay in a good supply of dried meat. The only accident which I experienced was a loss of a spade; but we are lucky enough to repair the loss at this station, because one of the overseers can spare one of his own. When I consider how lucky I have been, I get hopeful that our Almighty Protector shall permit me to bring my favourite plan to a successful end.” It sounded cheerful and sure, as though Leichhardt was at home in his work again, and at peace. They travelled on from the station, out into the unknown distance. And they were never heard of again. Not a trace of them, not a sign; not a strap nor an iron ring; not a bit of an instrument, nor a boot, nor an animal. Nothing was ever found, nor ever has been, that could be certainly identified as Leichhardt’s. For three years the colony waited for news. Leichhardt had said he would reach the settlement in two and a half years’ time, and the colonists were firm in their belief in Leichhardt’s power to reach the Swan River. But at last they realised there had been disaster.

Over the years many parties searched, as Mrs Cotton’s book records. It almost seemed as if when any one of the colonies wanted a little fresh adventure it sent out expeditions to search for Leichhardt. But none of the search parties was successful; some doom seemed to hang about all of them. Baron von Mueller, the most eager and persistent of the men who wished to find some evidence of the explorers’ end, could only say: “It seems as if a fatality prevailed throughout to prevent us from following up the traces of the lost explorer.” “In Sydney tens of thousands of people say they live ‘out Leichhardt way’,” writes Mbs Cotton. “Every night numbers of them pack themselves into homeward trams that bear in shining letters selves into homeward trams that bear the name of Leichhardt. Their thoughts roam, but their minds never go drifting back in time. If they did they would come to the last of the warring days, of Napoleon, when a little boy, Frederick William Ludwig Leichhardt, was born on a day big with chance, in Germany's ancient Mark of Brandenburg. . . . Place names mean nothing; within the very memory of their naming men have forgotten the reason why. Leichhardt’s was a strange life, significant because of its faithfulness to an idea, or insignificant, perhaps. Some have said one thing, some the other. But chance and his own surprising character made of it a piece of all but perfect drama.”