13 July: Boreham on Allan Cunningham

An Epic of Chivalry
A great new weir in New South Wales has been named, after Allan Cunningham, whose birthday this is, the Cunningham Weir. It is pleasant to recall the audacious and memorable exploits of this gallant and engaging young explorer. Australians of all tastes and temperaments will like to be reminded of the heavy debt under which he placed these young lands. Scholars and scientists will think of him as a brilliant and painstaking botanist; practical men will reflect on his daring adventures in the realm of pathfinding; whilst young people, fond of stories of adventure, will recite with a new relish his hairbreadth escapes from a cruel death, sometimes at the hands of fierce and hostile blacks and sometimes from the penalties incidental to the penetration of the vast Australian deserts. But from whatever angle the student may approach this stirring and romantic page in our annals, he will recognise in Cunningham the type and pattern of a very gallant gentleman.

This hardy and resourceful young Scotsman came out to Australia under the auspices of Sir Joseph Banks. Sir Joseph, who had very largely financed the expeditions of Captain Cook, and who had accompanied the redoubtable navigator on his epoch-making voyages in the capacity of naturalist, developed, in his old age, an extraordinary flair for infecting younger men with his own unconquerable passion for exploration. Mungo Park, Lachlan Macquarie, and Sir John Franklin were among his most notable proteges. So was Allan Cunningham; and it was one of the immense delights of Sir Joseph's declining days to sit back in his easy chair and chuckle over Cunningham's adventures amidst the untamed and untrodden solitudes of the Australian continent.

Experience Inspires Ardour Of Youth
Sir Joseph Bank's method of procedure was simplicity itself. Having fired the imagination of some ardent youth by telling of the unexplored territories that he had skirted with Captain Cook, the old man used his influence with the King to secure for his new recruit some nominal position on the other side of the world. Thus, officially, Lachlan Macquarie was sent out by the King as Governor; in reality he was sent out by Sir Joseph Banks to organise an expedition to cross the Blue Mountains. In the same way, Allan Cunningham was sent out to Australia nominally to collect some new botanical specimens for His Majesty's conservatories at Kew Gardens. But it was always noticed that, although millions of acres of virgin bush were exposed to his scrutiny in country already charted, the plants that he most passionately coveted were always growing on the other side of ranges that had never been crossed and beyond the vast expanses of deserts that no human foot had traversed! The nominees of Sir Joseph Banks all came out with a solemn commission authorising them to shoot at the pigeon; but, as soon as they set foot on Australian soil, they immediately proceeded to take aim at the crow!

In her finely executed "History of the Early Explorers of Australia," Mrs. Charles Bruce Marriott confesses to a special admiration for Allan Cunningham. She devotes more space to him than to any of the other pioneers. And with good reason. For the work of Cunningham stands related to the very dawn of Australian history. He trod in nobody's footprints. A new continent was spread at his feet. It was in 1817 that, the Blue Mountains, having been crossed by Blaxland, Lawson, and Wentworth, Governor Macquarie determined to send out an expedition to open up the huge interior of the silent and unknown land. Over the mountains, rivers had been descried whose waters had flowed westward. What boundless plains did they irrigate? Into what seas did they empty themselves? Everybody was guessing, but nobody knew. Macquarie therefore despatched Oxley, the Surveyor-General, and Cunningham, the King's botanist, to investigate the intriguing problem. And thus the career of a great explorer, and the history of a great nation, simultaneously began.

A Collector Who Gave More Than He Took
Nobody can read a single page of Cunningham's most fascinating journal without sharing his delight whenever he came upon a new species for the King's greenhouses. Moreover, he was just as anxious to enrich Australia as to be enriched by it. He always carried a bag of peach stones, and, wherever the soil was suitable, he sowed some. "They may," he writes "provide a meal for some famished European or some hungry blackfellow." It would be difficult to compute the number of guests who have blessed Allan Cunningham for the table that he thus spread in the wilderness.

Few explorers have a prouder record. Some of the finest agricultural and pastoral areas in Australia, such as the Liverpool Plains and the Darling Downs, are among his discoveries. His diary contains passages that nobody can read without emotion. The sentences in which he describes his first glimpse of Cunningham's Gap; the pages in which he tells of his arrival on the Darling Downs; and the entry in which he records the sensational finding of the dead Oxley's journal, are among the most moving classics in Australian literature.

Absolutely destitute of fear, he plunged into the wildest and most barren territory; he knocked about the coast for years in a ramshackle old vessel that was utterly unseaworthy, making in the course of these daring tours, discoveries which transformed the whole character of Australian life. Beneath the magic of his touch the continent assumed a startlingly new aspect. Having dared a thousand horrible deaths, he passed peacefully away on June 27, 1839. His bones repose in the obelisk erected to his illustrious memory in the Botanical Gardens at Sydney; but he has bequeathed to posterity a name that Australia, at any rate, can never afford to forget.

F W Boreham

Image: Allan Cunningham