16 June: Boreham on Thomas Mitchell

A Martial Explorer
This is the birthday of Sir Thomas Mitchell. A special stamp was issued to commemorate the centenary of Sir Thomas Mitchell's exploratory triumphs in Central Queensland. The name of Sir Thomas is seldom included among the Homeric names on Australia's scroll of fame; yet it is one that is well worth remembering. Among the virtues generally attributed to the typical Australian, modesty does not always find a conspicuous place; yet at some points he most certainly carries his diffidence to an extreme that transforms it into a vice. For some reason or other, the Australian is singularly reluctant to emphasise and commemorate the magnificent exploits which adorn his own history. The omission is not to his credit. If their silence is due to bashfulness, it is by no means a commendable bashfulness. Macaulay lays it down as an axiom that a people which takes no pride in the noble achievements of remote ancestors will achieve nothing worthy of being remembered by remote descendants.

All the great arterial highways of the Commonwealth, have received a solemn sanctity from the sacrificial deaths of men like Burke and Wills, and Gray and Poole and Kennedy and Baxter and Leichhardt and a score of others. These gallant spirits make up that:

". . . legion that never was listed,
That carries no colours nor crest,
But, split in a thousand detachments,
Is breaking the road for the rest."

The enterprises with which the name of Major Mitchell stands immemorially associated are numbered among those epic undertakings about which a golden haze of rich romance has gathered, and Australia can ill afford to let such priceless archives perish.

Transition From Triumphs Of War To Those Of Peace
There has been a tendency to belittle Major Mitchell's exploits because of the peculiar atmosphere in which they were enveloped. They have been dubbed "Mitchell's Marches" because the major, being a major, conducted them pretty much as he would have conducted a military campaign. "No expedition," says Mr. C. R. Long, "ever moved through the Australian bush with such blowing of bugle-calls and shouting of military commands as the Major's." He liked to be at the head of "a little army," to use his own phrase. Instead of setting out into the unknown with one or two tramping companions and camping companions, as did so many of our early pathfinders, Mitchell liked to have a well-organised, well disciplined, well-trained force under his command.

Animated from boyhood by a passionate love of oversea adventure, he was only sixteen when he first saw active service in Spain, and from then until the close of the struggle with Napoleon he was constantly engaged on the battlefields of Europe. Nor was his military instinct a mere passion for being under fire. He brought to every action the trained eye of the surveyor; he was an authority on the value or the menace of each undulation on the landscape; he was afterwards officially appointed to survey, for the purpose of the permanent records, the battlefields of the Peninsula; and several of the maps that he then made are still treasured and consulted. At the age of thirty-five—twelve years after Waterloo—he had the chance of becoming Deputy Surveyor-General of New South Wales; and, as the exploration of a new world appeared to promise more excitement than the subsiding squabbles of the old, he grasped the opportunity with avidity and resolved to carve his name on the rugged monuments of early Australia. He came; led four separate expeditions into the unchartered interior of the Continent; earned for himself the reputation of a dauntless leader, a sagacious administrator and an exact historian; and, after nearly thirty years of valuable service, laid his bones to rest in the land of his adoption.

Rivers Of A Continent The Key To Its Development
No explorer was ever more fortunate than Sir Thomas Mitchell in respect of the discovery of rivers. Somebody said that he could detect the very scent of water. It was his penetration of the lands beyond the Murray that led to his being honoured with one of the very earliest of Queen Victoria's knighthoods. He discovered the Glenelg, the Peel, the Namoi, the Gwydir, the Avoca, the Wimmera and several other rivers, and he successfully traced the course of the Darling as far as its confluence with the Murray. It was his good fortune to open up some of the richest land that Australia can boast. His whole heart was in his work. He talked excitedly to his companions of the flocks and herds with which these green slopes and well-watered plains would soon be dotted and of the multitudes of prosperous settlers who would before long make their homes in the fertile valleys that abounded on every side. The panorama of verdant landscapes, shining streams and rolling downs that constantly greeted his delighted eyes filled his soul with a wilder sense of conquest than any that he had tasted on the battlefields of Europe.

Altogether, he made a most valuable contribution to the stirring romance of pioneering; and whenever, beside Australian hearths and campfires, the stories are told of Blaxland's famous tussle with the haughty summits of the Blue Mountains, or of Hume's thrilling discovery of the Murray, or of Flinders' amazing voyages in the "Tom Thumb," or of Stuart's rapture when, after crossing the dusty heart of Australia, he suddenly beheld the shining ocean on the North and excitedly bathed his face in its waters, or of the heartbreaking experiences of Burke and Wills at Cooper's Creek, or of Capt. Sturt's privations as he stood face to face with death in his subterranean cavern at Depot Glen, there will also be told the imperishable story of Sir Thomas Mitchell's famous marches, and, whenever the tale is repeated, it will emphasise and perpetuate, the lustre of the renown of a very gallant gentleman.

F W Boreham

Image: Thomas Mitchell