Longitude 131°
Australian Pioneers and Explorers
'I shall not attempt to rank myself amongst the first or the greatest, yet I think I have reason to call myself the last of the Australian explorers.'
Ernest Giles
1835 - 1897
The Gibson Desert defied and ultimately defined Ernest Giles. He found it, he named it, he assaulted its merciless red sandhills time after time. And time after time it refused to be conquered.
In the five years between 1872 and 1876 Giles led four expeditions over the continent's harshest lands, solving most of the Centre's remaining mysteries and crossing more undiscovered country than any other Australian explorer.
Along the way he put many now-famous features on the map - Mt Olga, Kings Canyon, the Finke Gorge, Palm Valley, Lake Amadeus, the Great Victoria Desert.
And then there was the Gibson. He named it for his companion who, on one ill-fated push for water, rode into the vastness on the only horse and was never seen again. Giles made it back to the camp, trudging a hundred kilometres with a hundred kilo keg of water on his back.
During his first expedition he set European eyes on Kata Tjuta and Uluru for the first time. He imagined the red rocks of what he named Mount Olga to be as 'mixed as plums in a pudding', their very existence the result of 'extraordinary freaks or convulsions of nature.'
He was dazzled by the ancient oasis in Palm Valley. 'Could it be transported to any civilised lands its springs, glens, gorges, ferns, Zamia flowers would charm the eyes and hearts of toil-worn men who are condemned to live and die in crowded towns.'
Such a fate was never likely to befall Giles. In 1875 he struck out across the wilderness to Perth for the third time.
Setting his course south of the Gibson he found he was faced with the less corrugated, but equally boundless Great Victoria Desert. It was another marathon trek over a waterless waste. For the camels there were hundreds of kilometres between drinks. For the men it was a case of drinking, when they could, 'from a smear of water'.
Although he was finally successful in reaching Perth, he wrote, 'I regarded what had been done as only half my mission.'
His nemesis in the north, the Gibson, was still waiting for him, shimmering in its intolerable heat.
Now he could set upon it from the west, sneaking up behind it. In January 1876 he led his party up to the Ashburton River on the north-western coast, and turned due east.
His camels were again reduced to walking carcasses as he traced the tracks of desert animals between widely scattered water holes. Starving and virtually blind from scurvy, he came across a small dying wallaby.
'The instant I saw it, I pounced upon it and ate it, living, raw, dying - fur, skin, bones, skull and all. The delicious flavour of that creature I shall never forget.'
He simply would not be denied, and the Gibson at last gave up its only secret - it was half a million square kilometres of the most unforgiving country on the face of the Earth.
This monumental return journey gave Giles the opportunity to name one last testament to his explorations. He could now publish his journals under the triumphal title, 'Australia Twice Traversed'.
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