Longitude 131°
Australian Pioneers and Explorers
'I advanced a few yards on to the beach, and was gratified and delighted to behold the water of the Indian Ocean.'
John McDouall Stuart
1815 - 1866
On the boat out from England in 1838, young Stuart was described by a fellow passenger as 'very stubborn'. And a good thing, too. Without that characteristic the slightly built Scotsman could never have become 'the king of Australian explorers'.
Stuart led six expeditions to the interior. He was the first European to gaze upon the Red Centre. He opened up thousands of square miles of sheep country. And, stubbornly refusing to be beaten, eventually became the first man to cross the continent from south to north and back.
Although he relied on sextant and compass, it was the persistence, courage and unfailing common sense of an instinctive bushman that were the true instruments of his success. Forsaking wagons and camels, he could lead his party over 40 kilometres a day on horseback.
Stuart began as many others, with the fruitless search for an inland sea. Most of his expeditions, however, held the more practical objective of establishing a route for the overland telegraph from Adelaide to the northern coast, a link that would finally connect the colonies of the south to the rest of the world.
On his last adventure, 'The South Australian Great Northern Exploring Expedition' in 1862, Stuart finally planted the Union Jack on the shore of the Indian Ocean near present day Darwin.
And then racked with scurvy, nearly blind and crippled, he led the party on the 3400 kilometre return journey. It was one of the greatest feats of survival in the history of exploration, and it all but killed him.
After enduring one particularly violent fit, the entry in his journal for October 18 read: 'I have kept King and Nash with me in case of my dying during the night, as it would be lonely for one young man to be there by himself. Wind south-east.'
Eventually some hands on a Mount Margaret sheep run saw 'ten gaunt and ragged men, one of them carried on a litter, heading a string of limping, emaciated horses, come riding slowly, wearily, triumphantly out of the mirage that filled the empty north.'
They could have added 'stubbornly' to their description.
In Adelaide a holiday was declared and crowds lined the streets. On January 21, 1863, the same day that thousands stood bareheaded in Melbourne as the remains of the tragic Burke and Wills passed on their way to burial, men threw their hats in the air and women blew kisses at a skeleton of a man, clothed in tatters, riding in triumph.
Stuart was never intimidated by the desert. Where others found the vast interior alien and terrifying, to him it was simply awe-inspiring, 'wonderful country ... scarcely to be believed.'
In all of his expeditions not one human life was lost. He was the first person since David Livingstone to win honours from the Royal Geographical Society twice.
And in his wake, right through the central line of the continent, followed the overland telegraph, the railway and the highway ... the Stuart Highway.
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