The Europeans in Australia: Volume 2: Democracy by Alan Atkinson

Author:Alan Atkinson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: NewSouth Publishing

II

Emerson once told of riding with a woman in the American forest. Among the silence of the trees she said to him ‘that the woods always seemed to her to wait, as if the genii who inhabit them suspended their deeds until the wayfarer has passed onward’. The silence itself seemed to suggest something living. This feeling of an expectant presence must have been keen in Australia too, although here it was not always silent. Many remarked on noises in the bush that seemed to indicate something wholly mysterious. (This was before there were stories of bunyips.) Robert Dundas Murray, at Port Phillip, was baffled by a voice, as he called it, which came at times ‘out of the depths of the forest’, apparently calling to intruders in complaint or anger: ‘You recognise its tones in the moanings, the uncouth cries and wild shrieks, that at long intervals rise into the air, arrest the ear for an instant, and then cease as suddenly as they broke forth.’26 He never discovered what it was.

For anyone with ears attuned there was a waiting even more palpable among the rocks beneath. Here, as in America – both countries in which there was much for immigrants to do – it seemed that the very future was living and breathing beneath the surface of the present.

The opening of the Australian scrub was followed by the opening of the earth itself. The territory was gouged and tunnelled first in imagination and then in fact. It was a shared effort and it was a result of the way in which Europeans thought and acted together during the 1830s and ’40s. In 1833 Charles Sturt published, as part of an introduction to his account of two expeditions of discovery, the first summary account of the geology of the eastern mainland (leaving out what is now Queensland, so far unexplored). The sandstone of the east coast, he said, gave way along the line of the Great Dividing Range to red granite. That ‘primitive rock’ was a type of continental skin – blonde, as if European – that stretched as plains to the westward, ribbed here and there with limestone and further on with a variety of schorl (blue, finely grained and very hard) and mica (rose, pink and white). To the south-west the sandstone was interrupted by the richer whinstone, and so, once more, by limestone as far as the Yass Plains. There Sturt found quartz, ‘in huge white masses’, more granite, and, as a type of mottling, sandstone, chlorite, micaceous schist, chalcedony and red jasper.27 In South Australia the geologist and linguist Johann Menge made similar surveys, publishing his findings in Adelaide. He was struck with the hornstone of the Barossa Range. ‘Veins of opal’, he said, ran through it everywhere, including opal agate striped red and blue and opal jasper in red and yellow. Similarities with Iceland suggested hot springs in earlier ages.28

In such writing there was a great sense of depth. The country now apparently had bulk and weight.

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