The Story

of the Flinders Ranges

© 1964; revised 1965; reprinted 1967

Published by Rigby

Hans Mincham puts us in the picture of European exploration and settlement of what Matthew Flinders described as a “chain of rugged mountains” when he sighted the hills on March 8th, 1802.

 

Notes

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John Horrocks settled at what he laid out and named as the village of Penwortham – 12 km south of Clare and a few km north of Watervale – in 1839. “He owned Australia’s first camel”.

 On July 29th 1846, tired of “the monotony of life on a sheep-run”, he set out on “an expedition ‘to the N.N.W. of Mt Arden’ intending to become an explorer. 

He died in September 1846 (aged 28) from wounds occasioned by the discharge of his gun caused by the recalcitrant camel

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 (but may have perished from lack of water had he continued his trek inland; i.e., so instead of three deaths there had been only one.

“It seems certain that Horrocks, whose object was mainly to find new pastoral country, would have discovered nothing to arouse his enthusiasm in the direction he was taking. Pastoralists had not then realised the enormous value as stock food of saltbush, which to Horrocks, Sturt, and Eyre was merely a sign of sterile country.”  

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Goyder, Assistant Surveyor-General, “made his first trip north in April 1857.”

He was misled by Australian conditions, mirages and floodwaters and his findings ignited a

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embarrassing rush of applications for leases in the northern Flinders – applications for pastoral leases in an area as yet unsurveyed by the

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Torrens Government of SA. Torrens resigned and the Surveyor-General himself, Captain A H Freeling, lead a follow-up 1857 expedition which reported that Goyder’s conclusion concerning the availability of water was flawed – that Goyder’s inexperience with Australian conditions had lead him astray.  

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“Colonists in Adelaide in the forties and fifties who tried to gain some picture of the inland from reports in the Press of the day must have wondered at the conflicting accounts. First there was Eyre, who considered most of the country he traversed to be sterile and useless. Further, according to him, advance beyond the Finders was completely barred by the impassable horseshoe. In 1842 [Deputy Surveyor-General, Thomas] Burr raised hopes, which [Surveyor-General] Frome soon curtailed. Then Sturt, recoiling from the gibber-strewn wastes of the interior in 1845, confirmed Eyre’s picture of the useless nature of the inland country. In the following year Horrocks had nothing favourable to report as far as he had been able to go. Then came [B H] Babbage [who was commissioned by the SA Government to find gold worked his way up from the Adelaide Hills through to Mt Serle in the Flinders Ranges and found nothing, not even the abundant copper deposits], followed by Goyder with story to excite the pastoralists of three states. Finally there was Freeling, who presented a picture which the history of more than a century has confirmed as essentially correct.”

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“To anyone who had merely read the reports of Eyre, From, Sturt, Babbage, and Freeling, one thing must have appeared puzzling – the fact that not only were runs established in the ranges, but that they soon spread far out over the plains on each side of the North Flinders, and that by 1858 most of the apparently sterile country traversed by Eyre and From was being grazed. The secret lay in the nutritive value of the saltbush that the early explorers passed by almost unnoticed, looking on it merely as a sign of aridity and sterility.

“Eyre had no idea that saltbush, chief plant of the western plain and the other arid areas, would make excellent stock food. The discovery that cattle in particular would fatten quickly upon it was probably made by several pioneers, none of whom would see any reason to spread freely the news – and a very important discovery it was in the pastoral history of this country. As Samuel Parry recorded in 1858, ‘in Eyre’s and Sturt’s time saltbush was not known as being good for cattle; since then many settlers prefer a saltbush country to any other.’In one of his reports to the Surveyor-General he tells something of a conversation he had with George Marchant, who in 1858 managed Wilpena Station … [and] who was then producing one fat mob of cattle after another on a lease he held in the Mt Victory locality, said, ‘I would prefer a saltbush country to one all grass.’

“And so the very plant which to Eyre was the emblem of an arid, sterile land became the means, in combination with wells, bores and dams, of establishing runs throughout an area which in 1840 appeared forever worthless.”