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Outside Magazine June 2003

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The Hard Way
Hot on the Trail
Australia's first great adventure was part Lewis and Clark, part Donner Party—searing proof that fame is a four-letter word

By Mark Jenkins


	(Illustration by Deborah Barrett)

A KANGAROO SQUATS IN THE MIDDLE of the red dirt road. Head drooped, front paws limp, it can barely hop out of the way. The scorching globe of the sun is literally cooking the meat inside the kangaroo's gray, tattered fur. I pull over, pour several quarts of my emergency water into a makeshift bowl, and set it beside the road along with some food. I know it's too late. This animal will die.

The drought is that bad. Kangaroo carcasses dot the desert like the skeletons of dead explorers, their hides stretched taut over rat-gnawed bones, sand drifting into their pecked-out eyes.

I stop for the night in Tibooburra (population 130), a ghostly, dirt-blown town 600 miles north of Melbourne, in the northwestern corner of New South Wales. The Tibooburra Hotel is a dilapidated two-story sandstone building with a peeling wood porch. Tiny rooms above the pub, bathroom down the hall. I am the only guest.

In the pub, a prosthetic leg and a dusty saddle hang from the ceiling, cowboy hats are nailed in rows along the walls, and the smell of cigarette smoke and abandonment is in the air. I order a mug of beer that immediately goes warm.

A crooked little man in a crushed cowboy hat bounds through the screen door, takes a stool at the bar, pours a mug of beer down his creased, gray-stubbled throat, and orders another.

"I'm the water hauler," he volunteers.

Turns out Tibooburra, an Aboriginal name meaning "heaps of rocks," went dry two years ago, and locals have had to truck drinking water in from an aquifer-fed reservoir.

"A third of an inch of rain in two years," adds the Pooh-bellied bartender.

"We got a 3,000-gallon tanker," says the water hauler, raising his mug to me. "Goin' tomorrow 3 a.m. for the fill-up, mate, if you care to come along."

"I'm heading to Innamincka," I say, "to see the Dig Tree."

The Dig Tree is a gnarled coolibah that stands in the burnt heart of the outback, beside the warm, green water of Cooper's Creek. It is the most famous tree in Australia, on account of the cryptic instructions carved into its trunk and the part it played in that country's most notorious expedition.

In 1860, Robert Burke and William Wills set out to become the first white men to cross Australia, a historic south-north traverse from Melbourne to the Gulf of Carpentaria. Their eight-month journey took them through the Tibooburra region in October of that year, en route to a base camp on Cooper's Creek, and then into vast, desperate stretches of the interior. Burke and Wills were like the Lewis and Clark of Australia, famed icons of early outback exploration—although, by the time it was all over, they'd be-come legends for very different reasons.

"Burke and Wills—now they were some bloody tough bastards!" says the bartender, suddenly animated. "I hope they're still teaching the schoolchildren about our heritage."

To get a taste of what they experienced, I've come to the desert in the dead of summer—January—after one of the driest years in Australian history.

"Tracin' their path, are ye?" says the water hauler. "Bugger, they was brave."

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