The Warrego dividing into many dry channels when they reached its lower courses, the party struck eastward to the Culgoa, and reached that river after a very distressing stage over dry country on which they lost six horses from heat and thirst, whilst bringing the carts across it.

9.2.  A tragic expedition.

Kennedy’s first experience of an independent exploring expedition in the west was by no means a fitting prelude to the tragic journey he next undertook.  The same impulse that led to Mitchell’s and Leichhardt’s northern journeys stimulated Kennedy to make his dangerous journey up the eastern coast of the long peninsula that terminates in Cape York —­ the desire to find a road to the north coast, so that an easy chain of communication should exist between the southern settlements and the far north.

It was at the end of the month of May that Kennedy landed at Rockingham Bay with his party of twelve men.  He had started from Sydney in the barque Tam o’ Shanter, which was convoyed by Captain Owen Stanley in the Alligator.  This was in 1848, the same fateful year that witnessed Leichhardt’s disappearance.  A schooner was to meet the party on the north, at Port Albany, where it was proposed to form a settlement should the features of the peninsula warrant such an enterprise.  In actual point of distance the task was not great, being a land traverse of from three to four hundred miles, allowing for deviations.  But never were men in Australia so dogged by disaster and beset by danger as were Kennedy and his followers.  Opposed by country as yet unfamiliar to them, they found their onward path hindered by many totally unforeseen conditions.  Ranges and ravines clothed with an almost impenetrable jungle, which was infested with the venomous leaves of the stinging tree and the hooked spikes of the lawyer vine, confronted them.  The land was densely populated with the most savage and relentless natives on the continent, who resented the invasion from the outset.  Death tracked them steadily throughout, and claimed ten out of the thirteen of the devoted party as his victims.

The country through which their course lay is now dotted with mining-fields and townships, and fertile spaces of tilled tropical plantations.  The coast-line rich in harbours is the busy haunt of steamers, and the narrow waterway between the mainland and the great barrier reef the home of many lightships.  But when Kennedy and his party made their pioneer journey, the great desolation of the wilderness beset them on every side from the land, whilst the sea off-shore held myriad dangers.