Thoughts on the Dig Tree

How wonderful it has been to see so many beautiful photos of the life-giving floodwaters surging through Australia’s northern Channel Country towards Lake Eyre. The country that the waters are flowing through includes one of our most significant heritage sites: The Dig Tree.

This coolabah tree, situated on the north shore of Coopers Creek, has lived for over 150 years. It has born witness to one of the most tragic and terribly ironic failures of communication that took place beneath its boughs on 21 April, 1861.

To understand its significance, imagine what it was like to set off from Melbourne on an expedition to discover the interior of Australia at a time when there were no maps, no cars, no mobile phones, no emails, no GPS. Imagine yourself riding a horse or a camel with the intention of discovering the interior of our vast island continent, hoping to find an inland sea – and then to travel to the far north, wondering all the time what kind of edge the continent had made with the far distant sea?

The first team of European explorers to cross the continent was led by Burke and Wills. They set off from Melbourne 150 years ago. The immense significance of the Dig Tree is a story of a failure of communication. Burke’s team came back from the arduous expedition to the Gulf of Carpentaria, exhausted and out of food, expecting to find a base camp at the Dig Tree. But no-one was there. Brahe and Wright had left about 4 hours earlier! They had the decency to dig a hole and bury food and provisions in case Burke’s party did return. The explorers found the cache beneath the tree which gave them enough food to survive for more than two months more. Had they stayed beneath its sheltering branches they would have been found when Brahe and Wright returned. Instead the explorers wandered off into South Australia where Burke and Wills died. They left no trace of having been at the Dig Tree. If they'd carved another message in its bark before leaving, Brahe and Wright would have known, when they returned to the tree, that they were still alive somewhere.

Think about this story and what it means for the way Australia has developed its own unique culture. Dig this... AMP (formerly one of Australia’s leading Mutual Societies, still a major insurance company) ran an ad for many years that said this:

“The Dig Tree is on a small tract of Australian Heritage land at “Nappa Merrie” cattle station, one of the Stanbroke Pastoral Company chain. And Stanbroke is just a part of AMP’s investment portfolio - Australia’s most substantial. AMP is a MUTUAL society investing the savings of nearly 2 million Australians. So in many ways the lives of AMP Policy holders are interwoven with the history of this country”.

The story has inspired art, music, writers of poetry, fiction and non-fiction, even the writers of advertisements!

Pera Wells

Musings on the myth

Why is the story of Burke and Wills so important in the Australian psyche? Manning Clark, one of our most notable historians, had this to say:

The story of Burke and Wills could be told to illustrate many things about life. Like all great stories it had everything. It had a mighty spirit, Robert O’Hara Burke, destroyed by a ‘fatal flaw’. It could told to show that when chance conspires with a man who suffers from attacks of the ‘sillies’, then all the inventions of science, all the material progress of mankind is powerless to save him from the fruits of his folly. It could be told as a story about the evils of snobbery, with a special glance at ‘poor Charlie Gray’ as a victim of such snobbery. It could be told as a story of how the great bond between Burke and Wills, the affection they felt for each other, contributed to their deaths. It could also be told as a story of a man who was trying to prove something to a woman who, in turn, was never going to be impressed by Robert O’Hara Burke even if he had raised the dead once again into the land of the living.

To feel the full force of that tragedy one has to stand on the banks of Cooper’s Creek at the spot where Wills died. Right to the very end Wills had believed, like Mr Micawber, that something might turn up. Then, when he knew his death was very near he had the courage to tell his father his religious opinions had not changed. Like Hamlet he believed: the rest is silence. On that same spot a few months later the man who led the expedition to find his remains, A. W. Howitt, an agnostic, read the words of St Paul: ‘For the trumpet shall sound, and the dead shall be raised.’ The most difficult thing of all for a historian is to learn how to tell his story so that something is added to the facts, something about the mystery at the heart of things.

Manning Clark Manning Clark: Occasional Writings and Speeches Fontana Books 1980 pp 69-70. Originally presented in 1976 in a series of Boyer lectures. One wonders whether, if Clark had been speaking in (say) 1996 or later, he might have added: ‘It could be told to show what white Australia can lose by treating the ‘natives’ with disdain or contempt.’