The Great Explorer closes his eyes against that bright tormenting sun rising over the desert’s far horizon, already brain-numbingly hot, and tries to recall the parades that cheered him on as he set out from Sydney or Melbourne or Brisbane or wherever it was. The good citizens lined the streets waving small flags and called Huzzah! Ladies threw flowers to him and men and young boys stared at him in awe. On his return, they will fire cannons in his honour and proclaim him a hero of the Empire. Men of the press will crowd around to ask what great thing he has learned on his epic exploration.
‘That a saddle makes a poor pillow,’ he will advise.
*
He has a difficult day’s journey through rocky country, and when he has set up camp the Great Explorer writes in his journal that the hills around were of a most superior description, beyond his most sanguine expectations. The land is excellent and very rich, he writes, with light black soil covered with kangaroo grass two feet high, and as thick as it could stand. Good hay could be made, and in any quantity.1
He ponders what else to write, but falls back on an old favourite line: I never saw anything equal to this land in my life.2
*
The Great Explorer has lost track of time. His watch stopped working one cold night in the desert many days or weeks or years ago. He tries to measure the time of day by gauging the location of the sun, then tries to measure the passing of the years by the dates on old magazines and newspapers he finds blowing across his path. Then by the increasing number of tour buses he sees driving along the highways in the distance.
*
One day, the Great Explorer comes upon a black man wearing a mantle made of various animal skins, all sewn together. Being desirous of obtaining it, he offers to exchange the mantle for an axe. But the man will not part with it, indicating that the nights are very cold and the mantle is his only covering.3 The Great Explorer decides not to give him any space in his journal by telling his story, and rides on over unexplored ground.
*
At noon, the Great Explorer takes his thermometer out of its box and observes that the mercury is up to 125°F. Thinking that it has been unduly influenced, he puts it in the fork of a tree sheltered alike from the wind and the sun. But when later he goes to examine it, he finds that the mercury has burst the bulb.4
*
The Great Explorer writes in his journal that he has camped happily on the bank of a fine stream of water. He had seen the smoke of fires, but if there were natives they had moved on before him. His dogs killed a kangaroo, which was very acceptable. He ponders what else to write.5 The timber about him appears rotten and unfit for building, but he writes: I never saw anything equal to this land in my life.
*
The Great Explorer remembers how he found eight chiefs who possessed the whole of the territory thereabout. After telling them about his exploration objective, he purchased two large tracts of land from them—about 600,000 acres, and in exchange he delivered over to them blankets, knives, looking glasses, tomahawks, beads, scissors and flour as payment. He then had them sign a parchment with their own marks and they gave him handfuls of soil in exchange.6
He only kept the parchment, and rode on.
*
The Great Explorer sits with his journal and tries to capture the day’s events. He writes that he had been making his way onwards when suddenly a native with his spear fixed in a throwing stick burst upon him. And each tree and each rock seemed to give forth a black denizen, as if by enchantment, surrounding him with savage and ferocious yells on every side, bent on his destruction. He had given them the parchment that the other chiefs signed and a random soil sample he had collected, and they were gone like they had never been there.
*
The Great Explorer starts a list in his journal of all the things he has eaten since his food ran out. Snakes. Lizards. Grubs. His belt. Flying insects whose fine, transparent wings became stuck in your teeth. Half-eaten tins found in the rubbish bins of camping grounds. What else? His hopes. Dreams. Memories.
*
The Great Explorer dreams of floating in a boat in the inland sea. He is dreaming of the parade he will get when he returns to civilisation. He dreams of the accolades he will receive from scientists and gentlemen. And, of course, from her. Laura. Who is ever in his thoughts. Or was it Eliza?
*
The Great Explorer awakens to find himself in a dried riverbed strewn with empty bottles and other detritus. He looks about and is surprised to see that he had camped in the middle of a small town.
‘This won’t do at all,’ he says and slips out of town before anyone finds him there.
*
It has rained for forty days and forty nights. The ground has turned to bog and the Great Explorer sinks in it up to his knees. He struggles to free himself, but sinks deeper, up to his thighs. He struggles harder and sinks to his hips. Then his waist. His chest. His shoulders. His head. If he does not free himself, he thinks, there will only be a battered hat protruding from the earth as a mark of all his efforts.
*
Jesus only spent forty days and nights in the wilderness, he thinks, though he did resist the Devil that came to tempt him with a ticket home. He wonders what he will do when Lucifer appears with that Greyhound bus voucher?
*
The Great Explorer has been trying to sketch the land about him with charcoal from his campfire. He stares at the land and moves his hands across the page of his journal, convinced he is capturing it. But when he looks at his work, he sees he has made a mess of it.
*
The desert is so hot that the stitching on the soles of his boots singe and fall apart. It is so hot his fingernails fall out. It is so hot his bone knife handle splinters. It is so hot that matches falling on the ground ignite.7 It is so hot his thoughts and memories leak out his ears as a thick, yellowy fluid.
*
Through sleepy eyes, the Great Explorer looks out into the darkness and sees a shape there. He lifts his head from his hard saddle-pillow. It is a person; a woman. Nearly as dark as the night. She comes over to him and lies down next to him. Wraps her limbs about him. She is moist and warm. Lying with her feels like floating in the elusive inland sea that he knows is out there somewhere.
Then he is awake, and sees the scrub about him alight with the first touch of dawn. He looks for the woman, to see if he had imagined her, but only sees dark shapes receding into the landscape.8
*
The wind had been blowing all morning and increased now to a heavy gale. The Great Explorer had sought shelter behind a large gum tree, but the blasts of heat were so terrific that he feared the grass would take fire. Everything animate and inanimate gave way before it. The birds are mute. The lizards are immobile. Even the leaves of the trees dry and fall like a snow shower around him.9
*
The Great Explorer lists in his journal all the things he has had to fight. A snake. A wild camel. A wild pig. A whole herd of feral animals. Feral dogs. Childhood memories. Doubt. Insecurities.
*
The Great Explorer checks his calculations once more. He measures the sun at 111°00′30″. He then proclaims to the emptiness, ‘Let any man lay the map of Australia before him, and regard the blank upon its surface, and then ask him if it would not be an honourable achievement to be the first to place foot in its centre.’10
He takes a deep breath, as if practising for the speech he will give upon his return to civilisation, and says, ‘Men of undoubted perseverance and energy have in vain tried to work their way to this distant and shrouded spot, for a veil has hung over Central Australia that could neither be pierced or raised. Girt round about by deserts, it almost appears as if nature has intentionally closed it upon civilised man, that she might have one domain on the Earth’s wide field over which the savage might roam in freedom.’
*
The Great Explorer is perplexed. He is looking over his valuable journals and maps and finds the words are moving off the page, as if they have turned into tiny insects, intent on getting back into the desert sand. He tries to read them, but cannot. And his maps! The images and words on them are fading to emptiness. Returning to an unexplored and unnamed state.
*
The Great Explorer is tired and sees the heat-hazed horizon throw up taunting shapes. Water pools. A road. A pub. A bus station.
*
The Great Explorer turns his head to the side. He is certain that he saw movement out there in the scrub. He continues walking. There! He sees it again. There are several figures. Two or three, at least. He stops and the figures stop, trying to keep out of sight. He walks on and they walk on too. He is keeping a close eye on them now as they flit from tree to tree. Then he sees them, moving across a break in the landscape. It’s a bloody film crew!
He keeps on.
*
The Great Explorer thinks he should have recruited a guide. Someone to tell him which plants were edible and which were poisonous—someone to show him where water was hidden. Someone to broker peace with hostile natives. Someone to acknowledge the greatness of his quest.
*
The land about him is hard and rocky, and at each step a stone tries to trip him up. He refuses to slow his pace, though, until dusk when he slumps exhausted to the ground and writes in his journal: I never saw anything equal to this land in my life.
The Great Explorer stumbles upon a camp fire and finds he is looking at himself, lying there, starving to death. The figure looks up at himself and makes a dry clicking sound with his mouth, trying to work up enough saliva to speak. ‘Turn back,’ he croaks. ‘Before it is too late.’
‘What has become of you?’ he asks, needing to know what will happen.
But the Great Explorer before him is beyond hearing, and his eyes close as he slumps into the sand.
The Great Explorer sees a line of footprints in the soft ground about him. He places his own boot alongside one, then compares the two. The barefoot print seems so light on the land. He follows the prints for some way and they fade away as the ground becomes harder—that, or the mysterious figure just melts away.
*
A fleeting thought occurs to the Great Explorer that the blacks may have names and stories for the land that he believes he is discovering; names and stories that tell where the best paths are and where water and wildlife are. But the thought fades from him quickly, blown away into the distance.
*
The Great Explorer thinks he must be near death now because he can see the shades of the Great Explorers who have gone before him wandering in from the darkness to sit around his campfire. Burke and Wills. Sturt and Stuart and Leichhardt and Kennedy and… But then he sees he is mistaken. They are the second-tier explorers that most people have never heard of. Grey and Hume, Oxley and Mitchell. He watches them sit desultorily around his small fire and start complaining how they never get good speaking gigs anymore. Not even in primary schools, they say.
The Great Explorer thinks he could easily lay his head on the desert floor, never to raise it again. He has dug a grave in preparation for dying and lain out the remains of his Union Jack—the most fitting covering in which the bones of a brave but unfortunate man could take their last rest.
He wonders what inscription he should cut into a nearby tree to record this moment. But he cannot see a tree. He curses and climbs wearily to his feet. He will have to die somewhere else.
*
The Great Explorer has started a list in his journal of all the ways a man could die. Starvation. Thirst. Heat exhaustion. Heart attack. Neglect. Gluttony. Being forgotten.
*
The Great Explorer is sitting in a bus terminal. He has been waiting for days. Waiting for the devil to show up with his bus ticket. He looks around at the other people sitting about him and at first thinks they are those second-tier explorers, Grey and Oxley and Hume and so on, all refusing to meet his gaze as if they have forgotten him already. But then he notices they are grey nomads and backpackers and other lost souls who have abandoned searching for some fragment of their dreams in Central Australia.
He writes in his journal: I never saw anything equal to this land in my life.
*
The Great Explorer is near the end now and thinks he can hear the distant cheers of a parade. The good citizens have lined the streets waving small flags and calling Huzzah! Ladies are throwing flowers, and men and young boys stare in awe. He hears cannons fired in his honour as they proclaim him a hero of the Empire. Men of the press are waiting for him, ready to ask him what great things he has learned on his epic exploration.
‘That a saddle makes a poor pillow,’ he tries to say.
*
Endnotes
1—Charles Sturt, Narrative of an expedition into Central Australia performed under the authority of Her Majesty’s government, during the years 1844, 5, and 6.
2—John Batman’s journal, 29 May 1835.
3—Francis Barrallier’s journal, November 1802.
4—Charles Sturt.
5—Gregory Blaxland’s journal, 1813.
6—John Batman’s journal, 1835.
7, 8, 9, 10—Charles Sturt’s journal, 1828.
