Australia Twice Traversed: The Romance of Exploration, Being a Narrative Compiled from the Journals of Five Exploring Expeditions into and Through Central South Australia and Western Australia, from 1872 to 1876Giles, Ernest
History
Australia Twice Traversed: The Romance of Exploration, Being a Narrative Compiled from the Journals of Five Exploring Expeditions into and Through Central South Australia and Western Australia, from 1872 to 1876
Giles, Ernest
Australia -- Discovery and exploration
arrived twice at the same place without knowing it. The tree or trees
were found on a watercourse, or courses, near the head of the Warrego
River, in Queensland. The above was all the information gained by this
expedition. A subsequent search expedition was sent out in 1858, under
Augustus Gregory; this I shall place in its chronological order.
Kennedy, a companion of Sir Thomas Mitchell into Tropical Australia in
1845, next enters the field. He went to trace Mitchell's Victoria
River or Barcoo, but finding it turned southwards and broke into many
channels, he abandoned it, and on his return journey discovered the
Warrego River, which may be termed the Murrumbidgee of Queensland. On
a second expedition, in 1848, Kennedy started from Moreton Bay to
penetrate and explore the country of the long peninsula, which runs up
northward between the Gulf of Carpentaria and the Pacific Ocean, and
ends at Cape York, the northernmost point of Australia in Torres
Straits. From this disastrous expedition he never returned. He was
starved, ill, fatigued, hunted by remorseless aborigines for days, and
finally speared to death by the natives of Cape York, when almost
within sight of his goal, where a vessel was waiting to succour him
and all his party. Only a black boy named Jacky Jacky was with him.
After Kennedy's death Jacky buried all his papers in a hollow tree,
and for a couple of days he eluded his pursuers, until, reaching the
spot where his master had told him the vessel would be, he ran yelling
down to the beach, followed by a crowd of murderous savages. By the
luckiest chance a boat happened to be at the beach, and the officers
and crew rescued the boy. The following day a party led by Jacky
returned to where poor Kennedy lay, and they buried him. They obtained
his books and maps from the tree where Jacky had hidden them. The
narrative of this expedition is heart-rending. Of the whole number of
the whites, namely seven, two only were rescued by the vessel at a
place where Kennedy had formed a depot on the coast, and left four
men.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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