For 10 months after Robert O’Hara Burke and William John Wills set out across the continent from Cooper’s Creek in December 1860, there was no definite news of them. Then, late on Saturday, 2 November 1861, word finally reached Melbourne. At the time, respect for the Sabbath was such that no newspapers were published on Sundays. But recognising the importance of the story, the local Argus printed what was known as a special one-page press sheet. Most copies of this press sheet were probably pasted up around the city and have not survived. But two are known to exist. One is part of the National Library of Australia’s rich collection of Burke and Wills material which includes not only journals and letters but also books, maps, prints, paintings, photographs and relics—among them Burke’s one surviving notebook, Wills’s last diary and even a piece of one of the trees blazed by the explorers. Several other libraries and museums also have Burke and Wills collections. The largest, not surprisingly, are in Melbourne—the expedition’s starting place. The holdings of the State Library of Victoria, the Museum of Victoria and the Herbarium in Melbourne’s Royal Botanic Gardens are particularly important. However, there are also significant collections in Sydney and Adelaide as a consequence of the expedition having always been a subject of national interest. This material—along with the many objects and pictures in private hands—has never been brought together. While there have been Burke and Wills exhibitions before, they typically have been small, dominated by the explorers’ letters and diaries. They have neither revealed the wealth of material collected and produced by the expedition and its search parties nor examined what subsequent generations have made of the explorers. The exhibition Burke & Wills: From Melbourne to Myth provides a very different view of the explorers. It includes an unprecedented array of material collected and produced by the expedition and its search parties—diaries, letters and paintings, birds and plants, hair and bones, clothing, weapons, food and narcotics. It also shows for the first time how artists have depicted the expedition since it occurred. It is an exhibition which stretches across the culture and across time in order to reveal how one of Australia’s remarkable stories has grown and changed.
The earliest of the material in the exhibition predates the explorers’ departure from Melbourne in August 1860. To begin with, the expedition was simply the stuff of words. Always controversial, the expedition generated a stack of letters, reports, articles and editorials as soon as the Exploration Committee of the Royal Society of Victoria began organising it. But as the 19 men, 23 horses and 26 camels prepared to start, they also became the stuff of art. The expedition’s departure from Melbourne’s Royal Park was the subject which initially most attracted local artists both because it was a big public event and because it was what these artists had seen. Nicholas Chevalier, then chief cartoonist with Melbourne Punch, was first. In just three months he hurried off a large canvas which he exhibited in November 1860 as a ‘memorandum’, rather than a finished picture. William Strutt, Australia’s finest figure painter of the mid-nineteenth century, followed in May 1861 with a relatively small but much more accomplished watercolour of the same event. In between, another Melbourne artist, Henricus van den Houten, imagined the expedition succeeding. His big oil, acquired by the National Library in 1998, showed the explorers achieving what many colonists considered was crossing the continent, not by reaching the north coast but by reaching terrain already mapped by previous expeditions which had started in the north. Van den Houten’s painting was intended to show Burke’s party at Mount Wilson, which the Royal Society had identified as one of Burke’s possible destinations because it was the southernmost point reached by A.C. Gregory when his North Australian Expedition had headed inland from the Victoria River in north-western Australia in 1855–56. Members of the Burke and Wills expedition collected and produced even more material, though not for the country beyond Cooper’s Creek in which colonists were most interested. Hermann Beckler and Ludwig Becker, the party’s two German officers, were primarily responsible for this work which Burke deliberately impeded but failed to stop. While he raced to beat the South Australian John McDouall Stuart across the continent, Becker and Beckler pursued art and science south of Cooper’s Creek. Although often dismissed as a failure because of its loss of life, vast cost and small additions to geographic knowledge, Becker and Beckler made the expedition an artistic, botanic and ethnographic success. Becker was the finest artist to accompany a nineteenth-century expedition into inland Australia. He also was exceptional in his artistic range, producing landscapes, natural history subjects and portraits with equal skill. Most of his drawings and watercolours are distinguished by their meticuluous, even microscopic observation. But they sometimes are much more than art in the service of science. One example is Dick, The Brave and Gallant Native Guide. It celebrates the role played by Aborigines—often at great physical cost and danger to themselves—in enabling settlers to venture across the continent. The search parties which began looking for the Victorian explorers when nothing had been heard of them by mid-1861 added material from Cooper’s Creek and the country to its north. The South Australian party led by John McKinlay collected pieces of Burke’s men, animals and equipment. Alfred Howitt’s two expeditions—to search for Burke in 1861 and then to retrieve the remains of Burke and Wills in 1861–62—were more productive, returning from Cooper’s Creek not only with natural history specimens but also with the first big collection of colonial relics and a wealth of Aboriginal material. These objects include a nardoo cake which is probably the oldest surviving piece of Aboriginal food. Colonists made much of the explorers after hearing how Burke and Wills had died after crossing the continent. The first phase of the celebration started as soon as this news reached Melbourne in November 1861 and continued until January 1863 when the Exploration Committee reburied Burke and Wills in Melbourne. During these 15 months, dozens of sculptors, painters, photographers and printmakers celebrated Burke and Wills in small lithographs, engravings, mezzotints, photographs and wax medallions, big history paintings, life-sized figures for the colonies’ waxworks and even a monumental bronze. The range of relics of the explorers also multiplied as the explorers were lauded as Victoria’s, if not Australia’s, first heroes. Later artists around the turn of the century, including Arthur Loureiro and John Longstaff, continued to celebrate Burke and Wills. So too did William Strutt—more than 50 years after he first painted the explorers’ departure. The pictures of these artists were generally more painstaking, though less lively, than their predecessors. They also were on an unprecedented scale. The most famous—John Longstaff’s Burke, Wills and King at Cooper’s Creek, now unfortunately in no condition to travel—was for many years the largest Australian painting in an Australian art museum. Sidney Nolan gave the explorers new life. His Burke and Wills Expedition from 1948 was most controversial because it was the first picture in which an artist played with the explorers, presenting them as comic, even absurd. When Nolan entered it for the Sulman prize, the trustees of the Art Gallery of New South Wales rejected it. The weekly Bulletin thought it was a ‘joke’, which was in ‘poor taste’ given the explorers ‘majestic and tragic part’ in Australia’s history. The Sydney Sun lauded Nolan for transforming history into ‘a visionary dream’. Paul Haefliger of the Sydney Morning Herald reckoned Nolan’s ‘delightfully fantastic’ picture should have won the Sulman. Nolan was equally inventive in other paintings. Most of his other early Burke and Wills pictures are set in the red landscape of Central Australia which Nolan had seen for himself, when visiting Alice Springs and Uluru, rather than the very different landscape of Cooper’s Creek. But Nolan also built on tradition by basing pictures on colonial engravings which he both magnified and transformed. In one of these paintings, Nolan portrayed Wills as introspective and defeated. In another, he showed Burke not just as obsessed but mad—the first time this view of Burke, often put in print, had been powerfully expressed in paint. This artistic interest in the expedition has continued over the last 50 years. First David Boyd, Albert Tucker, and Nolan himself painted many more pictures of the explorers. More recently, the South Australian artist Anthony Hamilton has used the stuff of relics—camel hair, nardoo seed, oil cloth—to evoke the explorers’ dying days. The photographer Jon Rhodes has been commissioned by the National Library to take the first sustained look at the many memorials to the explorers in Victoria and on Cooper’s Creek. Peter Harris, who lives on the expedition’s route at Menindie, has carved Burke and Wills into emu eggs—the first time the story of the expedition has been taken up by an Aboriginal artist.
This sustained interest in Burke and Wills has few Australian parallels. No other colonial figures except for Ned Kelly have loomed so large in the culture. While successive generations have focused on very different aspects of the expedition and assessed it very differently, they have never lost interest in it. The drama and complexity of the expedition, always the stuff of conflicting accounts, has made it ripe for interpretation and reinterpretation. Burke & Wills: From Melbourne to Myth illuminates this process. Tim Bonyhady is the curator of Burke & Wills: From Melbourne to Myth. He is a member of the Australian National University’s Centre for Cross-Cultural Research and Centre for Resources and Environmental Studies. Burke & Wills: From Melbourne to Myth, presented by AAMI, is a National Library of Australia travelling exhibition in association with the State Library of Victoria. The Diary of William John Wills is also available on-line. |
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