By Reviewer: ROBERT WILLSON
STARVATION IN A LAND OF PLENTY: WILLS’ DIARY OF THE FATEFUL BURKE AND WILLS EXPEDITION
By Michael Cathcart. NLA Publishing. 213pp. $39.99.
As I opened this absorbing book, I was vividly reminded of an experience my wife and I had in the little English town of Totnes, in Devon. While hunting for second-hand bookshops, in a busy street we found a neglected memorial. It was to William John Wills, the young surveyor who died in June 1861 in the Australian outback. It was erected by his anguished father at his birthplace.
This illustration (1861) shows the dying William Wills clasping his father's pocket watch. Expedition leader Robert Burke, by contrast, is heroically robust and impeccably dressed. his pistol tucked prominently into his belt. Illustration: Michael Cathcart.
Today, more than a century and a half later, the Burke and Wills disaster is part of Australian legend, and they are probably Australia’s most famous explorers. As I read the memorial inscription, I was struck by the stark contrast between the lush Devon countryside, where Wills was born, and the Australian outback where he died, aged 37. As I read his diary, I came to understand him much better.
Yet, as the scribbled diary of Wills, now in the National Library of Australia, makes clear, the deaths of Burke and Wills were unnecessary and were the result of the stubborn refusal of the expedition leader, Robert O’Hara Burke, to accept help from the owners of the land, the Yandruwandha people. Young Wills knew that, but in the end he put loyalty to his leader ahead of life itself. They suffered, as the title of this new edition of Wills’ diary reminds us, starvation and death in a land of plenty, all because Burke believed that a British gentleman did not ‘‘go native’’. When the local people tried to help them, Burke drove them away. By contrast, Wills referred to them as his friends and recorded words of their language.
Starvation in a Land of Plenty by Michael Cathcart.
The diary of Wills, written in faded pencil, was acquired by the National Library just over 100 years ago. Author Dr Michael Cathcart, a broadcaster and historian, uses the diary as the primary source for this book and includes a valuable survey of what is known of the life of Wills from his birth and early days in Devon. It should be read in conjunction with an account of the scientific legacy of theexpedition, edited by E.B. Joyce and D.A. McCann and published by the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation. I reviewed it in this newspaper on February 11, 2012.
Born in 1834, the son of a doctor and member of the Royal College of Surgeons, young Wills had a good basic education and was tutored by his father in medical matters, but never qualified as a doctor. From his early years, he displayed a questing mind and clashed with his mother, who clung to a traditional religious faith.
Hers was the mental world of Jane Austen, but his was the world shaped by new scientific discoveries and the thinking of Darwin, Huxley and Wallace. He was drawn strongly to the study of mathematics and the sciences, including astronomy.
In 1853, William and his brother, Tom, arrived in bustling Melbourne. In the years that followed, he was a shepherd at Deniliquin and helped his father, who had followed the boys to the colony, on the Ballarat goldfields.
He also studied surveying and astronomy under Professor Neumayer, a contact which probably led to Wills being appointed third in command of the expedition led by Burke to cross Australia in 1860. Wills was the surveyor and astronomical and meteorological observer. Most people feel that Burke was totally unsuitable to lead such an expedition. The author gives us a lucid summary of the people and events of the expedition, but the core of this book is the detailed diary that Wills kept in a field surveyor’s notebook. From this diary, kept particularly in the last three months of the unfolding tragedy, we gain an unforgettable picture of the dignity and courage of Wills, his dogged commitment to hissurveying work and his growing understanding of the Yandruwandha clan in whose lands Burke and Wills died, while their companion, King, survived. If Wills had not been so loyal to his leader, he, too, might have survived.
Dr Wills had a photograph of his son, William, which formed the basis for many commemorative images.
It is revealing and moving to read the final letter that Wills wrote to his father, beginning: ‘‘These are probably the last lines you will ever get from me. We are on the point of starvation ...’’ He went on to give a calm and rational assessment of his situation and, as Michael Cathcart comments, it was the letter of an English gentleman dying with grace and dignity. He wrote, significantly, that his religious views were not in the least changed. His atheism had been a sore point in letters to his mother earlier, but in his last letter to his father, he did not mention his mother at all. He had no message for her.
Yet, after a final clinical assessment of his pulse rate, his emaciated condition and his probable death within a few days, Wills managed a gentle joke from the famous novel by Charles Dickens, David Copperfield, published a decade earlier. Wills wrote: ‘‘I can only look out like Mr Micawber for something to turn up.’’
Cathcart ends this moving book by writing: ‘‘The legend of Burke and Wills has been used to stand for many things. They have been hailed as a pair of British heroes and mocked as a pair of audacious fools. But William Wills deserves to be unshackled from the reckless amateur who drove him to his death. This diary is his testament. It is the work of a strange, thoughtful and brave young man.’’
Starvation in a Land of Plenty, beautifully produced and richly illustrated, is a credit to the publisher, the National Library, and a worthy tribute to the author of a remarkable Australian exploration diary.
Robert Willson is a priest and teacher of history and is fascinated by the literature of Australian exploration.