Longitude 131°
Australian Pioneers and Explorers
'I will cross Australia, or perish in the attempt.'
John O'Hara Burke and Willam John Wills
1821 - 1861 1834 - 1861
To speak of Burke and Wills, even a century and a half after their deaths, is to court controversy. To some they are tragic heroes, the first men to cross the continent north to south. To others bumbling failures whose efforts produced nothing of value.
And yet they are the most famous, the most celebrated of all Australian explorers.
Their expedition of catastrophe, coincidence and lost opportunity was Victoria's attempt to beat South Australia to open up the inland, 'the ghastly blank' as their backers labelled it. The rewards were a telegraph line to connect Melbourne to the world, a northern port, and perhaps vast pastures.
Burke was a peculiar choice as leader. A moody and impulsive Irish policeman with little knowledge of bushcraft, he had a reputation as a reckless eccentric and a legendary talent for getting lost! The younger Wills, fortunately, had qualifications in surveying, astronomy and even medicine.
The party was backed with £50,000 in public funds and consisted of 19 men, 23 horses, 26 camels and enough supplies to last two years, including six tons of firewood. One of its many wagons even converted to a boat in anticipation of striking the mythical inland sea!
Burke ignored warnings about the heat of summer and set off from Melbourne in a slow rumble to Menindee, 700 kilometres north. Infuriated with delays, he divided the cumbersome party and took eight men on to the halfway point at Coopers Creek. There he waited for six weeks for the others to catch up.
It was too much for his patience to bear. He set off with Wills, John King and Charles Gray in a bid for the Gulf, a thousand kilometres away. Through heat, desert and bog they trekked for two months before being stopped by mangrove swamps. Exhausted and low on supplies they turned for home without actually wetting their boots in the northern sea.
Unrelenting monsoons made sure they wet them on the return journey. Weakened by dysentery, Gray pleaded for a day's rest, but Burke would have none of it. He pressed on until Gray collapsed and then spent a day burying him - a day they could ill afford.
They reached Coopers Creek to find the camp deserted. Carved into a coolabah was the message 'DIG 3 FEET NW'. They dug only to find the terrible truth - the others had left camp just hours before. The supplies buried under the note remained unearthed.
The three men were now too weak to follow. They survived for two months on cakes made from nardoo seed. Shunning help from local Aborigines, Burke never discovered that nardoo, if not prepared correctly can be toxic, or that the waterholes were full of fish. King was not so stubborn. When Burke and Wills finally died he was taken into care by the tribe and survived until found by a rescue party.
Tragedy or disaster, Burke and Wills captured the imagination of the country. Theirs was the first Australian state funeral. The 'Dig Tree' is a national monument.
Or was it a scandal? New evidence suggests that the wealthy backers of the expedition were in fact engaged in a land grab, a bid to claim a massive chunk of what is now Queensland.
Typical of the endless debate, two popular films of the expedition were once released in the same year. One was a tragedy, the other a farce.
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