OUR LAST EXPLORER
“ … These carvings are … quite different from known Aboriginal art …”
Reveal to them our most recent (and largely forgotten) explorer, Michael Terry, a man whose explorations took place in the 1900s – a wanderer through the outback country for over 40 years – and their expressions of doubt are inevitable.
Terry’s name is rarely recalled in the modern halls of academic study and his wonderful exploits are therefore sadly unknown to the educated (?) youth of today.
Michael Terry – known as “The Last of the Australian Explorers” – was born in 1899, in Durham (U.K.)
In 1917, a raw 18-year-old fresh from the green fields of the River Tyne, Michael Terry enlisted in the Royal Naval Air Service, working in the Armoured Cars Division, in Russia, from where he emerged with frost-bite and gas-damaged lungs.
Discharged, the young man was allocated a permanent pension by the British government and a free ticket to either California (USA) or West Australia.
He landed at Fremantle on January 31, 1919, just a few months before his 20th birthday, sailing on the ship, SS MILTAIDES.
Finding lodgings at a “tiny pub at the top of Murray Street in Perth,” the young emmigrant at once decided to rid himself of everything that reflected his Englishness.
“Having heard ‘pommy this’ and ‘pommy that’ on the voyage out, I nursed the usual inferiority feeling and expected a hunk of Australian masculinity to swagger up, sing out ‘pommy bastard’ and bash me because I wore a cap,” Terry wrote in his autobiography.
Wearing a broad-brimmed felt hat, Michael Terry worked for a while as a car salesman in Perth, selling Dodge vehicles and training the new owners in their operation and maintenance.
After being robbed of all his savings at his place of employment, the young Englishman pined: “I was stoney broke in a strange land. It seemed the end of the world.”
Recalling “a sheep squatter (friend) from the nor’west,” Charlie French, the disheartened young man contacted him and acquired a job on Cardabia Station, to the north of Carnarvon, near the North West Cape.
Michael Terry travelled the 1,300-odd km between Perth and Cardabia with his friend, Charlie, and Guy McLeod of Minilya Station.
Terry wrote in his diary: “We slept in swags on the shed floor (at Koolanooka) after tucker aboard the car. Motoring at sun-up in an open tourer was pure hell for someone plaqued by frost-bite in Russia.”
At the Gascoyne Junction pub the visitor saw for the first time “nor’westers en masse,” describing them as “men who dressed differently, had another pitch of voice, were sun-bronzed and, being cattlemen, talked stock.”
Their little vehicle was hauled across the wide, waterless bed of the Gascoyne River by horses, their harness hitched to the front bumper bar.
Finally, at Cardabia Station homestead, near Point Cloates, the Englishman found rude men’s quarters, a kitchen block, sheep yards, stockyard, shearing shed, machinery shed and a blacksmith’s shop.
“The cook, a kindly old chap, was a Chinaman and there were black natives …,” he remembered.
At night legions of yellow crabs marched over a kilometer from the Indian Ocean to crawl into and over everything. Charlie French’s new wife, a former Perth actress, was not amused. Early one morning her screams of terror shattered the peace when she awoke to find crabs crawling up on her bed.
Out in the bush with the sheep musterers, Michael Terry’s own peace of mind was also shocked when he spotted, rising above a nearby sandhill, “a weird kind of head – some prehistoric monster surviving in this Southern Land …”
The “monster” was Terry’s first confrontation with a camel. When it gave a “doleful kind of howl”, he abandoned his horse to start running in the opposite direction.
The Aborigines, he said, referred to camels as the “Emu Horse” because it had a head like an emu and four legs like a horse.
When station work decreased after the shearing, Michael Terry pocketed his cheque and moved to Carnarvon, 145 km to the south.
Hoping to catch a ship to Fremantle, a worker’s strike prevented this and he took a casual job on Babbage Island, “levelling sandhills for a meat works, the first on the Gascoyne.”
The wages were not overly generous, he recalled. He and his fellow workers slaved for an 8-hour shift in blazing, dazzling heat “on the end of a long-handled shovel”, bending their backs all day as the team slowly straightened out the foundation site for an ill-fated meat works that, when completed, was then deemed uneconomic and did not process a solitary jumbuck.
Leaving the Gascoyne behind, Michael Terry moved to New South Wales where he started a transport company, became a drover, a car salesman and, in between times, undertook the first east-west motor vehicle crossing of Australia (1923) from Winton, in Queensland, to Broome, in West Australia, driving a 1913 Model T-Ford.
Later, on a visit to America, Terry conspired to meet Henry Ford himself. The American was informed of the Winton-Broome historic trip through Australia’s dead heart.
Ford commented: “You are a fine, adventurous young man and have done what many of us would like to do. But, after all, the Ford has done what I always knew it could.”
In the years following, having returned to Australia, Michael Terry organised 14 principal explorations of the Australian inland (1923-1935) with vehicles or camels.
On one overland venture in 1923, using a string of camels, the Terry party walked 3,213 km over a nine month period between Alice Springs (Northern Territory) and Kalgoorlie (West Australia).
“Throughout all my years of exploration,” Terry wrote, “it had always been my greatest wish some day to achieve a truly outstanding discovery.”
During his years wandering the inland deserts with camels, Terry heard wild Aborigines speak of a special place they called “Chugga-Kurri.” Terry did not accept the reality of this until one day he found himself standing on the rim of a rich and fertile valley.
“When my camel reached the top of the sandhill,” he later wrote, “I just gazed in astonishment at what I saw lying ahead of me …”
There were magnificent cliffs and scattered clumps of gumtrees, with flocks of white-winged corellas flying above. There was t-tree and golden wattle in bloom, and a pool of cool, clear water. I gazed at it entranced … such quantities (of water) as to be almost unbelievable in that type of desert country. All around … was greenness … It was like a dream of beauty … suddenly come true …”
The oasis was the legendary Chugg-Kurri of the wild desert tribes. Terry gave it the name of “Hidden Basin” and spent days exploring its exquisite wonders.
As an old man writing his memoirs, Terry noted: “All I know is that the wattle still blooms in that hidden valley and the half legend that I had heard tell of so long ago turned out to be true.”
On a mining jaunt to the Cleland HIlls (Northern Territory), in 1961, Michael Terry made a discovery which he came to describe as “my major contribution to Australian archaeology.”
At a natural waterhole known to the Aborigines as Ullilla, the traveller accidentally came across a series of extraordinary pictographs (rock carvings).
The art style depicted was totally foreign, not at all Aboriginal in origin; one object was of a human head wearing a crown, while another displayed a beard, with scattered symbolic markings surrounding the human figures.
“For seven years I talked about it with specialists,” Terry said, “hoping to be taken seriously and to have the carvings properly studied …”
It was not until 1967 that the explorer was able to organise an expedition back to the mysterious site with Pro. MacIntosh (Sydney University) and Robert Edwards (South Australian Museum).
After an absence of six years, Terry pointed up to a massive rock above to the “heart-shaped face with moon eyes.”
Edwards finally delivered his verdict, saying: “These carvings are thousands of years old and quite different from known Aboriginal art.”
In the days following expedition members photographed and officially documented 387 seperate rock carvings.
“What people carved them and when?” Michael Terry wondered. “The workmanship is superior to that of the Aborigines and of a different character.”
Later discoveries by Terry included another non-Aboriginal rock carving of a male face 240 km west of Grafton, in New South Wales, a peculiar Polynesian face carved on rocks at Warialda (NSW) and, in 1970, strange hieroglyphs inscribed on mudstone at Pingandy Station, 43 km west of Carnarvon, in West Australia.
A Professor Roma, of Ottawa University (Canada), concluded the rock-writing may have been a Bengali variety of Sanskrit used in Java until 500 years ago, while a Dr. Bruce Fell of the National Decipherment Centre, in Massachussets, USA, disagreed, stating: “ … Most of the marks can be seen to be continuous natural phenomena … Some fossils … simulate writing to a remarkable degree …”
As an old man of 70-odd years, the last Australian explorer reminisced: “I pause whilst the present fades and memory gives a length of vision wherein I … return to the desert … The mulga trees, like the blasted woods of the battlefields, stand naked to the eye … A space of time and vision clears again … After abundant rains … we ride our camels towards a rift in the ranges where in every pool … water shines and the camels can … feed on luscious herbage by the hour … Parrots whisk through the branches and birds sing from the green depths whilst I splash in the water happy with life … These fine things were mine … May they also await you …”
Michael Terry, FRGS, FRGSA, passed away in 1981.
-B.J.C.
