The Feel of a Word: inland sea

The idea of the inland sea took hold when, in 1817-18, Oxley discovered that rivers on the inland side of the Blue Mountains flowed westward. Since rivers have to flow into a large body of water, it was suggested that there was an inland sea filling the centre of Australian into which the rivers emptied.

For most of that century the inland sea was the prime focus of exploration, even after it was found that the Murrumbidgee and Lachlan, explored by Oxley, actually flowed into the Murray which flowed into the ocean in South Australia.

People were adamant that they had seen it.

First there had been Charles Sturt, searching vainly for his legendary inland sea, with Poole, his second-in-command, insisting that he had sighted beyond the Darling a glittering ocean with islands floating upon it.  In 1857 G. W Goyder, the deputy surveyor-general struck a few miles north of Blanchewater … and reported a belt of hug gum trees, with a wide sheet of water and highlands beyond.  On nearer acquaintance the trees dwindled to stunted bushes, the highlands to broken clods of earth.  Next he returned to Adelaide with news that Lake Torrens was a vast freshwater lake bounded by perpendicular cliffs, which he had plainly seen through a telescope.  But when next year his superior, Colonel Freeling, travelled up with a boat and an iron punt he found nothing but a muddy saltpan.

Land of Mirage  George Farwell  1950

Fittingly the inland sea turned out to be a mirage, and so the idea of the fertile heartland gave way to the idea of the dead heart.  This was the title of a book , The Dead Heart of Australia, published in 1906 by the geologist, Professor John Walter Gregory who, in 1901-02  took a party of university students on an expedition around Lake Eyre.  His description of the terrain was not positive.

Rather than abandon the idea of the inland sea people turned to thinking up ways in which to create such a sea.  If nature had failed, then perhaps science and technology could redress the situation.  The early 1900s saw a number of suggestions which were generally panned before anything could be done about them.

Inland Sea Theory ‘Fallacious’

Dismissing as fallacious the theory that the rainfall of Central Australia would materially be improved by the creation of an inland sea, the committee rejects the suggestion that a canal might be cut to Lake Eyre to let the sea water in.  ‘It would not necessarily transform the climate.  In any event, the proposition is quite impracticable on the ground of cost,’ says the report.  Even if it were practicable, the flooding of Lake Eyre might do as little good to Central Australia as the Dead Sea in Asia does to its barren basin.

Courier-Mail 9 December 1937

Ways to create the inland sea ranged from cutting a canal from the ocean, damming the floodwaters that surged down from the north, or building an equivalent of the Great Dividing Range that would cause precipitation on the region.  I would not be surprised if there are people who still raise this as a possibility.  An idea that seizes the imagination of the country as this one did, is not going to go away.

As we came to know more about the outback, it dawned on us that the dead heart was not as dead as we thought.  It is true that there were places where no one could survive.  A gibber desert was a formidable obstacle as the Surveyor-General of South Australia remarked in 1915:

To see Oodnadatta in the drought season is to see a region as desolate as can be imagined, nothing but gibbers as far as the eye can reach.  It has been said of Oodnadatta that the Devil made the place and even he was so disgusted with his work that he threw stones at it.

Man from Arltunga   R.G. Kimber  1986

The word gibber made its way into Australian English  from the Dharug people in the early days of settlement a Sydney.  It meant a large rock.  A gibber gunyah was a large overhang of rock that provided shelter.  The area called The Rocks was also referred to as The Gibbers.  But gibber became more flexible in meaning and could refer to a rock of any size.  Now it is used only for the small hard piece of chalcedony or silica covered with a dark mineral coating known as desert varnish which, multiplied to infinity, forms the surface of a gibber desert.

The dead heart offered crabholes, drift sand, and claypans which could be either covered with water in one season, or boggy and a danger to horses and camels the next, or baked hard and dry after that.  Saltpans glittered.  Dust storms covered everything so that soakages disappeared unless marked by cairns.  Spinifex and saltbush were the constant vegetation.

And yet there was more to it than that, as Ion Idriess said in Flynn of the Inland:

Round and north of Beltana are the ‘arid lands’, huge belts of saltbush and gibber plains, of sandhills and spinifex. And that ‘arid’ description is partly deceptive. Sheep and cattle stations are scattered north, south, east, and west throughout that country. Even parts of the desolate regions round Lake Eyre are inhabited.

Banjo Paterson spoke in praise of the saltbush:

For the trees and grass and the shrubs contain

A dry sweet scent on the saltbush plain.

For those that love it and understand,

The saltbush plain is a wonderland.

Nobody speaks about the dead heart anymore.  The shift from dead heart to red heart occurred in the 1930s when there seemed to be a belief that Australians should be educated about the real nature and possibilities of Central Australia. Frank Clune made use of the expression in the title The Red Heart. Sagas of Centralia for his book published in 1944.

Although there may be a few who still hanker for an inland sea, most of us have grown to love the outback.  We now contemplate the beauty of the red sand dunes against a cloudless blue sky, and are almost disappointed when it rains and they turn green with vegetation.  We rush to visit Lake Eyre on the rare occasion that it fills with water, but equally we are enthralled by it when it is a vast salt pan.