Piper (life dates unknown), also known as John Piper, was a Wiradjuri man who acted as a guide to Thomas Mitchell’s surveying expedition along the Murray and Darling Rivers into present-day Victoria in 1836. Piper spoke English adequately and, despite Mitchell’s initial misgivings, was able to convince the explorer that he would accompany the journey to its conclusion, provided he was given a horse and was clothed and fed. Piper would take orders only from the expedition leader, who came to consider him invaluable to the success of the venture. Along with five other Aboriginal guides, Piper was engaged in hunting, locating water and route finding, while also recruiting help from and communicating with the ‘wild natives’ they encountered on their progress south. Mitchell recorded a number of instances, for example, where Piper successfully negotiated safe passage through hostile territory or gleaned crucial information about the way ahead. Mitchell later wrote of his Aboriginal guides that ‘in most of our difficulties by flood and field, the intelligence and skill of our sable friends made the white-fellows appear rather stupid. They could read traces on the earth, climb trees or dive into the water … better than the ablest of us. In tracing lost cattle, speaking to the wild natives, hunting or diving, Piper was the most accomplished man in the camp’. On the conclusion of the expedition and its return to Sydney, Mitchell observed the conditions of his contract with Piper by rewarding him with various gifts, including a breastplate ‘on which he was styled not as usual “King”, for he said there were “too many kings already”, but as Conqueror of the Interior’. In 1843, having travelled to the Hunter Valley, Moreton Bay and Adelaide, among other places, Piper advised a government surveyor that he’d be interested in taking part in another of Mitchell’s expeditions. Consequently, in December 1845, he and another two Wiradjuri men, Yuranigh and Dickey, set out on the journey by which Mitchell hoped to establish an overland route to Port Essington. In January 1846, however, acting on a report that Piper planned to desert, Mitchell had him escorted back to Bathurst under police guard, thus creating a bitter end to an association Mitchell had long considered a friendship. Piper’s subsequent fate remains unknown.
