This Is Guernsey

Edmund Kennedy’s boss had always wanted to make a name for himself. Edmund Kennedy’s boss had always wanted to make a name for himself.

Becoming Australia’s bad-tempered Surveyor-General in 1828, 38 year-old Thomas Mitchell had already been “overlooked as leader for two important inland expeditions,” says Michael Cannon in “The Exploration of Australia.”

He openly criticised other explorers, especially when they did things like reach his destination before he did.

He was obsessed that Australia had an inland sea and “a river to India”.

Even the rivers he did find, had often already been found by someone else.

His approach to exploring was dubious.

He was inspired by rumours from a runaway convict called ‘George the Barber’, who said he’d seen a great river and many “Hippopotamuses and Orang-Outangs.” Even his knighthood he’d campaigned so desperately for was delayed until 1839 because of “his attitude towards aborigines.” He seemed to kill a lot of them, and once said something like: “I must remember to give warning shouts, so they can hear us approach.”

In 1845, when Mitchell was 54, he took as his second-in-command a 27 year-old surveyor, Edmund Kennedy, with him on another wild goose chase.

This, basically, involved following another man, who Mitchell had actually employed as naturalist and who had “wearied of government delays and set off with his own party,” says Michael.

Again, Leichhardt was the one to slip into the history books by crossing northern Australia from Brisbane to Darwin, leaving the now ‘Sir’ Thomas Mitchell in Sydney waiting for his permit.

Edmund Kennedy was born on September 5, 1818 in Guernsey.

The Australian Encyclopaedia says he was “the sixth child of Colonel (then Major) Thomas Kennedy and Mary Ann, daughter of Thomas Smith, a wealthy merchant and former Lord Mayor London.” He went to Elizabeth College and at 21 went to Australia, where he had an affair with an Irish immigrant, Margaret Murphy, who “went to Tasmania, and gave birth to Kennedy’s daughter, Eliza,” to whom he later “willed the bulk of his estate.”

Edmund got ready for his first expedition with Mitchell.

How could they fail to find the great river that, by now, Mitchell had convinced everyone flowed north to the Gulf of Carpentaria?

They could have found 50 such rivers with the ‘army’ they took: “30 trusted convicts and black trackers, 11 wheeled vehicles full of provisions, 112 bullocks, 250 sheep (for light snacks, presumably), and two boats,” says Michael Cannon.

These boats would never be launched in the sea, nor on an inland lake.

Even ‘the great river’ they found turned south and joined another one they already knew.

They did end up discovering one or two bits of good grazing country.

But had it been worth it? The heavy boats’ only use was to act as water troughs for the stock “Mitchell and several others went temporarily blind from ophthalmia” in temperatures up to 53 degrees in the shade, and they had to walk with “leeches on their eyelids as an attempted cure.”

But, if Edmund Kennedy thought this was bad, alas, it was only his apprenticeship.

In 1848 his party was dropped off by a ship between Cairns and Townsville where he set off on his own expedition to explore the far north-eastern pointed tip of Australia.

He soon found out that “the reality of north Queensland’s mountains and jungles was quite different to the favourable views seen by travellers on passing ships.”

Meanwhile, Mitchell took a year off in London “to supervise the publication of his ‘Journal of an Expedition into the Interior of Tropical Australia,’” that Edmund had really only just embarked on.

Edmund’s first bit of news, that the “river to India” didn’t exist, “severely embarrassed Sir Thomas Mitchell and delighted his many enemies,” says Michael Cannon.

But for Edmund it would be worse than embarrassing.

After a 500 mile journey, lasting five months, “Kennedy and his 12 starving men stumbled down the northern foothills of the Great Dividing Range.” They’d gone three-quarters of the way, and were nearly dead.

“In desperation,” says Michael, “Kennedy left eight sick men, two horses and a little flour, and took the remaining three white men, an aborigine called Jackey Jackey, horses and provisions on a dash to the tip of Cape York,” where the schooner ‘Ariel’ was waiting for them.

One of the men accidentally shot himself in the shoulder.” Kennedy carried on with Jackey Jackey, and left the other two to look after him.

The Australian Dictionary of Biography says that a month later the pair got “within 20 miles of the supply ship, only to find themselves trapped by the (ironically-named) Escape River and its crocodile-infested mangrove swamps.”

One evening they were attacked by aborigines.

Jackey Jackey later said: “they threw plenty of spears, and hit Mr Kennedy in the back first.” He tried to keep them “at bay with gunfire while he cut the barb out of his employer’s back,” says Michael.

“Then even more spears hit Kennedy in the leg and right side.

Jackey Jackey, himself wounded over one eye, caught Kennedy as he fell back and died.” He also said later: “I was crying a good while until I got well.”

“Jackey Jackey escaped by wading along a creek with only his head above water.” Two weeks later he reached the supply ship and told them what had happened.

The ship immediately sailed down the coast to rescue the two groups of men left behind.

But the three men “had completely disappeared, and were never found.”

“The eight men left at Weymouth Bay had tried to survive in 40 degree temperatures by boiling down their horses into soup.” It didn’t help.

“William Carron, the expedition’s 25 year-old botanist, described how the weakened, fever-ridden men died one after the other.

The survivors, too weak to dig graves, weighted the bodies with stones and rolled them into the water.”

Carron survived by shooting birds “and once a wallaby.” Some friendly aborigines had given them “pieces of turtle’s entrails, with some shark’s liver.

Given a fat blue-tongued lizard, Carron opened it ‘and took out 11 young ones,’ he said ‘which we roasted and ate.’” He and only one other man survived.

When rescued, they lay on the ground, “Carron’s arm and hip bones having worked their way through his flesh.”

Carron slowly recovered in Sydney, where he worked at the Botanic Gardens until his death at 53 in 1876.

Jackey Jackey became an instant celebrity and hero in Australia for having tried to save Edmund Kennedy.

“So many people bought him congratulatory drinks, that he became an alcoholic,” says Michael Cannon, and was “burned to death in 1854 when he drunkenly rolled into a fire.”

Sir Thomas Mitchell’s reaction to this human tragedy was to dismiss the expedition as “a waste of lives and money.” Whatever people thought of him for remarks like that, words like “a fine, noble fellow” spoken by T.H. Huxley were reserved not for him, but for Edmund Kennedy.

Article posted on 31st October, 2006 - 12.00am