Bush Tucker Man (1987–1990): Season 3, Episode 7 - The Passionate Prussian - full transcript
Queensland's Gulf Country
is as flat as it is spectacular.
A lot of the country round here
is taken up with cattle properties.
But being remote doesn't mean
you have to be by yourself.
Many people in the outback
have come to rely on HF radio.
Good morning, everybody.
This is Cairns School
of Distance Education,
broadcasting on frequencies
5300, 5865 and 11015.
Morning, Mrs Ogilvy.
Good morning.
Yes, Sophie?
I've got some exciting news
for you today.
Oh, that sounds great.
What's that, Sophie?
Got a special guest in.
Bush Tucker Man, Mrs Ogilvy.
Great, Sophie!
Yes, Mrs Ogilvy.
Good morning. How are you? Over.
Very well.
Is that the real Les Hiddins,
the Bush Tucker Man?
Crikey, I hope so. Over.
We're in strife if it's not.
That's great! What are you doing
at Rutland Plains?
Well, I'm here at the moment following
up the explorer Ludwig Leichhardt.
And I find him
quite a fascinating bloke, because...
He came through this Rutland Plains
area in 1845, round about then...
I've always wanted to follow
Leichhardt's journey
because he was so passionate
about exploration.
On this, his first trip,
he took seven men -
naturalist John Gilbert,
Calvert, Murphy,
and Roper and Phillips,
and two Aboriginals,
Brown and Charlie.
Charlie was the real character
of the expedition,
and we catch up with him
a bit later on.
This amazing journey started
in September 1844,
when the expedition
left Toowoomba, in Queensland,
and then travelled
all the way up Cape York
through the Gulf of Carpentaria
and onto the British garrison
at Port Essington.
The aim was to find a way
to the north
and to prove the viability
of pastoral land for the future.
I'm starting this trip here
at Rutland Plains,
because this cattle property
on Cape York
has a special place
in the history of Leichhardt.
Up to now, the many Aboriginals
they came across
were more curious than threatening.
However, all that
was about to change.
What happened next created
a whole turning point for the expedition.
For some reason or other -
and we're not really quite sure
about the whole thing -
the Aboriginals decided
to put in an attack
round about 7:00 at night.
They end up spearing Roper
and Calvert, and they killed Gilbert.
Poor old Calvert.
He copped a spear through the groin.
Stopped him riding a horse
for a while, I can tell you.
The next day, they buried Gilbert.
And feeling that they might
be attacked again,
they decided to move on.
Many of the rivers round here
already had names,
but not all of them,
and Leichhardt was pretty keen
to fill in the gaps.
So the next major river
he came across -
guess what he called it.
There have been
some pretty strange things
that have happened
round this Gulf Country,
and this train line is one of them.
It was built for the gold rush era
in the 1880s, and it's only 150km long.
It was supposed to link up with
the rest of the Queensland Railway,
but it never happened.
These days,
it's mainly used by tourists.
Leichhardt had come out from Prussia
a few years earlier
and immediately set out
on short trips
to learn as much as he could
about the Australian bush.
It was his enthusiasm
and his new skills as a bushman
that would eventually
get him through.
They'd all been on the road now
for 10 months
and were starting to feel the effects
of what had been a difficult journey.
Course, the longer
Leichhardt's expedition went on,
the fewer rations
and provisions he had.
By the time he got round
this Gulf Country here,
he'd run out of salt.
He was a great one for scrounging
round the countryside, Leichhardt,
and round here,
he resupplied himself.
Apparently, he was looking for salt,
but some of the men
weren't real keen on it.
When he bunged it
in the stew that night,
some of them went crook at him
because they reckoned
he'd put in too much salt.
Anyway, that's it.
It was Brown and Charlie's job
to find food and to act as guides,
but Charlie was a bit cheeky
quite often,
which caused Leichhardt
to sack him one time,
only to reinstate him
the next day, of course.
You know, one of the great,
interesting things
about this Leichhardt expedition
is the fact that it was
privately funded,
not like a lot of the other exploration
that was going on at the time.
See, people like Major Mitchell
and Captain Charles Sturt
and Kennedy and those types,
they all had government funding
backing them.
Poor old Leichhardt, he had to
crank up the funding himself,
so he got a whole bunch
of patrons and sponsors.
And they tipped in money,
hoping that he might find something.
I guess they were interested in
grazing country and that sort of thing.
And as he went round the place,
he named different places
after those sponsors and patrons.
And you see this creek here,
which turns into a river a little bit
down the stream there a bit further?
This is called Robinson River,
and it's named after the bloke Robinson
in Moreton Bay
who helped him kit out the expedition
in the first place.
One of my favourite little rivers,
this one.
By the time he'd moved round
the bottom of the Gulf,
he was way behind schedule.
His men were grumbling and wondering
if they'd ever get to Port Essington.
He was now heading north-west,
where I'm going,
to an area that's surrounded
by beautiful lagoons.
Whenever I'm gonna stop
for a few days,
I like to build a decent camp
which is both simple and comfortable.
It's not a bad idea
to have something do two jobs.
These wooden planks here
hold my jerry cans together in the trailer.
But they've got another use,
making life in the bush
just that bit better.
Setting up camp -
lot of hard work at times.
But it's really worth it if you're gonna
stay somewhere for a number of days.
This lagoon here
is right beside the Roper River.
I'm gonna have a look around here,
because right here,
we're right slap-bang in the middle
of Leichhardt country.
There's a few things around here
I wanna look at over the next few days.
Leichhardt was said to be
a bit of an oddball,
but he really was very practical and
his camps were always well organised.
He'd occasionally stay
for a few days in one spot
so that he could kill a bullock
and dry the meat to preserve it.
He made sure he wasted nothing.
He even collected the fat, using it
to grease the saddles and the harness.
Old habits die hard.
When Leichhardt
came through this country here,
he encountered lots and lots
of Aboriginal people.
And on one occasion,
he actually got talking to 'em.
Well, sort of talking, anyway.
And he gave 'em a bit of a present -
some of his spare horseshoe nails.
But they came back at him and they
said, "Hey, we don't want 'em like this.
"We want 'em bent, so we can
make fishhooks out of them."
Obviously, those people
had somewhere or somehow
encountered steel before,
so they knew
what it could be made into.
All this country round here, it's so rich
in game and birdlife and all the rest of it.
It supported quite a lot
of Aboriginal people back in those days.
And if you look very, very carefully,
you can still see signs of that era.
Oi! Come and have a look at this.
I've seen a lot of rock etchings
in my time,
but I've never seen
anything like this.
Look at this - these feet
are absolutely superb.
And there's lots and lots of them
round all these rocks here.
You can see that they've been
chipped into the rock
and somehow the wind's
moved the sand across
and it's all collected there,
and they really jump out at you.
Come and I'll show you
something else.
Called 'petroglyphs', these engravings
preserve Aboriginal art.
You see, these rocks
are in a riverbed,
and during the wet,
they're covered by a mass of water,
which would normally wash away
painted surfaces.
Back to Mr Leichhardt.
By the time he crossed
this river here behind me,
they were trying out
all sorts of bush tucker,
including this stuff here,
which is the resin out of the tree.
Take it back to camp
and boil it up and chew it.
I tried it before -
it's a bit like eating glue.
Think I'll save me appetite
for something better.
I might try and catch a few yabbies,
knock up a bit of a yabby pot here.
This place here
used to be a cattle property,
so you can find all sorts of junk
lying round the place.
I found this old flour drum
up the way there.
Back in Leichhardt's day, of course,
they didn't have drums of flour.
They had bags of flour.
He lost about 60 pound of it
by the time he got here,
so he was running short on flour
as well as everything else.
Banged a few holes in it
with the back of the pick.
Should work like a beauty.
Lump of meat on a bit of wire,
which is what the yabbies want.
See how it goes.
Leichhardt was a great observer.
Looking through
the Aboriginal camps,
he soon figured out
just what plants you could eat.
However, the job of
catching birds and animals
was mostly up to
the Aboriginal guides,
Brown and Charlie.
One day, Charlie came down to one of
these billabongs here at the Roper
looking for ducks or flying foxes -
I forget which, doesn't matter -
and he looked in the billabong
and he saw this monster, this animal,
this strange-looking thing,
come out of the water with horns on it
and all sorts of things.
Reckoned there was no way
he was gonna get in that water.
He went back to camp and told
Leichhardt and the whole rest of them.
They sort of didn't take
much notice of it.
In fact, next day, Brown went up to the
same waterhole, and he saw a crocodile,
so in his journal, Leichhardt tends
to dismiss Charlie's monster
as being a crocodile
with Charlie-added horns to it.
Well, there are crocodiles in here.
I guess it's just as well
Charlie didn't get in the water,
because it might have been
"Goodbye, Charlie."
But I'm not so sure about this...
monster business.
I think Charlie saw what Charlie saw.
We might be able to figure it out.
This is the mighty Roper River,
named by Leichhardt
after one of his men, John Roper.
The river was to be
the expedition's next big challenge.
Poor old Leichhardt
had a real dilemma.
He had to somehow find himself
on the northern bank of the Roper River.
But it's a pretty mighty river.
How do you cross it?
Well, the only thing he could do,
and that's exactly what he did do,
was move along the southern bank,
trying to look for a way to get across.
And then he got to this creek here,
and they had an absolute disaster here.
Charlie moved the horses into the creek
and three of them drowned.
Leichhardt was absolutely devastated,
but there's nothing much he could do.
So they kept on moving on
down that way.
Tell you one thing that wasn't here
when he came through -
that's this stuff here.
That's a bush passionfruit,
introduced from South America.
And these days, it's a real pest.
It's spread everywhere.
That's the Roper River bar crossing.
And this location, to Leichhardt,
is both good and bad.
It was bad in so much as
just back there a little bit,
he lost, yet again, another horse.
Slipped in off the steep bank
and drowned.
I guess the men and the beasts
and the horses and everything
were all coming to
the end of their tether.
They were just too weak.
But he got up here and he saw
exactly what he was looking for -
a rocky bar stretching all the way across
to the northern bank there.
And that let him walk all the way
across there, get on that northern shore
and start heading up
to Port Essington.
I guess in many ways,
it's not a bad thing he did find the bar,
because this water,
even though it looks inviting,
is absolutely full of crocodiles.
Well, I got some!
Have a go at that!
These things, when you cook 'em up,
just exactly the same as prawns.
Terrific eating, these things.
Had a thought the other day-
this is probably the first time
that salt from the Gulf Country
has been carted over here
to the Roper River
since Leichhardt did it
way back then.
They'd now been travelling
for 13 months,
and they were still
a long way short of their goal.
Leichhardt only had
a few bullocks left
as he got closer and closer
to Port Essington.
Leichhardt had maps with him
that had been surveyed from the coast,
which is pretty much all they showed.
So as he went along,
he filled in some of the details.
Today, there's one map around here
that's got a really weird name.
This one here...
if you have a look at it...
..called 'Snowdrop',
which is rather a strange name
for any map in the middle
of the Northern Territory.
And down here,
we've got a Snowdrop Creek.
Leichhardt actually walked
right through this stuff here.
But how come we got a name
like 'Snowdrop'
for a map in the Northern Territory?
For years, that puzzled me.
Then a few years back,
I happened to read Leichhardt's journal.
I found the answer.
Remember, though, that Leichhardt,
when he left Toowoomba,
started off with something like
16 bullocks to eat along the way.
And by the time he got here,
he was down to three.
And he killed one of them -
killed him in that creek there,
that...Snowdrop Creek.
The bullock's name was Snowdrop,
because he had a little white dot
on the front of his forehead here.
So I guess Snowdrop got not only a map
named after him but also a creek.
This rocky plateau
became the next obstacle.
As spectacular as it looks,
Leichhardt described the view
as 'sickening',
complaining of large, loose boulders
that caused the animals to slip.
Nowadays, it's called Kakadu, a
national park on the World Heritage list,
and it's more than likely that Leichhardt
was probably the first European visitor.
Today, it's a breeding ground
for something like one-third
of Australia's known species of birdlife.
Arnhem Land has been home to
Aboriginal people for thousands of years,
and a record of that time can be found
in the caves around here.
Oh, yeah, the boat there.
These decorated hands
may have originated
from gloves worn by the British
or even the Dutch
visiting Australia's north.
What do you reckon that is -
English or Macassan boat?
Macassan.
Macassan.
By the time Leichhardt got to
this neck of the world -
and it's a tremendous
bit of country here -
he started to encounter Aboriginal
people who'd obviously met Europeans
and Macassan traders and those sort
of people round the coastline before.
That became very obvious
when one of them came up to him
and called him 'Commandant'.
But also, you get rock art galleries
like this that reflect that connection.
Well, from here,
Leichhardt had to find his way
right up there to Port Essington,
weave his way through
all these billabongs down here.
I won't have the same trouble he did.
I won't need the Aboriginal guides.
But I'd better get going
if I'm gonna get there.
They'd now been travelling for
around 15 months, presumed to be lost.
As they moved further north,
friendly Aboriginals
guided the exhausted party
towards the garrison
at Victoria Settlement.
Today, the best way to get there
is by boat,
or one of these.
I've been out here a few times,
and it never ceases to amaze me.
A more lonely place in Australia
is hard to imagine,
as the site for this settlement
was on a strip of land
thousands of kilometres away
from the rest of the colony.
Built in 1838, Victoria Settlement
was established to be a support base
for British ships travelling to and from
New South Wales.
However, after 11 years
and enormous hardship,
the British government
decided to chuck it in.
Disease and poor nutrition
had claimed the lives of 60 people -
men, women and children.
Mid-December 1845,
Leichhardt and his men
staggered into Victoria Settlement.
The lost explorers
were enthusiastically greeted
and supplied with
much-needed provisions and clothing.
This settlement here is only one
of a number that the British tried
up here in Northern Australia.
They had another go at one over there
earlier on over there
at Fort Dundas, on Melville Island,
and Raffles Bay over that way,
and then finally, this one here.
And one by one, they all failed.
I suspect that Charlie's monster
originated from here,
because what happened was
those three settlements
stocked themselves with water buffalo.
And as the settlements collapsed,
the buffalo were let run loose
and that sort of thing.
And gradually, they spread all the way
down through this Top End country
right down to
the Gulf of Carpentaria.
And that had been going on
for something like 20 years
before Leichhardt
even came up here.
So the spread
was all over the place.
What Charlie saw down there
in that lagoon down on the Roper River
was, in fact, a water buffalo
standing in the water up to here -
therefore, he couldn't see
any legs or anything.
But he's got this great big head,
this back out of the water,
and, like he said, two big horns.
Well, that's my theory anyway.
Leichhardt stayed here for a month
before catching a ship back to Sydney.
They'd covered an incredible
5,000km of unexplored country
with the loss of only one life.
However, two years later,
he set off again to cross Australia
and mysteriously disappeared.
You know, you really
have to be impressed
by this whole Leichhardt expedition.
They start way down there
in the Darling Downs
and over a year later
literally stagger into Port Essington here,
up in the Top End country.
Along the way, Leichhardt, of course,
named rivers and streams
and mountains, etc,
after his patrons and those people
that were on the expedition.
Even Charlie and Brown get a mention.
Brown's Lagoon's down in
south-east Queensland,
and Charlie gets a creek named
after him in Central Queensland.
But to my mind,
Charlie's the real hero,
the real character
in this whole event,
because he's the one,
along with Brown's help,
who each day carts in all the food
and the flying foxes and the ducks, etc.
And I reckon
without the input from those two,
the expedition
would not have succeeded.
I somehow feel that Charlie's been
short-changed a bit over the years.
Didn't quite get the recognition
he deserves.
Well, maybe there's something
we can really do about that.
is as flat as it is spectacular.
A lot of the country round here
is taken up with cattle properties.
But being remote doesn't mean
you have to be by yourself.
Many people in the outback
have come to rely on HF radio.
Good morning, everybody.
This is Cairns School
of Distance Education,
broadcasting on frequencies
5300, 5865 and 11015.
Morning, Mrs Ogilvy.
Good morning.
Yes, Sophie?
I've got some exciting news
for you today.
Oh, that sounds great.
What's that, Sophie?
Got a special guest in.
Bush Tucker Man, Mrs Ogilvy.
Great, Sophie!
Yes, Mrs Ogilvy.
Good morning. How are you? Over.
Very well.
Is that the real Les Hiddins,
the Bush Tucker Man?
Crikey, I hope so. Over.
We're in strife if it's not.
That's great! What are you doing
at Rutland Plains?
Well, I'm here at the moment following
up the explorer Ludwig Leichhardt.
And I find him
quite a fascinating bloke, because...
He came through this Rutland Plains
area in 1845, round about then...
I've always wanted to follow
Leichhardt's journey
because he was so passionate
about exploration.
On this, his first trip,
he took seven men -
naturalist John Gilbert,
Calvert, Murphy,
and Roper and Phillips,
and two Aboriginals,
Brown and Charlie.
Charlie was the real character
of the expedition,
and we catch up with him
a bit later on.
This amazing journey started
in September 1844,
when the expedition
left Toowoomba, in Queensland,
and then travelled
all the way up Cape York
through the Gulf of Carpentaria
and onto the British garrison
at Port Essington.
The aim was to find a way
to the north
and to prove the viability
of pastoral land for the future.
I'm starting this trip here
at Rutland Plains,
because this cattle property
on Cape York
has a special place
in the history of Leichhardt.
Up to now, the many Aboriginals
they came across
were more curious than threatening.
However, all that
was about to change.
What happened next created
a whole turning point for the expedition.
For some reason or other -
and we're not really quite sure
about the whole thing -
the Aboriginals decided
to put in an attack
round about 7:00 at night.
They end up spearing Roper
and Calvert, and they killed Gilbert.
Poor old Calvert.
He copped a spear through the groin.
Stopped him riding a horse
for a while, I can tell you.
The next day, they buried Gilbert.
And feeling that they might
be attacked again,
they decided to move on.
Many of the rivers round here
already had names,
but not all of them,
and Leichhardt was pretty keen
to fill in the gaps.
So the next major river
he came across -
guess what he called it.
There have been
some pretty strange things
that have happened
round this Gulf Country,
and this train line is one of them.
It was built for the gold rush era
in the 1880s, and it's only 150km long.
It was supposed to link up with
the rest of the Queensland Railway,
but it never happened.
These days,
it's mainly used by tourists.
Leichhardt had come out from Prussia
a few years earlier
and immediately set out
on short trips
to learn as much as he could
about the Australian bush.
It was his enthusiasm
and his new skills as a bushman
that would eventually
get him through.
They'd all been on the road now
for 10 months
and were starting to feel the effects
of what had been a difficult journey.
Course, the longer
Leichhardt's expedition went on,
the fewer rations
and provisions he had.
By the time he got round
this Gulf Country here,
he'd run out of salt.
He was a great one for scrounging
round the countryside, Leichhardt,
and round here,
he resupplied himself.
Apparently, he was looking for salt,
but some of the men
weren't real keen on it.
When he bunged it
in the stew that night,
some of them went crook at him
because they reckoned
he'd put in too much salt.
Anyway, that's it.
It was Brown and Charlie's job
to find food and to act as guides,
but Charlie was a bit cheeky
quite often,
which caused Leichhardt
to sack him one time,
only to reinstate him
the next day, of course.
You know, one of the great,
interesting things
about this Leichhardt expedition
is the fact that it was
privately funded,
not like a lot of the other exploration
that was going on at the time.
See, people like Major Mitchell
and Captain Charles Sturt
and Kennedy and those types,
they all had government funding
backing them.
Poor old Leichhardt, he had to
crank up the funding himself,
so he got a whole bunch
of patrons and sponsors.
And they tipped in money,
hoping that he might find something.
I guess they were interested in
grazing country and that sort of thing.
And as he went round the place,
he named different places
after those sponsors and patrons.
And you see this creek here,
which turns into a river a little bit
down the stream there a bit further?
This is called Robinson River,
and it's named after the bloke Robinson
in Moreton Bay
who helped him kit out the expedition
in the first place.
One of my favourite little rivers,
this one.
By the time he'd moved round
the bottom of the Gulf,
he was way behind schedule.
His men were grumbling and wondering
if they'd ever get to Port Essington.
He was now heading north-west,
where I'm going,
to an area that's surrounded
by beautiful lagoons.
Whenever I'm gonna stop
for a few days,
I like to build a decent camp
which is both simple and comfortable.
It's not a bad idea
to have something do two jobs.
These wooden planks here
hold my jerry cans together in the trailer.
But they've got another use,
making life in the bush
just that bit better.
Setting up camp -
lot of hard work at times.
But it's really worth it if you're gonna
stay somewhere for a number of days.
This lagoon here
is right beside the Roper River.
I'm gonna have a look around here,
because right here,
we're right slap-bang in the middle
of Leichhardt country.
There's a few things around here
I wanna look at over the next few days.
Leichhardt was said to be
a bit of an oddball,
but he really was very practical and
his camps were always well organised.
He'd occasionally stay
for a few days in one spot
so that he could kill a bullock
and dry the meat to preserve it.
He made sure he wasted nothing.
He even collected the fat, using it
to grease the saddles and the harness.
Old habits die hard.
When Leichhardt
came through this country here,
he encountered lots and lots
of Aboriginal people.
And on one occasion,
he actually got talking to 'em.
Well, sort of talking, anyway.
And he gave 'em a bit of a present -
some of his spare horseshoe nails.
But they came back at him and they
said, "Hey, we don't want 'em like this.
"We want 'em bent, so we can
make fishhooks out of them."
Obviously, those people
had somewhere or somehow
encountered steel before,
so they knew
what it could be made into.
All this country round here, it's so rich
in game and birdlife and all the rest of it.
It supported quite a lot
of Aboriginal people back in those days.
And if you look very, very carefully,
you can still see signs of that era.
Oi! Come and have a look at this.
I've seen a lot of rock etchings
in my time,
but I've never seen
anything like this.
Look at this - these feet
are absolutely superb.
And there's lots and lots of them
round all these rocks here.
You can see that they've been
chipped into the rock
and somehow the wind's
moved the sand across
and it's all collected there,
and they really jump out at you.
Come and I'll show you
something else.
Called 'petroglyphs', these engravings
preserve Aboriginal art.
You see, these rocks
are in a riverbed,
and during the wet,
they're covered by a mass of water,
which would normally wash away
painted surfaces.
Back to Mr Leichhardt.
By the time he crossed
this river here behind me,
they were trying out
all sorts of bush tucker,
including this stuff here,
which is the resin out of the tree.
Take it back to camp
and boil it up and chew it.
I tried it before -
it's a bit like eating glue.
Think I'll save me appetite
for something better.
I might try and catch a few yabbies,
knock up a bit of a yabby pot here.
This place here
used to be a cattle property,
so you can find all sorts of junk
lying round the place.
I found this old flour drum
up the way there.
Back in Leichhardt's day, of course,
they didn't have drums of flour.
They had bags of flour.
He lost about 60 pound of it
by the time he got here,
so he was running short on flour
as well as everything else.
Banged a few holes in it
with the back of the pick.
Should work like a beauty.
Lump of meat on a bit of wire,
which is what the yabbies want.
See how it goes.
Leichhardt was a great observer.
Looking through
the Aboriginal camps,
he soon figured out
just what plants you could eat.
However, the job of
catching birds and animals
was mostly up to
the Aboriginal guides,
Brown and Charlie.
One day, Charlie came down to one of
these billabongs here at the Roper
looking for ducks or flying foxes -
I forget which, doesn't matter -
and he looked in the billabong
and he saw this monster, this animal,
this strange-looking thing,
come out of the water with horns on it
and all sorts of things.
Reckoned there was no way
he was gonna get in that water.
He went back to camp and told
Leichhardt and the whole rest of them.
They sort of didn't take
much notice of it.
In fact, next day, Brown went up to the
same waterhole, and he saw a crocodile,
so in his journal, Leichhardt tends
to dismiss Charlie's monster
as being a crocodile
with Charlie-added horns to it.
Well, there are crocodiles in here.
I guess it's just as well
Charlie didn't get in the water,
because it might have been
"Goodbye, Charlie."
But I'm not so sure about this...
monster business.
I think Charlie saw what Charlie saw.
We might be able to figure it out.
This is the mighty Roper River,
named by Leichhardt
after one of his men, John Roper.
The river was to be
the expedition's next big challenge.
Poor old Leichhardt
had a real dilemma.
He had to somehow find himself
on the northern bank of the Roper River.
But it's a pretty mighty river.
How do you cross it?
Well, the only thing he could do,
and that's exactly what he did do,
was move along the southern bank,
trying to look for a way to get across.
And then he got to this creek here,
and they had an absolute disaster here.
Charlie moved the horses into the creek
and three of them drowned.
Leichhardt was absolutely devastated,
but there's nothing much he could do.
So they kept on moving on
down that way.
Tell you one thing that wasn't here
when he came through -
that's this stuff here.
That's a bush passionfruit,
introduced from South America.
And these days, it's a real pest.
It's spread everywhere.
That's the Roper River bar crossing.
And this location, to Leichhardt,
is both good and bad.
It was bad in so much as
just back there a little bit,
he lost, yet again, another horse.
Slipped in off the steep bank
and drowned.
I guess the men and the beasts
and the horses and everything
were all coming to
the end of their tether.
They were just too weak.
But he got up here and he saw
exactly what he was looking for -
a rocky bar stretching all the way across
to the northern bank there.
And that let him walk all the way
across there, get on that northern shore
and start heading up
to Port Essington.
I guess in many ways,
it's not a bad thing he did find the bar,
because this water,
even though it looks inviting,
is absolutely full of crocodiles.
Well, I got some!
Have a go at that!
These things, when you cook 'em up,
just exactly the same as prawns.
Terrific eating, these things.
Had a thought the other day-
this is probably the first time
that salt from the Gulf Country
has been carted over here
to the Roper River
since Leichhardt did it
way back then.
They'd now been travelling
for 13 months,
and they were still
a long way short of their goal.
Leichhardt only had
a few bullocks left
as he got closer and closer
to Port Essington.
Leichhardt had maps with him
that had been surveyed from the coast,
which is pretty much all they showed.
So as he went along,
he filled in some of the details.
Today, there's one map around here
that's got a really weird name.
This one here...
if you have a look at it...
..called 'Snowdrop',
which is rather a strange name
for any map in the middle
of the Northern Territory.
And down here,
we've got a Snowdrop Creek.
Leichhardt actually walked
right through this stuff here.
But how come we got a name
like 'Snowdrop'
for a map in the Northern Territory?
For years, that puzzled me.
Then a few years back,
I happened to read Leichhardt's journal.
I found the answer.
Remember, though, that Leichhardt,
when he left Toowoomba,
started off with something like
16 bullocks to eat along the way.
And by the time he got here,
he was down to three.
And he killed one of them -
killed him in that creek there,
that...Snowdrop Creek.
The bullock's name was Snowdrop,
because he had a little white dot
on the front of his forehead here.
So I guess Snowdrop got not only a map
named after him but also a creek.
This rocky plateau
became the next obstacle.
As spectacular as it looks,
Leichhardt described the view
as 'sickening',
complaining of large, loose boulders
that caused the animals to slip.
Nowadays, it's called Kakadu, a
national park on the World Heritage list,
and it's more than likely that Leichhardt
was probably the first European visitor.
Today, it's a breeding ground
for something like one-third
of Australia's known species of birdlife.
Arnhem Land has been home to
Aboriginal people for thousands of years,
and a record of that time can be found
in the caves around here.
Oh, yeah, the boat there.
These decorated hands
may have originated
from gloves worn by the British
or even the Dutch
visiting Australia's north.
What do you reckon that is -
English or Macassan boat?
Macassan.
Macassan.
By the time Leichhardt got to
this neck of the world -
and it's a tremendous
bit of country here -
he started to encounter Aboriginal
people who'd obviously met Europeans
and Macassan traders and those sort
of people round the coastline before.
That became very obvious
when one of them came up to him
and called him 'Commandant'.
But also, you get rock art galleries
like this that reflect that connection.
Well, from here,
Leichhardt had to find his way
right up there to Port Essington,
weave his way through
all these billabongs down here.
I won't have the same trouble he did.
I won't need the Aboriginal guides.
But I'd better get going
if I'm gonna get there.
They'd now been travelling for
around 15 months, presumed to be lost.
As they moved further north,
friendly Aboriginals
guided the exhausted party
towards the garrison
at Victoria Settlement.
Today, the best way to get there
is by boat,
or one of these.
I've been out here a few times,
and it never ceases to amaze me.
A more lonely place in Australia
is hard to imagine,
as the site for this settlement
was on a strip of land
thousands of kilometres away
from the rest of the colony.
Built in 1838, Victoria Settlement
was established to be a support base
for British ships travelling to and from
New South Wales.
However, after 11 years
and enormous hardship,
the British government
decided to chuck it in.
Disease and poor nutrition
had claimed the lives of 60 people -
men, women and children.
Mid-December 1845,
Leichhardt and his men
staggered into Victoria Settlement.
The lost explorers
were enthusiastically greeted
and supplied with
much-needed provisions and clothing.
This settlement here is only one
of a number that the British tried
up here in Northern Australia.
They had another go at one over there
earlier on over there
at Fort Dundas, on Melville Island,
and Raffles Bay over that way,
and then finally, this one here.
And one by one, they all failed.
I suspect that Charlie's monster
originated from here,
because what happened was
those three settlements
stocked themselves with water buffalo.
And as the settlements collapsed,
the buffalo were let run loose
and that sort of thing.
And gradually, they spread all the way
down through this Top End country
right down to
the Gulf of Carpentaria.
And that had been going on
for something like 20 years
before Leichhardt
even came up here.
So the spread
was all over the place.
What Charlie saw down there
in that lagoon down on the Roper River
was, in fact, a water buffalo
standing in the water up to here -
therefore, he couldn't see
any legs or anything.
But he's got this great big head,
this back out of the water,
and, like he said, two big horns.
Well, that's my theory anyway.
Leichhardt stayed here for a month
before catching a ship back to Sydney.
They'd covered an incredible
5,000km of unexplored country
with the loss of only one life.
However, two years later,
he set off again to cross Australia
and mysteriously disappeared.
You know, you really
have to be impressed
by this whole Leichhardt expedition.
They start way down there
in the Darling Downs
and over a year later
literally stagger into Port Essington here,
up in the Top End country.
Along the way, Leichhardt, of course,
named rivers and streams
and mountains, etc,
after his patrons and those people
that were on the expedition.
Even Charlie and Brown get a mention.
Brown's Lagoon's down in
south-east Queensland,
and Charlie gets a creek named
after him in Central Queensland.
But to my mind,
Charlie's the real hero,
the real character
in this whole event,
because he's the one,
along with Brown's help,
who each day carts in all the food
and the flying foxes and the ducks, etc.
And I reckon
without the input from those two,
the expedition
would not have succeeded.
I somehow feel that Charlie's been
short-changed a bit over the years.
Didn't quite get the recognition
he deserves.
Well, maybe there's something
we can really do about that.