Australia's Pioneers, Heroes & Fools

To dull Australian males of a certain political profile, the "explorers" were the great heroes, going out into the unmapped wilderness, and discovering things never before seen.

In reality, everything out there was known by people who had been here for around 60,000 years, at least. Not only did the original Australians know the country, their feet had left the tracks that the explorers called "native paths" or "native roads", markings which made travel much easier than it might have been.

In fact, less than a month after the European invasion had started, back in 1788, some convicts had found "the road to Botany Bay", and they had popped over from Sydney Cove to see if two visiting French ships might offer them a passage away from the fearful land they had been dumped into.

In fairness, the explorers achieved a great deal in terms of getting around from A to B and drawing maps as white society understands "maps", but the Australians had a different idea of maps, and that is never mentioned when ageing whitefellas start spouting about discovery.

While he rejects the descriptor "ageing", Peter Macinnis admits to being of advanced middle age, and concedes that with more than half a century of wilderness walking behind him, others might call him "ageing". Nonetheless, he is young enough in his heart still to head out into the wilderness, wondering "who made this track I am walking on?"

With a first degree in botany and zoology, he has picked up enough earth science to be able to trace a lot of the history of country, as scientists see it, but most of his answers came from reading the journals of the explorers, and deciding as a one-time fraud investigator, how much we can rely on those accounts.

Reading the journals, you immediately realise that the standard school-room account of valiant white males galloping off into the unknown is far from complete. Most parties included convicts and Aboriginal men, while a few included Aboriginal women, some had white women along, and quite a few had teenage boys, while at least two parties included teenaged girls.

The emphasis when Macinnis was at school was heavily on a few of the more lethal expeditions, the ones where Edmund Kennedy, Ludwig Leichhardt and Burke and Wills died. We hear far less about the amazingly successful Gregory brothers or Charles Sturt; and what Australian child gets to hear about Harry the camel?

This is a study of the hows and whys of Australian exploration. It was first published by Pier 9 in 2007, and in 2021, the author sought reversion of the rights to the text, which has been extensively revised, augmented with extra information and illustrations.

This is not the history that Australians of my age got when they were at school, but it should have been. If enough of us start to push on this, maybe our grandchildren will get a more complete and more honest account of the recent, post-Invasion, history of our land.