Bush Tucker Man

This is Rockingham Bay, near Tam O'Shanter Point.

I've come here, halfway up the coast of Queensland,

to follow an explorer I've always admired.

I'm setting out on an expedition right to the tip of Cape York.

When I was a kid at school learning about this,

I never dreamed that one day, I'd actually come here.

Our schoolhouse was named after the expedition leader.

His name was Edmund Kennedy, and he was just 29 years old

when he left the 'Tam O'Shanter' here in May 1848.

All up, there were 13 in the party,

including Jackey Jackey,

an incredibly resourceful Aboriginal tracker

from the Hunter Valley down in New South Wales.

There was also a botanist called William Carron.

A lot of what I've found out about the expedition

comes from the journal that he kept along the way.

How Kennedy became a national hero

and why 10 blokes died

is what I wanna find out by following their route.

This expedition became one of the biggest disasters

in Australian exploration history.

But why?

From the minute he got here,

Kennedy realised that he had a real problem.

See, back in that era, the mapmakers had told him

that this country here was all flat and lightly wooded and all the rest.

Of course, it's not.

He wrote in his journal that a more vile country

had never stared him in the face before.

Well, I don't think it's real vile.

In fact, a whole bunch of Australians come up here for holidays.

But you gotta remember what Kennedy was trying to do.

Imagine walking two drays and a hundred sheep

through this sort of country.

No wonder he was absolutely staggered by it.

Well, if he thought this was crook, there was worse to come.

This is round about where I reckon he landed.

And it was from here that all his problems started.

For the first few weeks,

Kennedy travelled up and down along the coastline here

just trying to find a way inland.

Imagine trying to get through this stuff with 28 horses, 100 sheep,

four dogs and a bunch of carts.

Ridiculous gear for this sort of country.

In this part of the world, coastal rain forest and mangrove

often forms a barrier to anyone trying to get through.

Eventually, they found a way inland, here at Meunga Creek.

The idea was to make their way

up the east coast of Cape York

and get resupplied with a ship along the way

and then turn round and come back down

along the west coast.

Back in those days, rain forest like this stretched for hundreds of kilometres

along this part of the coastline.

Dragging carts through this sort of stuff would have been a real pain for him.

Nowadays, of course, much of it has been cleared

to make way for pastoral land,

which was one of the main reasons why

the authorities were so keen on the Kennedy expedition.

They wanted to know just how viable the area was

from an agricultural point of view.

As far as we can judge,

this is about the spot where Kennedy dumped his carts.

He stood here and he had a look over that way there.

And, of course, back in those days, it wasn't clear like it is today.

It was all scrub country.

He's actually about only 20km inland

and it's taken him 10, 11 days to get here.

Why?

Because he had to cut a road all the way

to get those carts through that scrub country.

Well, finally, the penny dropped.

\"Get rid of the carts,\" he reckoned.

That's where he dumped 'em - down that creek there.

But when he stood on this knoll here,

took his compass bearing up the Tully River Gorge there,

you can see behind me,

and had a look at the mountains and said,

\"There's no way in the world I'm gonna get 'em up there.\"

Just take a look at 'em.

Even today, this country is extremely difficult to get through.

But Kennedy and his men refused to be beaten by it.

This is how Carron described it in his journal at the time.

\"During these three days,

\"we travelled over an irregular, mountainous country

\"intersected by numerous creeks, running in every direction,

\"but all of them with belts of scrub on each side.

\"We sometimes crossed the same creeks two or three times a day,

\"owing to the tortuous directions they took,

\"and our clothes were kept wet all day.

\"Some of the rivers too had very steep banks,

\"which presented other obstacles to the progress of our horses.

\"Between the creeks, small patches of open forestland intervened,

\"with large blocks of rock scattered over them.

\"Most of the creeks had a rocky bottom

\"and were running to the eastward.\"

But eventually, they broke out to more open country.

They were coming into contact with the local Aboriginals all the time.

Mostly, there were no problems,

but on at least one occasion,

the expedition open-fired on a hostile group,

and at least one Aboriginal was killed.

Now, it's possible that this news spread rapidly ahead of them

and may well have had a bearing on what happened to Kennedy later on.

As the expedition moved through this country,

the Aboriginal people who lived here

were obviously keeping a pretty close eye on 'em.

On this rock wall behind me, you can see this rock art, and it's a horse.

Here we've got the neck. Pair of ears going up here.

The head, and even a pair of reins racing off into the air there.

So somewhere along the line,

they've seen horses moving through this country.

Now, whether this horse was one of Kennedy's, I don't know,

but it obviously impressed the local Aboriginal people.

I don't know - somehow, the idea that this horse was one of Kennedy's,

it's got some appeal to me.

Perhaps it is.

It's been suggested that some of the men

were on pretty intimate terms with the local women

without Kennedy knowing about it,

which is not a real good way to go travelling round the countryside.

This trip is still one of the great four-wheel-drive adventures

in Australia.

The track I'm on now is roughly about halfway up Cape York Peninsula.

By the time Kennedy reached here,

the whole expedition were reduced to eating their horses just to stay alive.

With almost no food,

the men and the animals were getting sicker by the day

from malnutrition and diarrhoea

and, of course, malaria.

These things here are those nonda plums.

Only grow in Cape York, these things,

and they fall to the ground when they're ripe, like this.

These little fruit have a real role to play in the Kennedy expedition.

If it wasn't for them, we wouldn't be telling this story here today.

I'll tell you down the track about that.

Kennedy was desperate to get to this spot on Princess Charlotte Bay

so that he could meet up with the resupply ship called the 'Bramble'.

But he couldn't make it because the rivers and the creeks and the mudflats,

they all stopped him getting through to the coast.

If old Kennedy could see what happened here today, he'd turn in his grave.

It took him four months of struggle to get here.

I've done the same trip in that motor car in four days.

Well, he had no 'Bramble', no resupply

and nowhere to go except north.

And that's what he did - up that way.

Weymouth Bay was to be

a turning point for the whole expedition.

Of course, Kennedy was a Pom,

and you can see it coming through in the way he did things.

For instance, he insisted that every Sunday

should be treated as a day of rest, with prayers,

even though they were so far behind in their schedule.

By the time they got here, Kennedy realised they were in deep trouble.

They'd killed all their sheep, the men were on their last legs,

and they only had nine horses left.

This location is extremely important

from the Kennedy expedition point of view,

because this is the spot here where he put Camp 80 – LXXX.

That's how he used to write his camp numbers on the tree,

in Roman numerals.