Queen Victoria didn't get out much.
She certainly never saw most of her empire.
So I'm on the journey she never took,
from the tea plantations of Darjeeling to the skyscrapers of Hong Kong,
the jungles of Borneo with their rubber trees and sago worms...
head-hunters, and orang-utans.
I've been to Ghana, the Gold Coast,
with its handsome castles and their slave dungeons...
and I've followed the slave story to the rainforests of Jamaica
where they found their freedom.
And I've landed on the foggy rock of Newfoundland,
where the Transatlantic cable shrank the empire so we could run the world from home.
So where am I going next?
Miles away
I'm headed halfway round the world to a country so beautiful,
the first British settlers couldn't believe their luck when they saw it.
What a shame there were some people already living there.
Let's see if they'll hutch up.
So, I'm off to New Zealand, to the Bay of Islands.
New Zealand has a North and a South Island,
and we're at the tip of the North Island.
It's supposed to have the second bluest sky in the world.
Do you think they're pleased about that?
Or is it a bit annoying to come second?
Are you looking at it now, thinking, "I've seen bluer"?
No one's sure, but they think the first settlers only came here about a thousand years ago.
They migrated from Eastern Polynesia,
and it's those Polynesians who became the Maori.
They were hunters, they were fishermen, and they were warriors.
(Shouting in Maori)
(Chanting in Maori)
And on this bay was a little Maori village with a name that means Sweet Blue Penguin.
But it's called Russell now.
It became a whaling station in the 1800s, and was the first European settlement.
It was full of drunken sailors and convicts.
It was so scary and violent, they called it the Hellhole of the Pacific.
It's a tourist place now. The most scary thing is teenagers who won't get out the stupid way
(Car horn)
It's all very gingham pincushion now, very spruced up.
But then, it was a big, filthy old jumble of Maori and European buildings,
all jammed together, with bars and brothels and guns.
Bit like the Wild West, but with scenery.
But not far from where the drunks and deserters of Russell
were crashing in and out of swing doors, was a more peaceful place.
A place where you didn't need to fight,
where you could take a breath and feel that perhaps, the worst of your struggles were over.
This is Waipu.
Thousands of miles away, in the Highlands of Scotland,
thousands of families were being cleared off their land to make way for sheep farming,
and many people were forced to emigrate or starve.
In 1817, Norman McLeod, a Highland minister,
set out with his family and followers to a new life in Nova Scotia in Canada,
where they would have land and freedom to worship how they wanted.
But the winters were hard there, and when crops failed,
and potato blight led to famine,
they built ships, and, led again by Norman, then in his 60s,
they sailed to Australia.
But the Gold Rush had put the price of land out of their reach,
and they set sail for the last time, and landed here,
in Waipu.
And so, 30 years after he'd left Scotland with those first brave emigrants,
Norman McLeod and his people found what they were looking for.
A place where they could farm and settle and worship how they pleased.
A place that looked very like the Highland landscape they'd left behind.
And they did settle, and they thrived.
They have thousands of descendants in New Zealand.
So it was worth it, in the end,
for all those McLeods and McLeans, and McKenzies,
turning their back on everything they knew,
making that great migration,
taking their beliefs and their hopes and their language
all the way to the other side of the world.
(Shouting in Maori)
But New Zealand wasn't just a haven for emigrants.
It was the land of the Maori.
(Whistling)
And Honay, whose travel company puts on these displays,
has a mission to make people aware of not just their culture,
but their whole history.
So, Honay, the Maori people were here before the white people came.
What was it like?
It must have been beautiful.
There were no fences...
there were no walls,
there were no boundaries.
Everything was open, from the sky,
to the sea, to the land.
It was the sacred house of the Nga Puhi people.
And, by the way, welcome to our house.
Kia ora.
So, what happened when the white people first came?
- It was a good time. - Mm.
Our ancestors saw the potential
for a new type of economic development, internationally.
Mm. So was it reasonably beneficial?.
Very beneficial.
And how long did that state go on for?
Until the Treaty of Waitangi.
(Shouting in Maori)
OK, the Treaty of Waitangi, which was signed in February 1840,
is an agreement between the Maori and the British.
Two versions, one in each language.
It aimed to give protection to the Maori and allow for British settlement.
But there is no direct translation between the two languages,
and both sides seemed to have slightly different understandings
of the meaning of the words used.
The Treaty of Waitangi, in the words of our ancestors,
we retain our "tino rangatiratanga" -
our sovereignty,
and our right to "mamaki tamata" -
to look after the new tribes that are coming here.
And what was the British interpretation?
- The British interpretation? - Mm.
Was that our people would hand over all sovereignty,
and everything to the Queen.
And that's really completely the reverse.
For some reason, the British thought that we really needed them to look after us.
I know, I keep hearing this!
- (Laughs) Every country we go to. - For some reason.
However, we didn't need no one to look after us.
- I know. - We had done a marvellous job of doing that
long before first contact with a European.
To go from the top of the pecking order
- to the bottom...in 150 years. - Mm.
It might take us another 150 years to get back to the top,
but yep, it will eventually happen.
Pecking order. The British had to have a pecking order.
And they had to be at the top.
Treaties might be in two languages, but the important one would be English.
Maoris might have very nice buildings, but we didn't want to live in them.
We wanted the proper white colonial ones
we'd built in all the countries we'd blagged our way into.
I think there's two things going on.
0ne is a sense of entitlement, that the people who are native to these places
are just minding them till the British can get there,
and the other is a sense of superiority,
based not just on the fact that Britain is a civilised nation
and knows how things should be done,
but that we are white, they are dark, like Africans,
and like Africans, the Maori are perceived as savage and slightly less than human.
Russell's more or less a tourist place now.
To get an idea of how the whole European-Maori hoo-ha played out,
we have to go to somewhere bigger, so we're going to Auckland.
It all looks very English, doesn't it?
Just a strange lack of pensioners picnicking in lay-bys,
and no stripy plastic bags caught in the trees.
And here we are, Auckland,
always turning up in the top five cities in the world for quality of life.
0ne in five people own a boat here.
As opposed to where I live, where one in five people have an asthma inhaler.
It's a big centre for sailing and adventure sports,
there's hundreds of ways of getting hurt, getting wet
or just scaring the pants off yourself.
It's got three harbours, two mountain ranges, a rainforest, loads of volcanoes...
That's one. Mount Victoria, dormant, I'm hoping.
And lots of middle-aged men trying to prove something. Whoa
There's those nice white houses again.
But although Auckland has this almost too English look about it, without the litter,
and a lot of the big, lumpy public buildings that at home, we prefer to cover in pigeons,
it is very cosmopolitan, it doesn't feel like somewhere that's bogged down in the past.
The population's very mixed. 50% are European,
and the rest are a mixture of Asians and Polynesians,
and about 10% are Maori.
And they are integrated, but there still is a huge amount of controversy
about the Waitangi Treaty and about the Maori.
Some people think they're hard done by and deserve to be recompensed,
and there's another view that they get too many hand-outs,
and they don't work hard enough.
This isn't something people are afraid to talk about, by the way.
(Man on radio) ..0800 RadioLIVE, 0800 723465.
Maori have made a huge contribution here.
Sure, we've got problems, but they're nowhere near as bad as Lindsay makes out.
(Second man) And we get sick and tired...
(Victoria) I'm here to take part in Willie Jackson's radio show.
(Woman) I'm a Maori businesswoman. (Man) Yes.
(Woman) I pay my damn taxes. We're not all on welfare, not all useless.
But, no, no, no, I never said that.
- You implied it. - I applaud people like you. No!
(Victoria) That's Willie. He's an MP. He's left-wing.
- That's Lindsay Perrigo. He's not. - (Woman) We're not all on welfare...
(Victoria) And that's me. And I'll be lucky to get a word in edgeways.
You see, I'm part of...my ancestors.
He doesn't give a stuff about his.
- And that's how, unfortunately... - You know...
..some of them think.
(Victoria) Lindsay seems very right-wing, but I think a lot if it's just to be annoying.
(Woman) We've heard a lot...
(Victoria) Don't you think he looks like Comic Book Man in The Simpsons?
The problem is, too many of you want to be paid to breed
kids who are not wanted and who get bashed up and killed.
Who are the families killing their kids, Willie?
(Victoria) Did he just say too many Maoris are killing their kids? He did, didn't he?
Too many Maori are killing their kids.
OK, and they're all on welfare.
- Too many are on welfare. - They're having kids,
they are being paid by the taxpayer to have kids that they don't want.
It's tribalism versus individualism
and there's an historic showdown here,
and if you guys don't move away from tribalism, you're stuffed.
No, no. Tribalism's important.
You seem to think that you did us a great favour by coming here.
Yes, we did. We saved you from yourselves.
- We were killing each other? - Stopped you eating each other.
(Victoria) You can't say that on the radio. Wouldn't get this with Ken Bruce.
- ..enjoying life. - I've got to move on. Sorry.
- You weren't keen on that. - No, that was a good call.
- You need to hear that. - I agree with a lot...
- Take that on board. - Don't patronise me.
Oh, Willie!
(Victoria) I think Lindsay's a lot nicer than he makes out.
My worry is that when he leaves here,
he'll be sat at home on his own with a Pot Noodle.
Our people, unlike other indigenous people, wanted to work with the British,
we trusted them with the Treaty of Waitangi, they betrayed us, Victoria.
- You should be ashamed of yourself. - I am, thoroughly.
Yes. But they make a joke of it, cos that's how they treat the indigenous people.
Get off the grievance gravy train.
(Victoria) 0oh. Grievance gravy train. I like that.
Do they have trains here, or just boats? Should that be grievance gravy boat?
No, forget that he's brown and I'm white...
(Victoria) Lindsay, I wouldn't care if you were navy blue, just stop talking
And I know you like Mario Lanza. Let's have some.
# Lonely as a desert breeze
# I may wander where I please #
No, that's not me. Though there was something about that debate
that made me wish I was dangling by my ankles off a high bridge.
# Just to rest awhile #
This is Tasmania, it's part of Australia.
It's an island 125 miles to the south of the eastern side of the continent,
and this is where the first settlers came in the 1800s,
but not by choice.
It was called Van Diemen's Land then
and it was very popular with the British,
not so much because of the scenery or the fresh air,
but because it was a very, very long way away from Britain.
And if you had a load of convicts you didn't have room for at home,
you could ship them out here, sweep them under the colonial carpet,
and forget about them.
This is Hobart, it's the biggest city in Tasmania, it's the capital.
Every tourist destination has to have a logo or catchphrase.
Auckland's was "City of Sails". As in boats, not jumble.
Tasmania's, because of its relatively unspoilt environment,
is "Island of Rejuvenation".
That's why I'm stood out here in the freezing cold.
There's beautiful fresh air and a nice view,
but, nope, still 53.
I know I sound like some old Nelly, saying, "0oh, it's lovely fresh air,"
but it does feel like the cleanest place in the world.
And I don't just mean compared with places like London,
which is like having an old net curtain over your face.
Even coming from Newfoundland, you can notice the difference.
And I've just realised why it looks English but not.
It's that there's no people.
There's nobody about.
Anywhere this pretty at home would be awash with ramblers with maps round their necks
and coach parties of biddies looking for a sit-down.
And it is pretty, isn't it?
It's like Midsomer Murders without the acting.
You know real travellers are very sniffy about tourists,
and they come back from places and go, "Oh, it was full of tourists"?
Well, I am one of those tourists that places are full of,
and I'm quite unashamed about it, cos I really like being a tourist.
I like being told what to do and what to look at,
and I'll go and look at any museum, Bakelite, ball bearings,
I love any place where there's a lady in a mobcap
pretending to be somebody from the olden days.
And I really like real places, and I especially like prisons.
I think there's something about going to the actual place where somebody was kept
to stand on the stones, to stand in the cell,
to be within those walls,
and think that, you know, any of us could have ended up in one of those places,
especially coming to somewhere like Australia or Tasmania,
and you know that so many British convicts were transported there,
for really quite small crimes, things I've done myself, like shoplifting.
You don't need to know that, but I've told you now.
Things like stealing a loaf of bread, or taking a hanky, or keeping somebody's laundry.
And they were sent so many miles,
and ended up...
in that tiny space.
For the convicts shipped halfway round the world to Australia,
the odds of escaping were never very high.
But here on this peninsula, they shrank to almost zero.
This prison, Port Arthur,
is surrounded on three sides by water.
It would take a day to row back to Hobart.
And the tiny spit of land that joins it to the mainland
was heavily guarded by savage dogs.
And in case anybody was tempted to swim for it,
the men were told, though it wasn't true, that the waters were shark-infested.
We've seen this all over the empire,
a beautiful landscape with a big, old, incongruous box plonked on it,
British bricks and iron bars.
Port Arthur was modelled on Pentonville,
but in Pentonville, you at least had the chance of news from the outside world.
You were behind bars, but you were at home.
The prisoners who landed here to start their sentence
must have felt they'd arrived at the end of the world.
(Woman) When they arrive, they're marched off the ship,
and they're read about an hour and half's worth of regulations,
all of which they're expected to remember,
- on pain of punishment. - Yeah.
Julia, who works here, said it's mainly the tough guys who got sent here.
The persistent reoffenders.
But it still seems a bit drastic.
- They're marched down to here... - Yeah.
..where they were given their clothes, banged up in a cell,
with a wooden door with a little hatch in it, that your food would be put through.
Those walls are the cell walls.
That's the width of the cell.
In the middle of all this openness, they were confined in the smallest possible space.
They work from dawn till dusk,
felling enormous trees, 150 feet long,
carrying them bodily out of the forest.
- Are they chained up while they're doing that? - They are.
And they might also be sent to the quarries,
where they're quarrying the stone to build the buildings for Port Arthur.
In later periods, if they're exceptionally badly behaved,
they're sent off round to the coal mines.
What was the general length of the sentence?
A lot of men came here with anything from seven to 21 years.
But if they kept reoffending, time was simply added to their sentence.
And some men were here for 40 years.
It wasn't all adults. There was a separate block for young offenders.
The British Empire's first juvenile detention centre.
(Julia) A lot of the boys were street kids,
from the slums of England's industrial cities.
- And how old were they? - The youngest was nine.
That was young James Lynch, who was transported for stealing three boxes of toys.
- It's not exactly heroin, is it? - No.
When you hear about these really harsh conditions,
you always want someone to have done something ingenious and got away.
We know about someone who nearly got away, Billy Hunt.
(Julia) Billy Hunt was an actor by trade. (Victoria) Mm.
And he escaped and made his way to Eaglehawk Neck.
And not far from Eaglehawk Neck, he found a dead kangaroo.
So he skinned the kangaroo, and put the hide on,
and decided he was going to hop across Eaglehawk Neck.
So he put the kangaroo skin on, and he's hopping across the Neck,
but one of the soldiers on duty thought,
"Mm. That looks like a delicious addition to tonight's menu,"
and raised his rifle, and Billy Hunt threw off the kangaroo skin...
- "Don't shoot." - And said, "Don't shoot! It's only Billy Hunt!"
- That's brilliant. - Yeah.
- So he never got away? - He didn't get away.
- What was he in for? - Nothing serious.
- Overacting. - Yes!
A lot of the convicts in Tasmania were already damaged and brutalised
by the flogging that was a routine punishment.
And they can't have felt they had much to lose by trying to get away.
But one escape attempt had shocking consequences.
In September 1822, a convict work party felling trees turned on their overseer,
stole a boat and rowed across the harbour and vanished into the forest.
Greenhill and his friend Travis led the way.
At the end of the first day, they baked flour and water over the fire, and ate it.
But the flour had been laced with something to stop the prisoners hoarding it,
and it made them hallucinate, which didn't really help what was to follow.
At the end of the first week, they'd eaten all their rations,
and they took their kangaroo-skin jackets and roasted them over the fire,
and ate them.
The next night, a man, Kenelly, said to another man, Pearce,
that he was so hungry he could eat a man.
And Greenhill, obviously not famed for his sense of humour, went, "Mm."
And he gathered them together and he said, "I think we should eat a man,
"but I think we should agree that we will all do it."
That night, one of the men, Dalton, was lying by the fire, asleep.
They came up with an axe, hit him over the head, killed him.
They roasted his heart and liver over the fire,
and they chopped up the rest of him and put it in their pockets for tomorrow's packed lunch.
The next day, they drew lots to see who should be killed.
It was a man called Thomas Bodenham.
He knelt by the fire, to make his peace with God,
they bonked him on the head with an axe, killed him, and ate him.
They walked on through the forest.
Travis is bitten on the foot by a deadly snake,
and lies down and says, "Just leave me. I want to die."
Well, they don't want to leave him, because he's dinner.
So they pick him up, drag him a little bit further,
his foot turns black, he says he can't walk any further,
Greenhill looks down on him,
kills him, cries, eats him.
So then there's only two of them left.
There's Greenhill and Pearce.
So that night, they're sitting on either side of the fire,
they're staring at each other.
They know whichever one falls asleep first has had it.
Hours pass. Eventually, Greenhill's eyes start to close.
He's asleep on the ground with the axe under his head.
Pearce tiptoes over, takes the axe from under his head,
hits him, kills him, eats his arm,
eats his leg, runs into a field, screaming mad,
and is just tearing into a lamb,
when he's arrested by a sheep farmer with a gun.
They took Pearce back to the prison
and he told them the story of the cannibalism and they didn't believe him.
They thought it was a cover story for all the others that had escaped and were still alive.
A year later, he escaped again,
and ate another convict.
And then they believed him.
Don't worry. They're only peanut butter.
The convicts who served their sentences and didn't eat each other's arms and legs
or dress up as kangaroos,
often chose to settle here rather than take that long, hazardous journey home to Britain.
But Australia was a huge, unknown continent.
The interior was unmapped and unexplored.
The state of Victoria was hugely rich, because of its gold fields.
And the money was there for a big expedition that would unlock the secrets of the interior
and show the rest of the world that they were a knowledgeable and sophisticated society.
The expedition was led by two men, Burke and Wills,
and it was a risky trip to undertake with no bush survival skills amongst the party.
Les Hiddens is an expert in the outback,
and he thinks it was doomed before it started.
They put this thing together and it was like a circus.
Because there was camels and the entourage went for something like a quarter of a mile.
They even carried along, you know, gallons and gallons of rum.
For the camels, not for the men! Right?
They even had fold-up boats and things in case they found an inland sea.
That was a pretty common thought process in those days.
- There must be a sea in the middle? - Yeah.
Because the rivers seemed to indicate that there would be something feeding the rivers.
And as they went across the countryside,
they had this quaint idea of spreading Englishness to the natives, you see?
- Yeah. - And what they did,
they gave away to the local Aboriginals,
- Union Jack handkerchiefs. - Very useful.
They were aiming to get from Melbourne
all the way to the undiscovered north coast.
They travelled with all the horses and the camels up to Cooper's Creek,
where they set up a base camp.
Then Burke and Wills carried on, leaving the others behind to wait for them.
They did reach the coast, but it took a lot longer than they thought.
And by the time they returned to the camp, the main party had left.
Burke and Wills never found the food and water that the others had buried against their return,
and having no idea how to survive in this environment,
within a month, both had starved to death.
But as Les was telling me, if they'd known what to look for in the bush,
they could have survived.
But there were, of course, along the way, different foods and things
that they could have eaten if they'd taken note and been familiar with them.
- Like what? - Well, these things...
Here's a thing called the bloodwood apple. It grows on a eucalypt tree.
- You can see the leaves of the eucalypt. - Yeah. Yeah.
And we just snap that off.
- OK. Now... - (Victoria laughs) Ha.
- Watch your foot. - Yeah. I'd like to keep my leg, if possible.
That there is a little grub. It turns into a moth eventually and finds his way out.
Oh, I'm vegetarian.
But if it's an insect that's eaten vegetables.
- So it's made of a veg... Yeah. OK. - That's right. He's vegetarian, too.
All right? And you can actually eat the surround inside there, as well.
Yeah. I wouldn't be rushing to collect them.
- They're quite bitter. - Yeah, well, that's...
- You've got it on your nose. - That's a young one.
- Is it? - Mm.
- And this other thing... - Bit like balsawood.
Yeah, it does a bit, doesn't it? Or a bit like coconut.
It's not quite as nice as that. Mm.
And this thing here grows off the vine. They call it the bush banana.
But, erm, just try some of those seed pods there.
- They're like cucumber or melon seeds. - Well, I don't...
- No, they're like tiny peas. - They're like peas.
- You want some more? - Do you know, actually, I don't.
(Les laughs)
The British had arrived here as jailers
with a convict population that had to be controlled by hanging and flogging.
Next it was the terrain that had to be tamed and brought under control,
mapped and measured and divided.
It was strange and harsh and inhospitable.
It had to be made manageable.
And it was the telegraph cable that would cross flood plains and deserts
and lick this country into shape and bring it into line with the rest of the empire.
Another expedition set out, led by telegraph superintendent Charles Todd from Greenwich,
to find a straight, overland route for the cable to follow.
A gap in the mountains was found and that became the site of a little telegraph station
and one of the first white settlements.
It was by some springs and they named it after Mr Todd's wife, Mrs Todd, Alice.
It might have looked like and empty country
to the surveyors and linemen trying to lay the telegraph cable but it wasn't.
There were people here already.
Not the poor savages, the "black fellas" of my school geography book,
thinly scattered and on the verge of extinction,
but tribe after tribe all over Australia, people with a rich culture, a stable society,
who didn't need artificial constructs like fences or houses
because they knew more than the whites ever would about their own land
and how to live with its rhythms.
My guide in Alice Springs was Arthur Archie.
His own family suffered at the hands of the white settlers
and he told me how the Aborigine lived before their lives were disrupted.
(Arthur) Aboriginal people was resourcing what Mother Nature had to give.
They had to know exactly about where the food was, where the water was,
the food chain that was above...what was above ground, what was below ground.
Then they had to know all about the climate. They had to know the seasons
because if we don't look after the land and everything that comes from it,
then we don't survive.
Even though they can utilise the things of today,
like the motor vehicle or the telephone, everything like that.
But where the home and where the heart is is back in the country.
There was nothing as conciliatory as the Waitangi treaty
between the white Australian and the Aborigine.
They called them "black fellas". They could be shot on sight
if they were in groups of six or more.
Some were even poisoned, offered rations laced with strychnine,
described by an official as, "Something to keep them niggers quiet."
Even within Arthur's lifetime, the native Australian could still be someone
to be feared and destroyed.
Arthur, what do you think it was that meant when white people arrived,
the Aborigines did not find a way of overcoming them and repelling them?
Well, the Aboriginal people, the only thing they had was spears and boomerangs.
Yeah. So they didn't have guns or anything?
They never had guns.
So it was just total massacres took place.
Not only with the men but also women and children.
Anything that was running or moving was shot down.
My grandfather, if it wasn't a certain lagoon,
where 400 men got shot,
and there was him and a couple of others who, if that lagoons wasn't full,
when they jumped in and swam under water and got out of the way of the bullets,
then I wouldn't be sitting here talking to you today.
We'll never really know how many Aborigines were here or how many died.
They think, in the first hundred or so years of British occupation,
at least 20,000 may have been killed.
It wasn't till 1967 that they were even included in the census
and given full, legal status as Australian citizens.
Australia Day is the celebration of Captain Cook landing at Botany Bay,
but for some Aborigines, that will always be a day of mourning.
This is Ballarat, Australia's biggest inland city.
It has wide streets, big buildings, and although the architecture
would have looked familiar to anyone arriving from the old country,
there was a new spirit here.
The buildings were posh but it didn't matter if you weren't.
A public school education or a title were no use to you here.
What counted was industry, determination, a willingness to take a punt.
A convict who'd served his time had as much chance as anybody
of making his way in the world.
Especially here because here, in Victoria,
in Ballarat in 1851, someone found gold
and, suddenly, not just ex-cons but labourers
and farm hands were chucking in their jobs and heading this way.
Gold fever was catching and the word was out.
If you could get here and had the strength to hold a pickaxe,
you could be one of the lucky ones who made their fortune
and set themselves up for life.
People came vast distances, burning their bridges,
and they couldn't be sure till they got here that the whole gold story was actually true.
There's a brilliant book about the Ballarat gold fields by Robyn Annear.
It's part of her family history.
Her pregnant great-great grandmother made that very journey.
So imagine people travelling across the world on this incredibly hazardous voyage
on the strength of what may have turned out to be a rumour.
So they were incredibly relieved when they turned up and, er...
- They were digging. - People told them, "It's true,"
and even showed them gold dust from their pockets.
And I imagine a huge sea of tents, like a huge rock festival.
- There was certainly lots of mud, so... - And really inflated prices?
Yeah. Not quite so much nudity as you'd see at a rock festival.
- No but we had huge beards, didn't we? - Lots of beards, yeah.
- So you tipped up, paid for your permit... - Yep.
- ..you marked out your spot and got going. - Yes, your claim. You got going.
They heard the gold fields before they saw them.
(Victoria) What could you hear? (Robyn) The sounds of picks
but also the sounds of people washing the gold-carrying dirt on the creek banks.
- So thousands of people. - What did you do, rinse it out?
You rinsed it out. You swivelled it back and forth.
- And then you saw a little glint? - You start off with a trough full of gravel
and you end up, in the space of a few minutes,
with just a tiny bit of sand and, if you're lucky, a glint of gold.
- A lot made fortunes. - Did they?
Some made enough to, you know, buy a farm, basically, and that was their aim.
So it really set people up for life
and not just a life like they'd had before but a whole new life.
This is the capital of Victoria, Melbourne.
It was built on the profits of the gold rush.
Built all of a piece on a grid system.
No squares, no crescents.
The buildings and the details were classical
but there was no old English wonkiness, no little alleys or funny angles.
It was recognisably British but bigger, better, breezier.
0ne of the oldest buildings in Melbourne is the jail.
It's a museum now and, in each cell,
they have the death mask of an inmate, of a hanged prisoner.
They'd cut them down, shave their heads and make the mask.
And using phrenology, which is reading the bumps on the skull,
they would try and determine the character of the hanged man.
They might even come to the conclusion that he'd had criminal tendencies.
Now that is the most famous inmate of the old jail,
hanged here on the 11th November 1880.
Police murderer, bushranger, political rabble-rouser.
That is Ned Kelly, aged 25.
He was an Irish Catholic and the son of a convict,
so that was two strikes against him with the authorities.
He ambushed and shot dead three policemen.
He was declared an outlaw which meant anybody could shoot him on sight.
But he had a lot of supporters who believed the Irish were victimised by the police
and he dodged the law and was in hiding for two years.
He was captured, in the end, after a shoot-out,
in this armour he'd made from bits of iron plough.
The bullets bounced of his head and chest
but the police shot his legs out from under him...
and he was taken to Melbourne where he was sentenced to death by hanging.
And that's where they hanged him.
They love him here, Ned Kelly. There's books about him and paintings.
(Woman) So many people have been asking me about this story.
(Victoria) Even his mother gets a look in.
I'm Mrs Kelly, all right.
I'll tell you the real story of what happened to me,
my boys and our family...
(Victoria) Not really his mother, obviously, because his mother would be about 138.
Government, police,
landowners.
Mostly all English here,
just the same as back home in Ireland.
All trying to keep us in our place.
It's the armour that people remember, I think.
I doubt if most people could recognise Ned Kelly's face.
And there must be loads of other bushrangers and rebels who are forgotten.
But there's sympathy for Ned still and I think it is the armour.
I think that's what's given him his iconic status.
I know he was a rebel and I'm sure he had a genuine grievance
but this is the image that's on all the souvenirs.
I know because I went in the gift shop and bought the soap and the matches.
I'm standing the other side of the prison laundry wall when they dropped my boy.
His final words were, "I suppose it had to come to this.
"Such is life."
I think Australians projected onto Ned Kelly the qualities they wished for themselves.
Rebelliousness, independence, a refusal to bow to authority.
It was a new country and that required a new hero.
We probably all know someone who emigrated to Australia with their family
in the '50s and '60s for the work and the opportunities.
What you may never have heard about are the British orphans who came here,
sourced from care homes and orphanages, sailing away from damp, old England
to an exciting life in a sunny country some of them had never even heard of.
0ne of those orphans was Harold Hague, and Margaret Humphreys
of the Child Migrant Trust knows of lots of children like Harold,
whose school day was interrupted by an exciting event.
So you were often called into the hall where there'd be 50 or 60 children
and someone would come along and say, "Now put your hand up
"those that would like to go to Australia because in Australia, the weather's hot,
"you get sweets, you go to school on horses."
And this wonderful picture was given to the children
around, "Wouldn't life be great there?"
And some put their hands up.
All I can remember is this man in a suit came to see me one day
and said, erm, "Would you like to go to Australia?
"It's a terrific place. The sun shines all day, every day."
And so I said yes.
I think there were two things, really.
One is that the kids mainly thought Australia was just round the corner
and they could go for a weekend and get back.
So that was a huge shock, when they were on the boat for six weeks.
And some kids really just thought they were going to be able to swim back home.
It was never explained to the children that there was no contingency
for them to come back if they didn't like it,
that there were no loving families with horses waiting to adopt them.
They were headed for orphanages and they were only being sent out at all
because it saved the British government money
and it was an easy way of increasing the white Australian population.
But for some children like Harold, the deception went much further than that.
He then said, "Well, you know you're an orphan.
"Your parents are dead and you've got no family here.
"There's nothing in England for you. You might as well go."
- And were your parents dead? - No. No. I didn't know that then.
My parents broke up during the war
and my mother had no option but to find somewhere to put me in care.
So when they told you, you had no family here, you just believed them.
- You had no reason not to. - I had no reason not to.
- Mm. - No.
When Harold sailed to Australia, he had a living sister he knew nothing about
and two living parents.
When investigating his story, Margaret uncovered details
of not just children like Harold being told they were orphans
but parents of children in care being told their child had died
when, in fact, the child's name had been changed
and the child put on a boat to Melbourne.
By the time Harold had found out about his family
and Margaret had tracked down the whereabouts of his mother, it was too late.
She was dead.
He lived all those years without her and he has no photograph of her.
These bravely smiling, waving, trusting children
were doubled-crossed by two governments working in tandem for their own ends,
conned and lied to.
Sailing so hopefully to a life of loneliness and neglect, often, abuse sometimes.
Marching into a country where it would take more than a pair of boxing gloves
to fight for their rights.
Some of them even now don't know their own real names or own a passport
and however hard Margaret works to try and reunite them with their families,
for many of the child migrants, it is going to be too late.
Queen Victoria was doing jolly well with her world domination.
She had her tea coming in from India, her convicts going out to Australia.
It was world bingo. She only needed one more continent to shout, "Empire"
What continent were we waiting for? Africa.
They'd left it a bit late. It was nearly 1860
and they still hadn't really got anywhere further than the edges.
This is the Zambezi river in Zambia.
It runs from central Africa through six countries on its way to the Indian 0cean,
and in 1858, fuelled by that Victorian fervour to explore and catalogue,
the British government funded an expedition to penetrate into southeastern Africa
and open up the Zambezi.
Africa held an intense fascination for people at home.
They called it the dark continent
and there was huge curiosity about what was in the interior.
I don't know why I'm bothering to take these pictures. I'm hopeless at taking pictures.
I'll get these home and there'll just be a setting sun out of focus
and some ripples where there's about to be a hippo
or some bubbles where there's just been one.
The only way I could get a good picture of a hippo would be to invite it onto this boat,
sit it down and buy it a lager.
Thank God for postcards.
The man who led the Zambezi expedition was not only an explorer and scientist,
but a missionary who believed his calling was to bring Christianity
to the Africans he would meet on his travels.
He had spent almost 30 years in Africa.
He was the first European to cross the entire African continent from west to east.
He was David Livingstone.
In 1842 he began a four-year expedition
to find a route from the upper Zambezi to the coast.
His overriding purpose was to establish a navigable trade route.
This was part of his ongoing campaign to end the slave trade in Africa.
He'd been appalled to find that, although it was abolished in Britain,
it was still flourishing in Africa.
If he could open up this river as a trade route
then that would, perhaps, offer alternative ways of making a living.
He called the Zambezi God's Highway
and, God willing, he would follow this mighty river all the way to the Indian 0cean.
Well, God was willing
because it does go all the way to the sea.
The only problem is that just about here there's a bit of a dro-o-o-p
But, you know, once you've navigated that 400-foot drop, and you're out of hospital,
it's fairly plain sailing all the way to the coast,
if you like white-water rafting.
If only Livingstone had realised adventure sports were the future,
he could have told the traders, "Get rid of the slaves.
"Get some rubber boats and a few life jackets."
David Livingstone was the first white man to set eyes on this spectacular waterfall
and in what must have been by now a kneejerk reaction,
he named the falls after Queen Victoria.
The people who lived here had cheekily given them their own name some time before.
Mosi-oa-Tunya, "the smoke that thunders."
And what they thought of a Scottish missionary renaming them
after a Queen they'd never heard of who'd never see them, we don't know.
(Elephant trumpets)
This whole area by the side of the Zambezi is a game reserve now.
Unlike poor old Dr Livingstone, who was here for years,
you can do a Victoria Falls safari package in two days,
and see the white rhinos.
That's them. They're called Victoria and Albert.
I've just renamed them.
They may already have names but I don't care.
I'm British, they're rhinos, they can't stop me.
Livingstone led the way but it was a difficult climate
for the British who wanted to settle.
The first Europeans here built a township on the banks of the Zambezi, near the falls,
but it was low-lying and marshy and malarial.
So they moved to higher ground, to Constitution Hill, renamed -
can nobody ever stick with the same name anywhere? - renamed Livingstone.
It became the capital of Northern Rhodesia
but when the capital was moved to Lusaka in 1935,
it faded a bit and not much went on.
But now it's really busy.
Because of the situation in Zimbabwe, it's picking up a lot of the falls tourism
that used to go to that side of the river.
And because of adventure sports and the link with Livingstone,
it appeals to quite a wide range of visitors.
I know these churches might look a bit out of place, not very African,
but those first English missionaries, perhaps that was all they could draw,
square with a pointy roof. "Here you are, build that."
Wait till he's gone then paint it.
This was my last chance to do some shopping. I've been all over the world
and all I've bought is two fridge magnets and some Ned Kelly matches.
(Man) This is tobacco...
Livingstone has this huge market
and it's down here where most of the Africans used to live in colonial times.
The white people were up on the hill, away from the heat and the flies.
But Lukson, who's our guide, says it's not like that now. He lives on top of the hill.
It's got all the things you would see in Skipton or Leicester -
fuzzy nylon slippers and aprons and people shouting abuse
because we were filming them without asking,
but it's got a lot of stalls with foods I wouldn't be able to put a name to
and none of the packaging we're cursed with in the UK.
What's that, Lukson?
This is, er, maize, pounded maize. They've just removed, er, the chaff.
I don't think the Atkins diet has caught on here in a big way.
Any carb under threat would be very safe here.
Stall after stall is maize, millet, tapioca.
I wonder if they know the proper way to serve tapioca?
Add a teaspoon of rosehip syrup and stir vigorously till pink.
Lukson took me to a traditional herbalist.
It wasn't the easiest place to film, as you'll see.
And also, we got into some very tricky areas.
Can I just ask you what some of these things are for?
- No problem. You can ask. - Erm, the tortoise shell.
We use this for people who come with blood from nose. Blood.
(Lukson) Bleeding. (Victoria) Oh, bleeding.
- How do you give it to them? - Put it on the fire...
- (Lukson) Inhale the smoke. - The smoke of a burning tortoise shell.
- And is this snake skin? - (Stallholder) Yes, is a snake. Python.
- (Victoria) What's that for? - We take this
- if you have a problem in your ear. - Yeah.
We usually put that to your ear, then it will be OK.
Do people come with spiritual problems and depression?
- Do they come with everything? - Er, of course.
(Victoria laughs) So what is the most common problem that people come with?
- Problem of "garonde". - On the anus?
- Aha. - Ah, problem of the anus.
(Lukson) OK. (Victoria) Haemorrhoids?
- (Stallholder) Yes. - That's what you mean?
Yes. There is very, very few problems which I fail...
(Victoria) You can't deal with? (Lukson) Just name one.
- Like HIV and AIDS. - (Victoria) HIV.
- (Lukson) OK, you can't cure that? - I don't manage.
- Er, what are the feathers for? - (Stallholder) Er, this...
(Lukson) This is for cleaning. (Victoria) That's your duster.
It's not a remedy. What are these things in here?
(Stallholder) This is special for women. (Victoria) 0h-oh.
If a lady have got a problem to her vagina.
- 0oh, dear. - If she's very big.
- 0h, please. - She can get this and put it...
- I'm not listening. - Then the body will be squeezed.
Yeah. Lovely. So, please, can we go now?
Is everything here grown locally or are things brought in?
Lots of the things are grown local and some of them are from the bush.
- What's that? It's like bits of wood. - This is a delicious...
- Yes. It's like beetroot - Beetroot. Is it?
Yeah but it's from the bush, it's not cultivated. It's a very good vegetable.
- It's like Viagra also. (Laughs) - It's like Viagra? Is it?
(Victoria) Is that why it's so popular? (Lukson) Yeah. Maybe.
- You want us to get some? - It'd be wasted on me, darling.
(Both laugh)
- I might take some home with me, though. - OK.
Thank you. Thanks very much.
The women carry the shopping.
(Cock crows)
For tourists who want more than white-water rafting and a big bag of Viagra,
you can follow in the footsteps of David Livingstone
and visit Toka Leya village where he met with the ruler of the falls, Chief Mukuni.
As a non-believer, Livingstone could not be welcomed into the compound
and had to sit with the chief outside under a mango tree.
But it was two men from this tribe that went with Livingstone on his last expedition
and, when he died in the jungle, carried his body all the way to the coast.
There are descendants of those men still living in this village now
and Bedyango, the High Priestess of the Toka Leya, who I met,
is directly descended from the Chief Mukuni who had that meeting with Livingstone.
(Drumbeats, singing and hollering)
We walked to the mango tree where Livingstone and Bedyango's ancestor
had sat and talked more than 150 years ago.
- (Victoria) Did he sit under this tree? - Yes. He was received by the Chief Mukuni.
Mipotola thirteen.
- Number 13. Yes. - 13.
And what's your father? Number 19?
- Number 18. - 18.
Because of Livingstone, do you think people here feel a bond with Great Britain?
People here, they are happy because you follow the footprints of David Livingstone,
- where he stepped. - Do they feel fond of the British?
- No, no. - Fair enough. Just thought I should ask.
This village is a tourist attraction.
It's on all the websites. You can come here as part of a package.
And the present Chief Mukuni is trying to strike that difficult balance
between preserving their way of life and displaying it for the money it brings in.
And they do now depend on tourism to survive.
But it is a real village. It's not put on for tourists.
They don't all go home on a bus at six o'clock.
Bedyango is a genuine priestess.
She performs rituals, she officiates for births and marriages.
This isn't a Ned Kelly's mother situation.
So you are encouraged to wander around
but some bits are obviously more aimed at tourists than others
and it's hard to know which are the mud huts you are allowed to peer into
and which are just the mud huts people are living in.
I might just say to Bedyango, "A few signposts wouldn't come amiss."
(Child laughing)
This train is only for tourists now. It's just for sightseeing.
But it's a reminder of a man whose dream it was
that the whole world should come under British rule.
British, in this case, most definitely meaning white.
The man was the fanatical empire builder, Cecil Rhodes.
The man after who Rhodesia was named.
Could have been worse. Could have been Northern and Southern Cecilia.
And his dream was to build a railway that would run from Cape Town in South Africa
to Egypt in the north,
a lovely pink line linking all the British dominions.
In his lifetime, the line only got as far as just south of the falls
and even now there's a big section missing between Sudan and Uganda.
So Rhodes was never able to see it used as he wished,
as a method of getting white chaps in a hurry to where they were needed,
to keep the natives in check.
But this bridge was his idea.
It was his dream to span the Zambezi at the falls with a railway bridge.
It would have been easier to span the river a few miles upstream, where it's narrower,
but Rhodes wanted the spray of the falls to hit the carriages,
Rhodes not being the one who would have to clean the windows.
So although he does seem to have been almost criminally and racially bonkers,
we have to thank him for this.
It was meant as a huge, imperial two fingers but let's take it for what it is,
a wonderful piece of engineering,
designed by the same man who built Sydney Harbour Bridge,
to get you from one side of the Zambezi to the other.
(Low rumbling)
And here I am, making my way to my last destination,
a place I've always wanted to see.
I drove very near it on the Zimbabwe side a few years ago
but we were filming and we didn't have time.
This has been an extraordinary trip to make, a mad whistle-stop tour around the empire.
I can't think of a better place to end it than here.
And it's wonderful. You can see why Livingstone was so knocked out by it.
All that fantastic spray and mist is over on the Zimbabwe side
because, Sod's law, we're here in September
when it dries up a bit on our side, so it's more of a single bath tap.
But what the heck? It's still an incredible view.
By the time of Queen Victoria's diamond jubilee in 1897,
the British Empire had turned one fifth of the world's surface pink.
and the Queen of England ruled over a quarter of the world's population.
They used to say the sun never set on the British Empire and it didn't.
When the sun went down in Blighty, it was only tea time in the Sandwich Islands,
lunch time in Winnipeg and, in Western Samoa, they'd barely had breakfast.
From Bombay to the Gambia, at any given moment, the sun had got his hat on
and that hat was made in Britain.
The more I've gone from country to country,
the less I feel able to do any sort of clever,
end-of-documentary, smarty-pants type summing up
cos the empire isn't one thing, it's so many threads.
If you go right back to the beginning, it's about state-sponsored piracy.
It becomes about stuff. It's about cod,
it's about cotton, it's about tea,
it's about coffee, it's about slaves.
It's about people, mainly men, chancing their arm,
seizing their opportunity to have a life that isn't possible
in a very class-bound, tiny little island.
It becomes then about moral responsibility,
about people feeling genuinely superior to other races,
having a moral duty to teach them how to live and how to worship.
By the time you get to the Victorian era, it's actually a brand,
it's a concept, it's a selling point.
By the '20s and '30s, it's a way of people leaving England,
an England with no jobs or prospects, and they can go to somewhere in the empire,
they can live a life that's more British than if they'd stayed in Britain.
I've met people who think empire and the British are a jolly good thing.
I've met people I could barely look in the eye
because they say that we've stolen their country.
So I don't know. All these threads come together
and they're knitted into a big, shapeless, moth-eaten old woolly that is the empire
and some people are very fond of it and some people want to chuck it in the bin.
I don't know. I'm done. I'm going home.