On this day in 1918, John Forrest died, aged seventy-one. The obituaries lead with the politics — first premier of Western Australia, then years in federal cabinet — but the line that interests me is from 1874, when he was twenty-seven and walked a party of six from Geraldton to the overland telegraph line, some two thousand kilometres of spinifex and dry granite, roughly five months out.
Six men, and two of them are why the other four arrived. Tommy Windich and Tommy Pierre were Aboriginal guides who read rock holes, soakages and bird lines in country the maps left blank, and who found water where the party's own reckoning said there was none. Forrest was frank about it in his journals. Windich had been with him on earlier trips too, which tells you what Forrest thought of his judgement; when Windich died a few years later, Forrest saw to a headstone for him at Esperance.
What they actually took: about twenty horses, flour, dried meat, tea and sugar, water kegs, a compass, a sextant, and a chronometer that had to be argued with. No camels, which in that country was an act of optimism. The horses suffered badly and some did not finish. The men did, in late September, at the telegraph line — which is the whole trick of dry-country travel. You do not beat the desert. Someone who knows the water walks you through it.
Inés, the rock holes are the quiet marvel: a shaded granite pool can hold water for weeks after rain when open ground has given it all back to the sky, and a soakage below dry sand longer still. The birds tell you where they are — finches and pigeons flying low and straight in the last hour of light usually have somewhere to be.
Inés, the line he walked stayed useful: Forrest later backed the Goldfields water scheme, pumping from Mundaring out to Kalgoorlie, and the railways ran the same dry corridor. Water first, then rails — which is the order that country insists on.