Exploration
Maritime Explorers
The coastline of South Australia was made known to Europeans by four expeditions between 1627 and 1803. The map-shading identifies the sections of coast first charted by each expedition; however, the precise tracks of the voyagers are not shown.
In the years following 1803, sealing and whaling vessels added some details to knowledge of the coastline. These included an account of the discovery of an excellent harbour on the east coast of Gulf St Vincent by a whaling captain named Jones in 1833-34. The large freshwater lakes near the mouth of the Murray were discovered by sealers in 1828.
Dutch ships bound for Java sighted the coast of Western Australia from 1616 onwards before heading north into tropical waters. In 1627 François Thijssen with a Dutch official Pieter Nuyts in the Gulden Zeepard, after meeting the southern coast of the Australian continent, explored to the head of the Great Australian Bight and beyond. They entered Fowlers Bay and reached the archipelago later named after Nuyts by Matthew Flinders.
One hundred and seventy-three years were to pass before the next discovery of a part of the South Australian coastline. Then, within three years, virtually all of it was carefully charted.
James Grant in the Lady Nelson was informed on arrival in Cape Town in 1800 of the discovery of Bass Strait, and was instructed to sail through it en route to Sydney. Making landfall on the extreme southern coast of South Australia he named the volcanic cones of Mount Schank and Mount Gambier, and Cape Northumberland and Cape Banks.
Matthew Flinders in the Investigator, on a voyage circum-navigating Australia, thoroughly explored and charted the South Australian coast between January and April 1802. He was the first to record the central coast between Nuyts Archipelago and Encounter Bay. Flinders resolved speculation on the existence of a north-south strait dividing the continent, and described promising country for future settlement. At Encounter Bay on 8 April in a dramatic episode he met the French explorer Nicolas Baudin heading from the east.
Nicolas Baudin, commanding a French scientific expedition on behalf of Napoleon, sailed in Le Géographe along the north coast of Bass Strait while Flinders was charting the South Australian gulfs. Baudin discovered the coast between Cape Banks and Encounter Bay along which such French names as Lacepede, Guichen and Rivoli bays still remain. After re-equipping his expedition in Sydney, Baudin returned to the South Australian Coast early in 1803. In company with Louis Freycinet in command of the Casuarina, the French vessels charted Kangaroo Island, and were the first to record its west and south coasts.
Land Explorers
The routes followed by the principal inland explorers are shown by coloured lines which also correspond to the main periods of exploration. Within each time period the density of the coloured line is an assessment of the importance of the expedition in its contribution to geographical knowledge. Routes are shown only where an explorer was the first to traverse an area previously unknown to Europeans. The inset map of Australia shows the routes of those expeditions which passed through South Australia or which began or ended beyond its borders.
It should be remembered that although white Australians have justifiable respect for the achievements of the nineteenth century explorers, there was hardly a river, water-hole, rock or mountain range that had not been discovered and named by Aboriginal Australians in the preceding thousands of years.
The principal exploration journeys recorded on the map created only narrow threads of knowledge through a vast, dry interior. The details of the intervening terrain were gradually added by the less well-recorded observations of pastoralists, missionaries, surveyors, stockmen and prospectors, by surveys from the air and, more recently, by satellites.
George Sutherland, 1819, Master of the brig Governor Macquarie, spent seven months on Kangaroo Island gathering a cargo of seal and kangaroo skins, and salt. He made the first overland crossing from Nepean Bay to the southwest coast, and his exuberantly misleading report on the island's potential led the South Australian Company to locate its first depot there at Kingscote in 1836.
Charles Sturt, 1829-30, made the most important pre-colonisation journey by travelling along the Murrumbidgee River, carrying a whale-boat in sections, to its junction with the Lachlan River. There a skiff was constructed and the party drifted and rowed down the River Murray in the two boats. On 12 February 1830 they reached the mouth, and viewed Encounter Bay with its continuous line of breakers. Although Sturt was disappointed at the sand-bars blocking the river mouth, his favourable reports on the suitability of the neighbouring land for settlement were received enthusiastically by the colonisation theorists in England.
Collet Barker, 1831, was instructed by Governor Darling of New South Wales to examine the outlet of the River Murray while returning in the Isabella from Western Australia. He climbed Mount Lofty, and then crossed from Rapid Bay to the Murray. After swimming the mouth he was apparently killed by Aborigines. His party reported fertile land and the presence of a pass from Gulf St Vincent to the Murray.
Local Explorers and Overlanders, 1836-42. Explorations of the immediate hinterland of Adelaide were made by surveyors and settlers seeking routes to the River Murray, arable land, grazing and minerals. Although lacking the 'epic' quality of later inland journeys, they did produce vital topographical and economic information for the young colony.
In 1838 the first journeys by land along the River Murray from New South Wales (as distinct from Sturt's boat journey) were made in the pioneer cattle and sheep drives by parties led by Joseph Hawdon, Charles Bonney, Edward Eyre and Charles Sturt.
Edward Eyre, 1839-41, made the first major expeditions to the arid interior and the far-west coast. In 1839 from Mount Arden, at the head of Spencer Gulf, he sighted the dry saltbed of Lake Torrens. He then made a triangular journey around Eyre Peninsula, visiting Port Lincoln and Streaky Bay, and reported the region to be of sandy country with little grass and scanty water.
In 1840 Eyre explored north and west of the Flinders Ranges, encountering or sighting salt lakes at three places, and inferred that these were part of a continuous horseshoe-shaped Lake Torrens, effectively barring the way northwards. Belief in the horseshoe myth was to remain for another eighteen years.
Eyre than established bases at Streaky Bay and Fowlers Bay. After satisfying himself that only barren country lay to the north, he set out with four others around the head of the Bight for Western Australia. Five months later, after an appalling journey, Eyre and an Aboriginal boy reached King George Sound at Albany, Western Australia.
Charles Bonney, 1839, with ten drovers and 300 cattle, made the first overland journey from the Port Phillip District by way of Mount Gambier and the Coorong. This opened up a faster and safer route for stock than the River Murray, and drew attention to the grazing potential of the South-East, a reputation reinforced shortly afterwards by a journey by Governor George Grey and his party.
Edward Frome, 1843, as Surveyor-General, sought unsuccessfully to locate the southern boundary of the eastern branch of the assumed 'horseshoe' Lake Torrens and to determine the nature of the country to the east. He reported 'no country … was available for either agricultural or pastoral purposes'.
Charles Sturt, 1844-46, seeking to solve the mystery of the character of inland Australia, penetrated further into the interior than any previous explorer. His party of sixteen avoided the 'horseshoe lake' by travelling first to Menindee on the River Darling in New South Wales. Them, striking northwest, they discovered the Barrier Ranges and re-entered South Australia on a side trip which brought them in sight of Mount Hopeless in the Northern Flinders Ranges. Returning to New South Wales and discovering the Grey Range, Sturt again struck northwest across the stony desert that bears his name, and crossed the channels of Strzelecki Creek, Cooper Creek, Diamantina River and Eyre Creek before turning back from what is now known as the Simpson Desert.
John Darke, 1846, seeking pastoral land, explored north and east of the Gawler Ranges. Returning to Port Lincoln, he was speared by Aborigines near Waddikee Rocks and buried near what is now known as Darke Peak.
John Horrocks, 1846, left his station at Penwortham near Clare with a small party and the only camel in the colony and the first one in Australia used on an exploratory journey. The party reached Lake Dutton, where Horrocks, being jostled by the camel, was accidentally shot. He died three weeks later.
The explorations of the 1840s generated a gloomy view of South Australia as a small 'fertile island' of habitable country enclosed on the east by the sterile sands and limestone of the Murray Plains, on the north by a vast horseshoe of salt lakes, and by a waterless desert to the west.
However, this gloomy view was modified in the late 1850s. In 1857, Acting Deputy Surveyor-General George Goyder visited Lake Torrens and found it an inland sea surrounded by vegetation. Journeys by Babbage, Warburton and Gregory in 1858 proved that the 'horseshoe Lake Torrens' was indeed many separate lakes.
B.H. Baggage, 1858, explored in detail to the wast and north of Lake Torrens and Discovered Lake Eyre North. P.E. Warburton, 1858-66, confirmed the separate existence of Lake Torrens and Lake Eyre and located the first stock crossing between them. A.C. Gregor, 1858, coming south from Queensland along the Strzelecki Creek in search of the missing explorer Ludwid Leichhardt, passed along the eastern edge of Lake Blanche. The way was now open to reach the centre of the continent, and then the north coast, from Adelaide.
John McDouall Stuart, 1858-62, a member of Sturt's 1840s expedition to the interior, made a swift thrust in 1858 into the northwest beyond the Babbage party's journey, and then headed south west and reached the coast west of Streaky Bay. He gave optimistic reports on the grazing potential of the land he had traversed.
In 1860 Stuart set out on the first of three attempts to cross the continent from south to north. Passing west of Lake Torrens and Lake Eyre he reached a point beyond Tennant Creek but was forced to retreat because of scurvy and Aboriginal attacks. In a second attempt in 1861 he reached beyond Newcastle Waters where, foiled by dwindling supplies and thick scrub, he again had to return to Adelaide.
Stuart was finally successful in 1862, reaching the waters of Van Diemen Gulf near the month of the Adelaide River in July. On the return journey, Stuart was paralysed and blind for a while, but recovered in time to be showered with honours by the ecstatic populace of Adelaide. Stuart's route, in essence, became the line of the Overland Telegraph, built between Port Augusta and Darwin in 1870-72. Partly as a result of Stuart's expeditions, South Australia acquired responsibility in 1863 for the Northern Territory, hitherto part of New South Wales.
Robert O'Hara Burke and William J. Wills, 1860-61, had set out as leaders of the rival Victorian expedition to the Gulf of Carpentaria in the same year as Stuart made his first transcontinental attempt. Leaving Menindee, they followed roughly Sturt's route of seventeen years earlier, and traversed the northeastern extremity of South Australia. The return journey ended tragically with the death of three of the four members who had made the final dash to the Gulf.
John McKinlay, 1861-62, led a party from Adelaide in search of the missing Burke and Wills expedition. After finding what was thought to be the body of Gray, a member of that expedition, in the Cooper Creek country, they reached the Gulf of Carpentaria.
Ernest Giles, 1872-76, led several expeditions, beginning or ending the line of the Overland Telegraph. The longest, in 1875, skirted the southern end of Lake Torrens, followed the future route of the transcontinental railway to the site of Ooldea and reached Perth after a five-month desert journey. Camels made for a safe crossing of hundreds of kilometres of waterless country. On his return in 1876, Giles crossed the Gibson Desert and reached the Peake Telegraph Station west of Lake Eyre North.
William Gosse, 1873, set out from Alice Springs in an unsuccessful attempt to reach Perth. He was the first to reach Ayres Rock, the Olgas and the Musgrave Ranges with its double line of good water holes.
John Lewis, 1874-75, led a government party to the Lake Eyre region to determine whether its 'waters' could be navigated, and to explore and survey country east and north of the lake.
James W. Jones, 1880, a government surveyor, carried out a systematic examination of the Nullarbor Plain while seeking a site for the first trial boring for water in the region.
David Lindsay, 1891-92, led the Elder Scientific Exploring Expedition, the last major exploration of unknown areas in north South Australia. It traversed country south of the Musgrave, Tomkinson and Mann ranges before passing into Western Australia. Dissension among its officers and scientific staff brought the expedition to a premature close.
R.T Maurice, 1901, a pastoralist, led a 'pleasure trip' northwards from Fowlers Bay, to clear up doubts as to the nature of the country between Giles' east-west route and that of the Elder expedition under Lindsay. In a salt lake area, they came across the plainly visible tracks of Giles' party of a quarter of a century earlier.
