Longitude 131°
Australian Pioneers and Explorers
'If there is any road not travelled then that is the one I must take.'
Edward John Eyre
1815 - 1901
For a frail teenager sent from his native Bedfordshire to the warmer climes of Australia for his health, Eyre achieved some extraordinary feats of exploration.
He was just 23 years old when he made the first direct crossing from Sydney to Adelaide. The very next year he set off in search of the fabled 'inland sea'. On the way he discovered the Flinders Ranges and Lake Eyre, but was turned back at the aptly named Mount Hopeless on the edge of the great central desert.
In 1840 he began his most famous expedition. The recently constituted South Australian Government needed a stock route to the western coast, two thousand kilometres distant, and decided Eyre was the man who could find it for them. As remarkable and heroic as his journey was, like the quest for the inland sea it proved to be an impossible dream.
For eight months Eyre, accompanied by John Baxter and three teenage Aborigines, Wylie, Joey and Yarry, hacked through mallee scrub, then scaled sandy ridges and trudged over desolate plains from Streaky Bay in South Australia to King George's Sound in Western Australia.
He began in the full heat of blistering summer and finished in the depths of bitter winter.
He existed on snakes, lizards, berries and the roasted bark of young eucalypts before falling back on horsemeat.
He relied on local Aborigines to show them where to dig for water, but in the desert few Aborigines lived. They resorted to wringing the roots of tea trees and harvesting the morning dew to survive.
Eyre's exhaustion was so complete that he slipped into sleep even as he walked.
It was too much for two of the young Aborigines. Joey and Yarry fled into the wilderness, leaving behind a fatally wounded Baxter.
'The frightful appalling truth now burst upon me,' Eyre wrote in his journal. 'I was alone in the desert.'
Over the next three months his remaining Aboriginal companion, Wylie, proved that he was indeed not alone. Together the two men covered the remaining thousand kilometres to the western coast existing on what they could catch, find or dig up.
On one occasion Eyre noted that the apparently insatiable Wylie scoffed down 'a pound and a half of horse flesh, some bread, then the entrails, paunch, liver, tail and hind legs of a kangaroo, followed by a penguin found dead on the beach.'
Ironically for a journey almost fatally plagued by lack of water, Eyre first saw its end while standing on a hill over King George's Sound in torrential rain. At least there was now sufficient water in his system to enable him to weep at the sight.
Eyre returned to Adelaide (by sea, of course) a hero. He was rewarded with the Royal Geographic Society Gold Medal and a posting to New Zealand as Lieutenant Governor.
The world now knew that without pasture and without water, there was no stock route between Adelaide and the western coast. Eyre had proven, by trudging every one of its desolate miles, that there was just a vast, arid and forbidding wilderness.
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