2.
WHAT CAN WE LEARN FROM THE INHABITANTS OF THE UNKNOWN?
Mounted on a granite block, an imposing statue stands at City Square, on the corner of Collins and Swanston Streets in Melbourne, Australia.
The inscription around the base reads:
Robert O’Hara Burke and William John Wills
Leaders of the Victorian exploring expedition
The first to cross the continent from south to north
They perished on the return journey
At Cooper’s creek, Central Australia, June 1861
Burke stands to the left of the seated Wills, arm resting on his shoulder. A book lies open in Wills’ lap. The statue was unveiled on 21 April 1865, four years after the expedition’s ill-fated end.
The story of Burke and Wills is one of triumph, as the expedition managed to reach the Gulf of Carpentaria on the northern coast of Australia – a journey of 3,000km. It is also a story of disaster because many lives were lost along the way. Burke and Wills only made it back to Cooper’s Creek, less than one-third of the way back to Melbourne, where, at their deserted supply camp, they died of starvation.
Many historians have asked themselves how could Burke and Wills have died of starvation when they were surrounded by bush food (or “bush tucker” as it is called in Australia), rich sources of native foods used by the indigenous people living in the outback?57 As Ian Clark, author of The Aboriginal Story of Burke and Wills: Forgotten Narratives comments, whilst the Europeans were perishing, the Aborigines were thriving.58 The book argues that the answer to this question lies in Burke’s attitude. He had little respect, bordering on disdain, for the indigenous people and their knowledge of the land. Other explorers had used indigenous trackers in previous expeditions and the failure of this expedition is attributed to the lack of Aboriginal guides. The inability, or unwillingness, of the explorers to meaningfully engage with the local inhabitants of the land led to their demise.
Burke had left one of his men, William Brahe, in charge of the supply depot at Cooper’s Creek and he ordered him to prevent any Aborigines from coming close to the depot. Returning from the Gulf of Carpentaria after four months, Burke, Wills and King had missed Brahe by a few hours; he had given up waiting and abandoned the camp earlier that day.
Ian Clark believes that if Brahe had encouraged good relationships with the Yandruwandha people, who had lived in the Cooper’s Creek area for thousands of years, they would have been able to inform him of the imminent arrival of Burke and his party. Likewise, if Burke had not rejected contact with the Yandruwandha, they could have sent word further down the track to let Brahe know that they were coming.59
Once at Cooper’s Creek, the explorers distrusted the Yandruwandha people’s offers of friendship and hospitality. In his diary Wills described the tribes as “mean-spirited and contemptible in every respect,” even when the men became totally dependent on the food they were providing them with. Reluctantly relying on their generosity, Wills wrote: “I suppose this will end in our having to live like the blacks for a few months.”
Lord Alderdice, a Liberal Democrat member of UK’s House of Lords, and a descendant of the expedition’s sole survivor, John King, says that in contrast with King, who respected the Aborigines’ knowledge of the land, Burke was very dismissive of them.60 Burke fired his gun over the head of a man who’d brought him some food and asked for a piece of cloth in return.
Later it was reported that Burke rudely refused an offer of fish. After a while, the Yandruwandha stopped bringing the men food and eventually moved on. Without their benefactors, the explorers struggled to locate the nardoo seed, an aquatic fern that the Aborigines used to make cakes and this was because they were looking in the wrong places – they’d wrongly assumed that the seeds were growing on trees. Once they found the seeds, the explorers ate them green, not knowing that the nardoo seed is toxic if it is not correctly prepared (it drains the body of vitamin B1, which leads to death from malnutrition).
As a result of malnutrition, Burke ended up being unable to move, on the bank of the Cooper River. He asked King to place a pistol in his hand and to leave him unburied and he died later that day. King searched in vain for the Yandruwandha, and when he returned to camp, he found that Wills had died. After he had buried him, King set out again to look for the Yandruwandha, finally locating them. Lord Alderdice points out that the only reason King survived was due to his interest in the Aboriginal people and his respect for their knowledge of the land. King lived with the Yandruwandha for more than two months until a relief party sent from Melbourne discovered him on 15 September 1861.
The great irony is that Burke and Wills showed incredible fortitude and courage in being the first white people to cross the Australian continent. They perished because they didn’t open themselves up to an unknown and untrusted source of knowledge. They failed to learn from the inhabitants of the unknown; being unable to conceive that these inhabitants possessed more knowledge than they did. They didn’t trust them. Had their attitude towards new knowledge from the unknown been different, they would have survived.
Throughout the ages many people from different disciplines have tried to make sense of the unknown and there are stories worldwide of situations where Not Knowing is accepted, even embraced, and seen as a key driver of success. Not Knowing is central to many domains, from creativity in art to behavioural change in psychotherapy, new discoveries in science, exploring new frontiers in adventuring and creating new value in entrepreneurship. The way people operating in these domains use Not Knowing as a source of creativity and possibility is instructive for those of us struggling to learn about it.
Let’s not “do a Burke and Wills.” Let’s keep our minds open and explore these diverse experiences and perspectives. No matter whether we’ve already travelled in the unknown or this is our first time, let’s learn from the inhabitants of this place – the “poets and inventors of fables,” as Plutarch describes them. In this next section we meet some of them.