How Archduke Franz Ferdinand took in the sights - through his sights

HIS murder a century ago triggered a world war. But Archduke Franz Ferdinand knew all about mass slaughter – and our wildlife was a favourite target.

140614 TWAM Archduke Franz Ferdinand in hunting gear NO REUSE FEE APPLIES pIC : Natural History Museum of Vienna Picture: Captioned As

IF THE terrorists had not botched their work, it would have been a bomb that killed Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria and his wife Sophie that fateful Sunday morning in Sarajevo a century ago.

Instead, the bomb hurled by Nedeljko Cabrinovic exploded under the car behind, injuring its ­passengers but leaving the archduke unscathed. Later that same day, June 28, 1914, freakish ill fortune delivered the archduke’s car within easy range of the assassin Gavrilo Princip, who lost no time in pumping bullets from his Browning into the archduke’s jugular and Sophie’s abdomen. Both were dead in minutes.

So it was a shot, not a blast, that was heard around the world, setting off four years of unimaginable bloodshed. It was not a war that the archduke had wanted. Had he ever succeeded his uncle as emperor – and he had been waiting for that moment a very long time – then his agenda was one of domestic consolidation, not war with his neighbours. Yet there was also a kind of poetic justice in the mode of his death. The man who died by the gun had lived by the gun, as was never more obvious than when he visited Australia 21 years earlier.

In theory, the voyage which delivered Franz Ferdinand to Australia in May 1893 was to be a great learning experience, indeed, an education befitting an heir to the throne, with no expense spared. The cruiser Kaiserin ­Elisabeth, the pride of the Austro-­Hungarian navy, took him from Trieste through the Suez Canal to Ceylon (Sri Lanka) and India, and from there to Singapore and Batavia (Jakarta). At every port he dutifully met the local dignitaries as protocol demanded, honing the skills of statecraft and diplomacy that a future emperor would need. But for Franz Ferdinand this journey was above all about pleasure, and he derived his greatest pleasure from killing animals.

Landfall was first made in Australia on ­Thursday Island, where the archduke and his 400 officers and crew cooled their heels for a couple of days as Kaiserin Elisabeth took on water and provisions. On May 16 she entered Sydney Harbour, moored in Farm Cove and fired off a 21-gun salute to the colonial flag. The archduke recorded in his diary his impressions of the ­harbour’s great beauty and his relief at feeling the fresh, cool Sydney air after many weeks ­travelling through the tropics.

The formalities that accompany even a private visit were dealt with quickly and efficiently. The first visitor aboard to welcome the archduke was the German Consul-General in Australia, Alfred Pelldram, who was doubling as Austria- Hungary’s representative. By the afternoon the archduke and a sizeable royal retinue were ­venturing onto land to meet and greet the local elite. NSW was still awaiting the arrival of its new ­governor, Robert Duff, so it was Lieutenant-Governor Frederick Darley who played host at Government House, acquainting his royal visitor with a number of Her Majesty’s ministers.

Sydney was not without its charms; the ­archduke wrote glowingly of the commercial life, the museum, and the remarkable number of beautiful women and girls. But for him the brief sojourn in town was little more than a prelude to the main events, a couple of hunting expeditions to the city’s west and south. Wisely he drew on the local knowledge and contacts of his hosts, who pieced together an itinerary which soon earned royal approval.

The next day a specially commissioned train, serving both as transport and accommodation, delivered the archduke and his entourage to the Blue Mountains. That might have been ­Darley’s idea, since although the lieutenant-governor lived in Woollahra, his preferred site of “rustication” was Lilianfels, his grand summer residence at Katoomba. A photograph taken that day shows the archduke, stick in hand, at ­Govett’s Leap lookout, which impressed the archduke immensely.

There was more fun to be had further west, as the archduke might well have learnt from Frank Suttor, the minister of public instruction, who hailed from Bathurst. When the curtains were parted on the royal carriage on the morning of May 18, the archduke awoke to find himself in Narromine, 40km west of Dubbo. There he was entrusted to the care and hunting instincts of local squatter Frank Mack.

The fun began in Mack’s carriage on the way to the farm, when the archduke spotted, and promptly dispatched, three colourful birds. Then, and with the help of greyhounds the train had collected in Bathurst, the archduke sighted his first marsupial quarry – kangaroos. The animals’ distinctive locomotion held him spellbound for a moment, leading him to note in his diary “how agile these apparently clumsy animals are and what great jumps they are able to make thanks to their powerfully developed back legs and the tail, with which they launch themselves from the ground”. Of course that was no reason to spare them, and the killing continued through the morning, until an invitation to partake of luncheon (a combination of half-raw and half-burnt lamb roasted on an open fire) forced a temporary stay of the slaughter.

Next day, local farmers on horseback kindly drove ever more kangaroos towards the archduke. Their efforts were richly rewarded when, after quite a chase, an emu was added to the royal collection.

On the morning of Sunday, May 21, the archduke was back in Sydney, exercising great forbearance in attending a service at St Mary’s Cathedral lasting more than two hours; he understood barely a word of it. Further social duties were fulfilled that afternoon, but already the archduke’s thoughts were elsewhere.

The next day the train took the southern line, allowing its passengers to inspect the ­abattoir and meat-canning factory at Auburn before the journey continued to Moss Vale. The archduke’s host there, a certain Mr Badgery, soon cottoned on to the Austrian’s fondness for Australian fauna. Having collected his guest from the station, Badgery thoughtfully halted the carriage under some trees and gestured to a round shape huddled in one of the branches. What transpired was recorded in the archduke’s diary in the following words:

“Without being clear about what kind of animal it was, I fired a decent load of shot at it. Although I had obviously hit the target pretty well, because a lot of fur flew from its thick, grey coat, the shot produced little effect. The animal simply clung more tightly to the branch and did not appear to be finished off until the third shot, without having stirred itself noticeably. We were just about to send someone up the tree when suddenly the animal fell onto the road, and I was now able to identify it as the so-called Australian Bear (Phascolarctus cinereus). It belonged to the family of marsupials, and in its exterior appearance is reminiscent of a small bear. The fully grown animal reaches a length of barely a metre; the body is stockily built and covered with a very thick, soft coat, which is grey on the back but white on the stomach and on the inner side of the extremities. The head is round like a ball, the nose flattened out, the ears have tufts of hair and stand upright. The five toes of the front feet are divided into two groups, the back feet distinguished by the joining of the second and third toes. The toe, which is the equivalent of the thumb on the back feet and performs an important function in climbing, has no nail. The animal I killed was carrying a young one, which fell out of the pouch during the fall from the tree.

“One distinctive feature of the Australian Bear is its sluggishness and apathy; its only ­talent is climbing, but even this it does with astonishing slowness. Some time later we tried to coax a bear hanging quite low on a tree into fleeing or at least climbing quickly by yelling and making noise, but for a long time it took no notice at all of us, until finally turning its head away casually, climbing upward a few centimetres and then remaining restfully on the branch, until eventually I shot him down.”

Franz Ferdinand managed to shoot another seven koalas on the ride to Badgery Station, whereby on each occasion, as he put it, he was “astonished again and again at the passivity of this animal when shot. Naturally one hits it with the first shot, but often one needed a whole series of shots before the dead bear fell down from the tree to which it had clung with its forearms and claws.”

The platypus offered quite a different kind of challenge. Even to spot one was difficult, but to shoot one required a high degree of skill from its stalker. The archduke, as ever, was up for the challenge. In the company of just one other hunter he made his way one morning to a well-shaded watercourse at the base of a steep gorge, where he soon spied his quarry. “A lucky shot killed the animal immediately, but then we were at a loss to know how to get hold of it, because in deep water it was being driven downstream, and no one was keen to take a swim on the ice-cold current on this very cool morning. Finally my practical Australian came up with an idea to save the day – by throwing stones behind the dead platypus it was possible to create waves which gradually drove it to the bank. This process took a while, but it finally provided us with an animal, which turned out to be an old male.”

One sample alone was a meagre return for such effort, so the archduke rode another two kilometres to a site warmly recommended by his hosts. Sure enough, after scrambling through a landscape better suited to goats, he reached a stretch of water where not just one but two ­platypuses were to be seen. He resolved to hide behind a tree until one swam in his direction. Alas, Franz Ferdinand was thwarted in his aim of adding another of these creatures to his ­collection, as Badgery’s booming voice broke the silence, scared the platypus and darkened the archduke’s mood. Even European royalty, it seems, could not expect breakfast to be delayed any longer. As he trudged off to take it, the archduke took out his frustration on an unfortunate rock wallaby which happened across his path, followed by a couple more koalas and a bird.

A tight schedule demanded that Kaiserin ­Elisabeth prepare for departure, much though the archduke was enjoying himself. Back in Sydney he hurriedly ticked off the last items on his itinerary, among them witnessing demonstrations in sheep-shearing and boomerang-throwing, another visit to the museum, and a final meal at the Australian Hotel. His diary also reveals that he purchased a considerable part of an unnamed gentleman’s collection of ethnographica.

Those last couple of days in Sydney offered the Austrians the chance to reciprocate their hosts’ hospitality. Invitations were extended to 300 locals to attend a gala ball to be held on the decks of Kaiserin Elisabeth, whose crew festooned her with decorations. These were financially troubled times in colonial Sydney, gripped by a banking crisis, and few would pass up the opportunity for a free party. So it was that 500 turned up, among them, as the host noted, some very beautiful women, who excelled themselves on the dance floor. The next day Sydney was abuzz with news of the ball hosted by the Austrians.

As Kaiserin Elisabeth steamed through Sydney Heads on May 28, Franz Ferdinand reflected on the land he was leaving behind, its people, and above all its fauna. New Caledonia lay ahead, then New Guinea, Borneo, Singapore (for the second time), Hong Kong, three weeks in Japan and a railway journey across North America, before a transatlantic crossing delivered the archduke to Vienna and further training for the job he never got. And at just about every point along the way there was wildlife to be shot, stuffed and catalogued.

Over the course of his life, records show, the archduke managed to snuff the life out of 274,899 animals. Until, of course, that fateful day in Sarajevo a century ago, when he found himself at the wrong end of a gun.

Those meticulous records also show that a number of exotic birds from numerous points of Franz Ferdinand’s world tour completed the journey back to Vienna alive, where they found new homes in the royal menagerie at Schönbrunn Palace. Among them were souvenirs of the archduke’s Australian travels: kookaburras and cockatoos, blissfully unaware just how lucky they were to be alive.