Longitude 131°
Australian Pioneers and Explorers
'This rock appears more wonderful every time I look at it, and I may say it is a sight worth riding eighty-four miles of spinifex sandhills to see.'
William Christie Gosse
1842 - 1881
A dozen years after John McDouall Stuart raced Robert O'Hara Burke to the top end of the continent, two more explorers lined up for a race to the sea. This time it was the western sea, and the starting point was half way up Stuart's continental centre line - Alice Springs.
Encouraged by Stuart's success and the subsequent completion of the overland telegraph line that followed him, the South Australian Government was now determined to find a route from the recently opened Centre to the western coast at Perth.
Two men, William Christie Gosse and Peter Warburton, were equally determined to lead the expedition that would do it.
Warburton set off on 15 April 1873. Gosse led his party of four Europeans, three Afghan camel drivers and an Aboriginal guide out of the Alice a week later. After eight months they had proved between them that no practical route existed.
Warburton's ravaged group managed to struggle across the Great Sandy Desert to the north west coast near present-day Port Hedland. All the camels were dead, the men were shrivelled wrecks, Warburton himself was half-blind ... and they were still a couple of thousand kilometres from Perth.
Gosse had less fortune reaching the coast, but achieved a good deal more on his travels. He accurately documented substantial information on more than a hundred thousand square kilometres of previously unknown country, and collected valuable specimens of native flora that are still retained in Melbourne.
He also discovered and named many of the features for which the Centre is now famous, including Mount Conner, the Musgrave Ranges and Mount Woodroffe.
Although Ernest Giles had preceded him by just nine months to be the first to sight Uluru, it was from the other side of the evidently impassible Lake Amadeus. Gosse found a way around the salt lake and became the first non-Aboriginal to lay a foot on the world's biggest rock.
'Seeing a spur less abrupt than the rest of the rock, I have left the camels here,' he recorded, 'and after walking, scrambling two miles over sharp rocks, succeeded in reaching the summit, and had a view that repaid me for my trouble.'
'This rock is certainly the most wonderful natural feature I have ever seen.'
Smitten by the monolith, he camped at various sites around its base for three weeks. On August 1 he wrote: 'The rock presented a grand appearance this morning; close to our camp was a waterfall about 200 feet high, the water coming down in one sheet of foam.'
He gave it the name Ayers Rock, after the Secretary-General of South Australia, a name that it retained for more than a century.
Gosse had just become the first of many thousands to be astonished by the 'one immense rock rising abruptly from the plain.'
Bookings
Enquiries
Tell a Friend