User:Itsonlyme/History of the Flinders Ranges

The recent history of the Flinders Ranges is one of a frontier pushed rapidly back. Initial and cursory exploration led to a rush of pastoral settlement, closely accompanied and followed by surveyors trying to map and organise the countryside, and officially sponsored fossickers seeking fortune. After drought ruined many of these pioneers in the 1860s, those who survived and prospered again were threatened by none other than advancing farmers, who in turn were ruined by the drought of the 1880s. With pastoral fortunes made and mining fortunes proving elusive, the region's sheep and cattle settled down to a quiet existence amongst the stony ridges and gum-lined gorges. In recent decades, the advent of tourism and establishment of three major national parks, along with several sanctuaries, is changing the character of the Flinders Ranges once again.

Exploration and survey

Flinders and Eyre

The first European to see the ranges was Matthew Flinders and the crew of his ship The Investigator as they sailed up Spencer Gulf in March 1802. A party including the expedition's naturalist and two artists set off on the morning of March 10 to climb the highest peak in the ranges "abreast" of the ranges. Decieved by the clear air, they only reached the summit at sunset and had to spend a night on the summit without water. The view they had from the top, Flinders later wrote, was "a dead uninteresting flat country every where"; not quite accurate, but the mountains of Wilpena Pound were over the horizon and the Willochra Plain dominates the view. Flinders later named the mountain after his naturalist, Robert Brown. Although French ships under Nicholas Baudin and Louis de Freycinet also visited and surveyed Spencer Gulf (Golfe de la Melomanie and Golfe Bonaparte to them), and likely saw the ranges, no landings were made.

The next white men to visit the ranges were those of Edward John Eyre's small expedition of 1839. Fresh from overlanding sheep down the River Murray, Eyre travelled up the western plains, reaching a small hill a little west of Hawker. From here he was the first to see Wilpena Pound and Lake Torrens.

On June 18, 1840, Eyre again went north, with his previous companion John Baxter, and young E. B. Scott. As he approached the ranges from the south, he named Crystal Brook and Mount Remarkable, then continued north along the western plains for the third time in a year. In the vicinity of Leigh Creek, he named a gorge overlooked by towering hills Scott Creek after his young second-in-command; today the gorge is dammed to form Aroona Dam, the water supply for nearby Leigh Creek. Eyre also went on a reconnaissance trip to the northwest, away from the main range, to ascertain whether Lake Torrens continued to block his path, naming Mount Deception and Termination Hill.

Then, turning east, Eyre penetrated the main range for the first time, naming some permanent water he found Depot Springs; the station at the same spot today retains the same name. From here he noted a mountain poking higher above the ranges further to the east, and he and Scott climbed it, gaining sight of yet another salt lake through ranges to the east - he believed that this was the very same Lake Torrens to his west, curling around out of sight beyond the plains stretching north to the horizon. He named this peak that he had climbed Mount Serle, after Governor George Gawler had requested him to name "some remarkable feature" after a Mr Serle; it is still not known who this person was.

Determined to settle the matter of whether Lake Torrens indeed persisted to the north, Eyre continued north, sending all his companions bar a single aboriginal back after heavy rains flooded the countryside. After reaching and naming Mount Distance some 50 km north of modern-day Arkaroola, he set out for a low isolated mound at the extreme north-eastern end of the ranges, naming it Mount Hopeless before reaching it; indeed, from the top he saw his salt lake to the north once more. Not realising that it was a separate lake from Lake Torrens, as was the lake he had glimpsed to the east, he turned back south, defeated.

The 1840s and Horrocks

In October 1842, another expedition to the north was dispatched when the Port Lincoln pastoralist C. C. Dutton, attempting to drive his stock around the top of Spencer Gulf, failed to arrive as expected in Adelaide. Alexander Tolmer (the Commissioner of Police) and a number of volunteers went north, but the policemen returned after a difference of opinion in the vicinity of Mount Remarkable. A creek running deep into the ranges near Baroota Reservoir is still named Separation Creek after the split. Upon return to Adelaide, the Governor ordered the policemen north again, this time with the deputy surveyor-general Thomas Burr and Eyre in command. At Depot Creek, Eyre decided to turn to the south-west, and Burr returned with the policemen again. On the way south, however, Burr crossed the ranges to the east into new country around what was to become Melrose. Upon reaching Adelaide, Burr reported this "well-watered... luxuriant" country, exciting speculation amongst pastoralists who had not yet penetrated that far north.

Burr's boss, the surveyor-general Edward Charles Frome, was the next to go north, in the same year. Travelling north in the area between the Mount Lofty Ranges and southern Flinders. After reaching and passing the vicinity of Orroroo, he found it necessary to retreat due to lack of water. He set out again in the middle of 1843, hoping to bypass Eyre's eastern "Lake Torrens", but failing due to a mistake in Eyre's navigation, he fell in with the mountains in the vicinity of the Gammon Ranges, and mistook Mount McKinlay for Mount Serle. His report was as gloomy as Eyre's, describing the country as unimaginably "barren and sterile".

Back in the south, one of the pioneering pastoralists of the Clare Valley, young John Ainsworth Horrocks, had decided to become an explorer, feeling that a more "stirring life" better suited his "temper". A party of six men (including the artist S. T. Gill and a camel) left his village at Penwortham on July 29, 1846. He headed through what is today the Mid North, eventually leaving pastoral settlement behind at the foot of Mount Remarkable. From here he continued north and discovered a pass in the range between Quorn and Wilmington, today called Horrocks Pass. After reaching Depot Creek, a little south of Mount Arden, Horrocks set out to explore the plains to the north-west, but after five days travel disaster struck. While loading his gun in order to shoot birds, his camel lurched and the trigger caught; the gun fired, taking off several of Horrock's fingers and knocking the teeth out from his lower jaw. One of his companions, Bernard Kilroy, walked back to Depot Creek in a single day to get help, and the whole party returned, but Horrocks died from his injuries back at Penwortham on September 23, 1846.

The belated survey

The next people to explore the ranges further to the north and east were the pastoralists (see below for their advance). The first pastoral leases in the central Flinders were lodged in 1850, for the area surrounding Wilpena Pound. At the time, the government required any application for a lease to be accompanied by an accurate private survey with reference to at least one point fixed on a government map. This proved to be a problem with the rapid advance of the pastoralists, for the only such points available in the Flinders were Mount Brown, Mount Arden (fixed by Flinders), Mount Remarkable, Mount Eyre, and Mount Deception (fixed by Eyre). As most of these peaks were away on the western margins, away from the more attractive lands to the east, there was a frustrating lack of reference, and Charles Bonney, the Commissioner of Lands, was having trouble sorting out conflicting leases.

To resolve the problem, surveyor-general Arthur Henry Freeling arranged for a baseline to be surveyed north from Mount Remarkable to the vicinity of Mount Eyre, and H. C. Rawnsley, a surveyor with the government, was sent north in early 1851 to complete the work. The expedition slowly became a farce, with Rawnsley lingering at Mount Remarkable for four months before moving to begin the work. In July, prompted by newspapers fuming at the expenditure of the expedition, Freeling himself met Rawnsley at Mount Eyre. The latter finally concluded his baseline at the southern bluff of Wilpena Pound in August. Now reviled in the colony for wasting time and money, he was sacked the following year, and it is possible the bluff his line terminated at was named Rawnsley's Bluff by the local squatters awaiting confirmation of their leases in an ironic nod at his reputation.

The next major survey was led by assistant surveyor-general George Woodroffe Goyder in 1857. He first surveyed a road through the Pichi Richi Pass, between Quorn and Port Augusta, then travelled north to Mount Serle where he assisted a private surveyor, J. M. Painter to run an urgently needed baseline from Mount Rowe to Arcoona Bluff, on the western margins of the Gammon Ranges. It was again needed for the pastoralists, who had moved in the preceding seven years throughout the entire length of the Ranges.

Much of the major work of triangulating and naming the features of the northern Flinders was completed in that year and the year following by the private surveyors Painter, Samuel Parry (who arrived in the north with Freeling in 1857), and John McDouall Stuart, not to mention the work of Frederick Sinnett, who performed probably the first survey in the northern Flinders in June 1851 when he utilised Rawnsley's baseline to survey the pastoral applications for Wilpena and Oraparinna to the north. Parry covered a large amount of territory, all over the ranges, while Stuart (later to become one of Australia's most famous explorers) spent most of his time in the area between Wilpena and Mount Serle. Stuart was employed by the pastoralist John Chambers, who was based at Oratunga, a little north of modern Blinman, and is believed to have named many features in the ranges, including Mount Chambers on the eastern plains, which was originally called Eagle's Nest Hill by Frome in 1843.

The myth of "Lake Torrens"

Those inclined to exploration in the Flinders were most attracted by the extreme northern margins, and the dry saltbush plains beyond which it was believed, ever since Eyre's 1840 expedition, there was an enormous lake filled with salt which bogged down horses and blocked any further progress. The first to follow in Eyre's steps was the engineer B. H. Babbage, who was employed by the government to go on a prospecting expedition through the ranges. He left for the northern ranges in September 1856, nominally under Charles Bonney, who travelled with him as far north as Mount Serle, to inspect the leases which he had just granted. Leaving Bonney behind, he rode north to the extreme fringes of the ranges and named a major creek running north after the Governor, Richard Graves MacDonnell. Two large waterholes on the creek he named St Mary's Pool, and Blanchewater, and the wife of the Governor. Examining the low ranges south of Mount Hopeless, he named one hill Mount Hopeful, for he had learned from natives that it was possible to cross "Lake Torrens" to the north. He was forced to turn back when his native guides proved reluctant and he lost his horses.

Goyder was the next to try and penetrate the salt lake barrier when he arrived in the north in 1857. Leaving his contractors behind to proceed with the survey, he travelled north up the MacDonnell and discovered a large sheet of freshwater, which he believed to be Lake Torrens. Impressed by the countryside, and unable to continue, he rushed south and caused quite a stir amongst all concerned in Adelaide, all of whom had been led to believe the northern areas were wasteland by Eyre twenty years earlier. The truth lay somewhere in between, for Goyder had seen the country at time of rain. His Lake Torrens was not even today's Lake Blanche, but rather a flooded backwater of the MacDonnell.

Goyder's report sparked more than just a little stir. Unsurveyed applications for pastoral leases flooded in, and tempted by the opportunity for making money, the government attempted to quickly amend legislation to allow these leases. Controversy erupted and the government had to resign; in the meanwhile, an expedition equipped with a boat and under the leadership of the surveyor-general Freeling headed north. Heading straight for the MacDonnell, they reached the margin of "Lake Torrens" (Lake Blanche), only to try and float the boat on muddy salt flats. Noting the deceiving effects of mirage in the area and the intermittent rainfall, Freeling returned to Adelaide.

The myth of the horseshoe lake was broken by explorations by Babbage and Stuart in and around the northwestern margins of Lake Torrens in later years - Eyre's dream of the Flinders being stepping stones to the interior proved true with the establishment of Marree and the overland telegraph.

Pastoral settlement

Camels, rabbits, and goats

In 1846, Horrocks had utilised the services of a lone camel in exploring the arid plains to the west. Although this unusual nimal caused something of an upset amongst the locals, frightening horses, it proved well-adapted to the outback. Ten years later, the well planned and equipped Burke and Wills transcontinental expedition was equipped with camels, and many stockmen saw that the desert creatures might prove useful. So it was that in 1862 and 1865 Sir Thomas Elder and Samuel Stuckey, business and owners of several pastoral runs in the northern ranges, arranged to purchase 122 camels from India. These arrived at Port Augusta in January 1866 and Elder soon established a camel-breeding station at his Beltana headquarters, on the telegraph line.

With Elder's camels came a number of so-called "Afghans" to serve as camel-drivers, and in following years many more arrived. Some realised the potential of camels, and turned importers: at least 700 camels were shipped in to Port Augusta toward the end of the nineteenth century. The camels proved very useful in the Far North, beyond the Flinders, especially as a means of transport beyond the railhead which existed at Oodnadatta for many years, and the drivers gave their name to the The Ghan railway. Not until the advent of the automobile in the early twentieth century were camels superseded; their descendants remain as wild pests in the region north of the Flinders today.

Rabbits are believed to have first entered South Australia from Victoria in the 1860s. They came into the Flinders from the northern Mount Lofty Ranges. In the 1870s, as agricultural lands near Gawler became infested, farmers blamed the pastoralists further north for introducing the pest, though it's likely neither were to blame. They rapidly spread north through the ranges, causing damage ever more severe as the vegetation grew thinner. By 1888, the rabbit plague had reached a station northeast of Lake Callabonna, well beyond the Flinders, and within five years destroyed all the vegetation, turning the land into a sandy desert and forcing the station to be abandoned.

Goats were another animal introduced in the nineteenth century that became a major pest in the ranges. Well suited to the rocky country, they upset the ecosystem and consumed an inordinate amount of vegetation.

Agricultural advance

The Hills at Wilpena

See also: Wilpena Pound § History

Mineral exploitation

References

• Hans Mincham, The Story of the Flinders Ranges, Rigby, 1962.