Graham Seal - Great Australian Journeys - Gripping stories of intrepid explorers, dramatic escapes and foolhardy adventure

Many people assisted with the making of this book. Thanks to Maureen Seal, Rob Willis, Olya Willis, Mark Gregory, Warren Fahey, and the friendly staff at Allen & Unwin.

So us here is off to New Holland if God will spear our lifes All with littel families, hower sweethearts and hower wifes.

Migration song of the Henty family and workers, 1829

Australias first journeyers came from the north. They were the descendants of the populations that moved out of Africa perhaps 70,000 years ago. But instead of going north to Europe they went south and lived in Asia, before working further south into Borneo, Java and Papua New Guinea.

Some of those people found their way across the islands, and the seas between, onto the Australian mainland more than fifty thousand years ago. The descendants of these first peoples are now known as Aborigines. They established and evolved a culture rich in mythology, spirituality and creativity that thrived until European settlement, and continues in communities across Australia to this day.

The only way to tell the story of this first journey is to imagine how it might have happened. First people made their way from Asia to islands further south. As they reached one and found it hospitable, they settled. Then, after perhaps a few or many generations, the younger men and women began to look with interest at another island, far away but still tantalisingly visible. What was that yonder island like? If there were people on it, were they like themselves? Perhaps they were dangerous. What about the animals? Could they be hunted for food? Perhaps there were bad spirits of some kind.

The questions must have mounted until some brave souls, probably both men and women, were curious enoughor perhaps desperate enoughto put to sea in whatever craft they had and strike out for the unknown. This final trip across the sea may have been undertaken by many groups over time, from many islands, either by design or perhaps cast away by storms. If they survived the currents and winds, they landed. If they then survived whatever dangers awaited them in that new place, they settledliving, hunting, gathering and having children.

Eventually, this same urge to go beyond spurred a group into a final dangerous sea journey to a very large and very distant island. These travellers landed on the northern shore of what we now call Australia.

Upon arriving they probably followed rivers inland where they would have found plants and animals mostly unlike any they had seen before. These groups eventually split, evolving their own variations on language, customs and beliefs.

We will probably never know exactly who the first Australians were, or exactly where they came from or why. We do know that they came as part of the great waves of humanity that rolled out of Africa time and time again. If these first Australians were indeed descended from the people who first left Africa they would be the oldest humankind outside of Africa itself. And they would have been living, hunting, building, singing, dancing and surviving in Australia millennia before other African groups reached Europe.

They are still here.

The first known European visitor arrived on the Cape York Peninsula early in 1606. His name was Willem Jansz, master of the small Dutch East India Company sailing ship Duyfken, or Little Dove. The Duyfken was a fast and nimble craft, at 110 tons and about twenty metres long and six metres broad. She was lightly armed with eight cannon and probably crewed by fewer than twenty sailors.

The Duyfken had sailed from Batavia, now Jakarta, along the coast of New Guinea and then to the unknown southland. Jansz was an experienced Dutch East India Company skipper, probably in his mid thirties. His orders were to search for trading possibilities in New Guinea and any other lands to the east and south. It did not go well.

The log of this voyage has been lost and so what happened is based only on word-of-mouth accounts. These tell us that there was at least one violent encounter between the sailors and the Aborigines. When the Duyfken made a landing, probably on the Wenlock River, the crew was attacked by Aborigines and one sailor was speared to death. Jansz may have already, by this time, lost up to half his crew through fights with either Australians or New Guineans.

It is possible that the oral traditions of the Wik people of Cape York Peninsula also hold a clue to what happened in one of these encounters. As the inherited story goes, the devils, as the Dutch sailors are called in these stories, landed and began to dig on the beach. The Aborigines were curious and through sign language discovered that the sailors were digging for water. The Wik people were recruited as labourers to dig wells and also taught to smoke tobacco, bake damper and make tea. But the Wik eventually decided that the Dutch were a nuisance, and probably evil as well. There was a fight during which both Wik people and sailors died, then the Dutch sailed away.

With a severely weakened complement, Jansz got the Duyfken back to Batavia. His voyage had been a failure as far as the notoriously hard-to-please masters of the Dutch East India Company were concerned. However, Jansz was the first to chart a section of the Australian coast and so to begin the long process of revealing the southland previously unknown to Europeans.

When possibly just a ten-year-old boy, Christopher Tomlinson stole a pair of shoes in Preston in 1830. The year before he had received four months imprisonment and a whipping for a minor offence. But this time he was arrested, tried at the Lancaster Quarter Sessions and given a sentence of fourteen years transportation to Botany Bay.

Christopher was moved south to foggy London and probably held in one of the rotting ships known as hulks that dotted the Thames. These unpleasant dwellings housed many convicts awaiting transport to Australia. In March 1831, he sailed aboard the Camden along with 197 other male convicts. They were guarded by 29 men of the 11th Light Dragoons. A few army officers and their families were also aboard as passengers, bound for service in the colony of New South Wales.

Built in 1799, the Camden was a reasonably seaworthy vessel of over 400 tonnes with an experienced master, and a competent surgeon named David Boyter. A few of the prisoners from the hulks had not been fit enough to make the arduous voyage and were left behind as the ship departed. Many of the convicts suffered from leg ulcers from the work they had been made to do in chains on the London docks. Those who left on the Camden were mostly young and reasonably fit. At least until the ship reached the open seathen the surgeon was busy treating his charges for seasickness.

We do not know if Christopher Tomlinson suffered from seasickness or ulcers. Perhaps his youth and diminutive stature might have saved him from hard labour on the wharves, sparing him the ulcers. But we do know that like everyone else aboard the Camden he had to cope with life on a cramped transportation ship and the extreme climates through which they passed on their 119-day voyage to the other end of the earth.

As they sailed south the temperature increased far above any experienced in Britain. By the time they neared Tenerife the soldiers were lying out on the deck complaining of headaches, although Boyter suspected that might have more to do with the spirits they were allowed to consume.

After four or so weeks in the warmer latitudes the temperatures began to ease as they continued southwards. Sore throats and coughs featured in Boyters sick list but no more serious complaints were recorded until about a week out from their destination when the diet of salted meat began to take its toll in the form of scurvy. Fortunately, the