Hume and Hovell 200 years on: Is it time to reassess their epic trek?

The Murray River flows strong and cold on the border between the cities of Albury and Wodonga.

Almost half a century ago, we moved to Albury and lived there for 10 sweltering summers.

When no flutter of breeze found its way between the hills, we took chicken sandwiches and wine to the riverbank and floated on the chilled stream, and in the gentler evenings we wandered beneath the branches of big old gums in the parks nearby.

One of the parks took its name from one of those trees.

Hovell Tree Park.

Precisely 200 years ago, on November 17, 1824, a retired English sea captain named William Hovell, famously adventuring with the Australian-born bushman named Hamilton Hume and six convict servants, carved his name into a river redgum there.

The carving remained visible well into the 20th century, even as the tree began ailing and slowly died.

A plaque depicting the original carving by William Hovell on the tree, held together by concrete in 1962Credit: Ken Wood

Albury’s worthies, reluctant to lose this fading claim to the area’s first European travellers, tried to prop up the old tree by pouring two tons of concrete into it.

But when in 1938 it became clear even that drastic effort was failing to hold back time, seedlings were taken and three new trees were planted.

And so, Hovell Tree Park, the Murray flowing by, retains its arboreal link to the past.

Hume claimed to have originally named the river the Hume after his father, though Hovell said he’d named it Hume’s River “because Hume was first to see it”.

The Murray River passing by the city of Albury.Credit: Destination NSW

Regardless, no heed was given to the truth that the river flowed through Aboriginal lands and their Dreaming stories from before time. It was later re-named for Sir George Murray, a British soldier from Scotland who became a South Australian politician.

Still, Hume got a bit more than a tree to be remembered by: his name was given to the highway along which thousands of cars and trucks thunder every day between Sydney and Melbourne.

Hamilton Hume as a young man.

It’s possible to imagine Hume would get a kick out of that disparity in lasting fame, for he and Hovell rasped on each other’s nerves during their expedition from south of Sydney to Corio Bay and back again in 1824.

Their squabbling blew into fiasco three weeks into the trek. Flummoxed by tough hill country west of the Snowy Mountains, and maddened by mosquitos and small biting flies, Hume and Hovell argued furiously about the best route forward.

Set on splitting up, they wrestled over their one frying pan. It broke into two, the handle separating from the pan. Hovell was gone less than a day before he returned, tacitly admitting an error in judgment.

Refusing to succumb, Hume and Hovell and their convict retainers – Hume’s assigned servants were James Fitzpatrick, Henry Angel and Claude Bossawa, and Hovell’s were Thomas Boyd, Ben Smith and Samuel Bollard – trekked for hundreds of kilometres where no Europeans had previously set foot.

William Hovell

They forded the flooded Murrumbidgee by wrapping a cart in a tarpaulin. Soon after, finding their path all but impossible, they abandoned their two carts and continued on foot.

At the Murray, after Hovell left his name carved into the tree by the riverbank, they built a boat from saplings to cross the river further upstream.

They swam their five bullocks, three horses and pack of dogs across numerous streams, hunted kangaroos and emus and eventually ate some of their bullocks and used their skins for footwear.

By the time the expeditioners struggled back to Hume’s homestead at Gunning, north of present-day Canberra, their clothes were rags, their supplies were at an end and their animals were dead or left behind.

They had taken three months to reach Corio Bay, near present-day Geelong, and 31 desperate days returning.

It was an astonishing accomplishment, even if they had unknowingly missed their intended destination, Western Port, by the width of Port Phillip Bay and more, despite Hovell’s reputation as a navigator.

The Hume and Hovell plaque in Explorers Park, Sydney. Credit: Neil Newitt

There was a time when the 200th anniversary of such an undertaking would have been celebrated in Australia with unrestrained fanfare.

Indeed, the centenary celebrations in 1924 went on for an entire week in Albury alone, featuring ringing speeches about “overcoming nature in all its savagery” and the pioneer spirit that won the land “in the spirit of Empire”.

The bicentenary this year is a relatively modest affair, though commemorative events are being held at Goulburn, Yass and at Albury’s Hovell Tree Park, and plaques and cairns are being re-worked, or new signage erected, along the expedition’s 1824 route.

There is, happily, no evidence Hume and Hovell came into conflict with Aboriginal people during their overland voyage, and Hume was notably at ease when he was at one point accompanied by a whole Indigenous clan to a gathering.

However, Bruce Pennay, adjunct professor at Charles Sturt University in Albury-Wodonga, suggests the time is ripe to acknowledge that the Hume and Hovell bicentenary should also mark the fact that expeditions like theirs were the start of what became the violent invasion of the lands of Aboriginal peoples that led to dispossession and massacres.

He points to the decision of the Albury LibraryMuseum to mount an exhibition just last month, titled Mob.

It shares First Nations People’s stories about the foundation of Albury, including a story panel called “Hume and Hovell: The arrival of the colonisers” which portrays the 1824 expedition as an intrusion leading to dispossession.

Another panel, “Frontier Wars: Grief, Anger and Resilience”, alludes to a mounted police barracks established in 1839 at the Murray River crossing to protect colonisers moving flocks of sheep and herds of cattle southward onto grasslands they could claim as their own.

The police barracks, in short, meant Albury, beyond its fabled Hovell tree by the river, was founded as a garrison town.

Pennay suggests, in a paper delivered to the Albury-Wodonga Historical Society, that Albury should have two foundation memory places: the Hovell Tree and a memorial to the police barracks.

To remind us how it all really began on the Murray.

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