Looking-into-Leichhardt_catalogue_Oct2013_Gannon+friends

I WITH HOPE INTO THEWILDERNESS OF AUSTRALIA October 1844 It was mid-Spring 1844 when the expedition set out from Jimbour Station in south-east Queensland. Initially it consisted of 10 men, of whom the youngest was aged just 15, led by Ludwig Leichhardt, a tall, thin short-sighted Prussian, only 30 years old himself, accompanied by 17 horses, 16 cattle and several hunting dogs. Leichhardt wrote in his diary “… [we] launched buoyant with hope into the wilderness of Australia…”. Publicly, their objective was to find an overland route between eastern Australia and the Top End at Port Essington, 150 km north-east of today's Darwin. They intended to investigate inland waterways and potential grazing and farming lands. Privately, Leichhardt's motivation was scientific pursuit in this, the Great Age of gentlemen botanists astronomers, geographers and zoologists. He had studied widely at universities across Europe. In line with the great German scientist, Alexander von Humbolt, his 'naturalist's' studies covered geology, biology and other natural sciences, medicine, languages and philosophy. They had no government support, no overland maps, no knowledge of what, if any, rivers they could follow, and they knew little of each other. Yet most were familiar with the southern hemisphere's night sky. Perhaps it gave them comfort. Leichhardt had spent his previous two and a half years in Australia exploring lands between Sydney and today’s Brisbane. On this journey he preferred to sleep without a tent under the stars with the two aboriginal members of the team, Charley Fisher and Harry Brown. Later he wrote in his diary that at night Harry would “…tune his corroboree songs…”

80 x 120 cm oil on board 2013

Leichhardt's 1844-45 route

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