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By Tony Hammill

One of the most intriguing explorers of Australia was Ludwig Leichhardt, who achieved fame both through his gruelling expeditions and through the disappearance of his whole party on his third expedition in 1848.

Leichhardt visited and explored the Brisbane Valley from early August 1843 to February 1844, a little over two years after the first advance parties arrived in the valley around June 1841. He was based at Durundur (pr. DUrundur) Station, near today’s Woodford, founded by the Archer brothers, David, Tom and Charles.

Leichhardt was a man of science and a gentleman, and Thomas Archer in a letter to his father on 10 September 1843 states:

We have at present a visitor here in the shape of a German M.D. who is botanising and mineralogizing all through the Colony. He is the most agreeable and well informed man I have ever seen in the Colony – an enthusiast in his profession, and, what is still more rare, there is not a grain of pedantry in his composition.

David Archer on 2 December 1845, following reports of Leichhardt’s presumed death on the Port Essington trip, described him as:

the amiable and talented naturalist that lived with us some months, about two years ago… He is or was, one of the very few I have met who, amongst a host of acquaintances and many friends had not, as far as I ever heard, one enemy…

Leichhardt’s journey can be followed through his own dated letters to various people. He arrived via the ‘Bunya-Bunyas’ (Bunya Mountains) at Durundur in early August 1843, and thereafter his progress is clear:

• Durundur, 27 August: Recounts his first trip to the Bunya-Bunyas. States that he will return to Sydney via New England and the Hunter.
• Mt Brisbane (Frederick and Francis Bigges) near Esk, 19 October 1843: Travelled from Durundur to Kilcoy run (Sir Evan Mackenzie); back to Mt Brisbane; visited his Nynga-Nynga (Ningi Ningi) friends on the coast; back to Mt Brisbane.
• Mt Brisbane, 8 November: Visited Tarampa run (Charles Cameron). Climbed Mt Tarampa, a small conical hill; explored between Lockyer Creek and Limestone (Ipswich).
• Durundur, 24 November: Visited Gideon A. Scott of Mt Esk run; visited David McConnel of Cressbrook run near Toogoolawah. Climbed a sugarloaf hill; visited the Balfours of Colinton run (Charles, Robert and John, uncles of R.L. Stevenson); again visited Sir Evan Mackenzie of Kilcoy run.
• Durundur, 9 January 1844: Returned from Bunya Feast with John Archer and Mr Waterstone.
• Durundur, 19 January: Rainy season prevented movement.
• Durundur, 6 February: Rain.

Leichhardt the naturalist was in his element roaming the valley, writing at length of the vegetation and rock types, his enthusiasm for nature shining through his writings. He comments on the Araucaria cunninghamii (Hoop Pine or Moreton Bay Pine), the grass-trees, the ironbarks and so on. On Cressbrook Creek he finds melaleucas and Castanospermum australe, the Moreton Bay chestnut whose nuts were consumed as a last meal by the ill-fated Captain Logan. He collects about 120 specimens of timbers, as well as leaves, flowers and fruit.

But it is for the Bunya pine (Araucaria bidwillii) that he reserves unrestrained praise in a letter of 9 January 1844, having attended the native bunya feast with a party led by John Archer:

I have travelled again in those remarkable mountain brushes, out of which the Bunya-Bunyas lift their majestic heads, like pillars of the blue vault of heaven.

He describes the tree and the manner in which the natives harvest and cook the nut, observing that these trees bear very good fruit only every three years or in such period, though there are trees in bearing every year.

Leichhardt also comes into his own as anthropologist and sociologist, relaying what he observes and is told. He comments on all aspects of the locals and their way of life. He expresses admiration at the education and hospitality of his hosts. He approves of their consumption of copious amounts of meat and tea with few vegetables (he regards vegetarian communities as less healthy), and large volumes of milk for children. He practises medical skills on some, diagnosing and curing a boy with malaria by administering quinine. He comments on the isolation, with neighbours perhaps twenty or more miles away, yet boundary disputes common. He notes the settlers’ proclivity for slandering one another as a common human weakness. He notes that the workers are mainly ex-convicts, as they have developed a wide range of skills which no new-chum has or wishes to acquire.

Life in the bush is very instructive. A man discovers his own powers, and I’ve had a great deal of this kind of experience myself, which means that I’m a fairly good bushman by now.

But it is Leichhardt’s comments on the morals of the inhabitants that are most incisive, and reveal the comprehensive interests of his inquiring mind. Following are his remarks on that old bush custom of the spree:

Their lack of spirituous liquors is of great importance for the health of the people in the interior. Yet when they go to town (Ipswich or Brisbane) and get to the public houses they give way to such long bouts of drinking that they return to their stations either ill, or spent with dissipation, until total abstinence restores them to health…

Brisbane Town, where the squatters meet at shearing time because they bring their wool shipment, is the recognised place for drinking, whoring and folly by night. These wild young men, in whose veins the blood seems to accumulate an electric charge that sends sparks flying on contact with society, are courteous, hospitable and sober on their stations.

Inevitably we must discuss the native inhabitants, dispossessed from their tribal and hunting lands by the coming of the white man, and interracial relations. I leave his comments as recorded.

Leichhardt says that the natives are treacherous and lazy and treat their women like slaves, and discusses the cycle of attack and excessive retaliation by whites. He discusses the settlement of old scores by the tribes at the Bunya feasts:

…there’s many a black who never returns to his own part of the country alive. His kinsmen proceed to devour the fallen brother, but they clean the bones of his trunk, limbs and skull, and the women carry them about in a small net. Some clans have a strange belief that the dead man’s strength passes into whoever eats him and makes the latter twice as strong. Nobody has the slightest doubt that the blacks enjoy eating human flesh. (White) men like the missionaries, who have lived amongst them for years, have been witness to it. There is no hope of converting this generation to Christianity, and this generation will likely be the last, for the blacks are rapidly dying out where they are in contact with the whites.

Leichhardt describes the females he encountered at the Bunya feasts:

I saw some black beauties – young unmarried women, about 14 to 17 years old, or perhaps younger. They were very regularly formed; their movements free and graceful; they were full of mirth and joke, and examined us with all the naivete of youth. Their faces could not be beautiful, for their broad, flat noses will never permit it; but the proportions of the body in woman and man are as perfect as those of the Caucasian race, and the artist would find an inexhaustible source of observation and study amongst these black tribes.

Leichhardt discusses the interracial problems on the stations, and blames the convicts, the only help available:

The majority of the whites who go to work on the various stations are transported convicts, and almost without exception, or with few exceptions, they’re unmarried, without a vestige of moral principle or feeling. There’s a pattern of easy relations now, between these men and the black women. The latter easily get permission to go to the huts, because they’re given plenty of food there and they have quite often to go hungry in the bush. Although the black men are not, as a rule, too strict with their wives so long as they return with tobacco and provisions, they won’t tolerate being deprived of them; so they turn sullen, begin to threaten and sooner or later avenge themselves. They do so either by killing the cattle and sheep, or by attacking the whites when they can get the better of them.

Leichhardt also makes this prophetic statement:

If the children could be taken away from the clans and brought up properly quite apart, there might be hope for them. But the British Government regards this as interference with the rights of British subjects, which it considers the blacks to be – so even this hope for a better future fades away.

So the concept that led to the stolen generation long predates the 20th century.

Henry Mort was David McConnel’s station superintendent. The following quote from his letter of 28 January 1844 to his mother and sister is appropriate here, and reveals the debate that existed even then on the morality of the whites’ actions:

Had a very animated discussion on the “Moral right of a Nation to take forcible possession of a Country inhabited by savages.” John and David McConnel argued that it is morally right for a Christian nation to extirpate savages from their native soil in order that it may be peopled with a more intelligent and civilized race of human beings etc. etc. F. McConnel and myself were of the opposite opinion and argued that a Nation had no moral right to take forcible possession of any place. What is your opinion on the subject? Don’t you think it a most heinous act for any Nation, however powerful, however civilised and however Christianised that nation may be – to take possession of a country peopled by weak and barbarous tribes, merely for the purpose of aggrandising the Christians at the expense of annihilating the unoffending and ignorant and perhaps less avaricious savages? Yet I would say, let England increase her Colonial possessions, let her commerce be extended, and let the ministers of her Church carry out the torch of civilisation and religion so that the darkest and most remote recesses of heathen barbarisms may be illumined thereby.

In a letter to his father on 29 April 1845, Charles Archer states:

Davie considers the Black as the hereditary owner of the soil and that it is an act of injustice to drive him from his hunting grounds – at the same time punishing any case of sheep stealing or petty theft when the culprit can be got hold of.

Several instances of the spearing of shepherds and other out-station workers and the carrying-off of sheep are reported in these letters. John Balfour was forced to abandon his station temporarily in 1841 because his men were in fear of their lives. As Leichhardt commented:

Naturally enough, the whites try to avenge themselves, so that many a black man loses his life. The fault seems to be in the inadequacy of the police force.

The full extent of these revenge attacks will never be known, as naturally they were rarely reported.

Pacification resulted, and the Archers and McConnels soon established good relationships with the native inhabitants and treated them well, whereas on Kilcoy Station confrontation and conflict frequently occurred, culminating in the arsenic-laced flour incident related by James Davis (Duramboi) which poisoned many blacks in 1842.

In due course Leichhardt was to leave the Brisbane Valley to meet his appointments with triumph and tragedy. It has been said that explorers work for one of two things: fame or fortune, and although Leichhardt claimed to have worked purely out of a love of science, he stated in a letter of 24 November 1843:

The rapidity of time reminds me of the shortness of my life, and it is not so much for me to think of dying, as to think of dying without leaving something behind me that may speak for me when my ashes are driving in the wind.

He also wrote on 24 August 1843:

…I will never leave Australia until I have travelled right across it.

Fame he certainly found, and his final resolution was fulfilled, if only in an ironic sense.

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Main reference: Brisbane River Valley 1841–50: Pioneer Observations and Reminiscences, Brisbane History Group Sources No. 5, 1991, edited by John Smith.

Historical image sources: State Library of Queensland, John Oxley Library; State Library of New South Wales; Wikimedia Commons.